A burgeoning question in understanding literacy development is whether engaging in musical training directly transfers benefits to reading-related skills. Although, there is considerable data examining transfer effects of musical training on literacy skills, results from these studies have been largely inconclusive (Anvari et al. To further delineate the potential effects that musical training ...

The ability of dyslexic children with or without phonological problems to process simultaneous and sequential visual information was assessed using two tasks requiring the oral report of simultaneously or sequentially displayed letter-strings. The two groups were found to exhibit a simultaneous visual processing deficit but preserved serial processing skills. However, the impairment in simultan...

Linguistic labels affect inductive generalization; however, the mechanism underlying these effects remains unclear. According to one similarity-based model, SINC (similarity, induction, naming, and categorization), early in development labels are features of objects contributing to the overall similarity of compared entities, with early induction being similarity based. If this is the case, the...

Our programme of research aims to find answers to the following questions. How do children acquire their phonetic and phonological systems? What types of developmental delays and disorders occur? Why do such problems occur? In this paper we add to the growing body of evidence that children can acquire phonological systems before they are able to master the phonetic skills needed to convey the c...

A good deal of painstaking empirical research is detailed in the literature on language acquisition in the first year of life. The majority of it, for obvious reasons, focuses on the infant's perceptual abilities rather than on production, and reveals what is perhaps an initially surprising sophistication in a young child's expertise at discerning contrasts in the acoustic signal which coincide...

Both phonological and morphological reasons have been suggested to account for mismatched elements in reduplicative outputs (e.g. gbóná is reduplicated as gbí-gbóná in Yoruba). However, the mismatched tonal sequences in Cantonese vocative reduplication are not amenable to either account (namely, the Emergence of the Unmarked account and the Morphological Doubling Theory account). This study pro...

The assessment of nonword repetition in children goes back at least to 1974, when the Goldman–Fristoe–Woodcock Auditory Skills Battery was published, including a subtest (Sound Mimicry) assessing nonword repetition (Goldman, Fristoe, & Woodcock, 1974). Nevertheless, it was not until 20 years later, when Gathercole and Baddeley (1990) reported a study of short-term memory in children with specif...