Recent advances in modeling early language acquisition are due not only to the development of machine-learning techniques, but also to the increasing availability of data on child language and child-adult interaction. In the absence of recordings of child-directed speech, or when models explicitly require such a representation for training data, phonemic transcriptions are commonly used as inpu...

This paper focuses on a method for automatically dividing speech utterances into phonemic segments, which are used for constructing synthesis unit inventories for speech synthesis. Here, we propose a new segmentation parameter called, “dynamics of fundamental frequency (DF0).” In the fine structures of F0 contours, there exist phonemic events which are observed as local dips at phonemic transit...

This study investigated whether and to what extent phonemic abilities of young readers (Grade 5) influence syllabic effects in reading. More precisely, the syllable congruency effect was tested in the lexical decision task combined with masked priming in eleven-year-old children. Target words were preceded by a pseudo-word prime sharing the first three letters that either corresponded to the sy...

The purpose of this article is to determine the phonemic status of [h] and [ʔ] in the Sistani dialect of Miyankangi. Auditory tests applied to the relevant data show that [ʔ] occurs mainly in word-initial position, where it stands in free variation with Ø. The only place where [h] is heard is in Arabic and Persian loanwords, and only in the pronunciation of some speakers who are educated and/or...

This study investigated the contribution of naming speed and phonemic awareness to teacher inattention ratings and word-level reading proficiency in 79 first grade children (43 boys, 36 girls). Participants completed the cognitive and reading measures midway through the school year. Teacher ratings of inattention were obtained for each child at the same time point. A path analysis revealed that...

Two reading experiments investigated the extent to which the presence of phonemic repetition in sentences influenced processing difficulty during syntactic ambiguity resolution In both experiments, participants read sentences silently as reading time was measured Reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity was compared to reading time on unambiguous control sentences. S...

A meta-analysis of 31 studies with 1,791 participants was conducted to investigate the sensitivity of tests of verbal fluency to the presence of focal cortical lesions. Relative to healthy controls, participants with focal frontal injuries had large and comparable deficits on phonemic (r = .52) and semantic (r = .54) fluency. For frontal but not nonfrontal patients, phonemic fluency deficits qu...

Infants' speech perception adapts to the phonemic categories of their native language, a process assumed to be driven by the distributional properties of speech. This study investigates whether deep neural networks (DNNs), the current state-of-the-art in distributional feature learning, are capable of learning phoneme-like representations of speech in an unsupervised manner. We trained DNNs wit...

The phonemic priming effect may reflect the hidden dynamics of spoken word perception and has thus been a key topic of recent research. This investigation compared phonemic and phonetic priming (cf. Goldinger, Luce, Pisoni, & Marcario, 1992), using signal detection methods. Although these methods were intended to provide separate indices of sensitivity and bias changes, the results were more co...

Although verbal fluency is a frequently used neuropsychological test, little is known about the underlying cognitive processes. The authors proposed that 2 important components of fluency performance are clustering (i.e., the production of words within semantic or phonemic subcategories) and switching (i.e., the ability to shift between clusters). In Experiment 1, correlational data from 54 old...