Learning to speak is a more complex task than just discovering the articulatory movements required for the production of speech segments. Most children learn to recognize and produce the sounds of their language community quite early and grow gradually towards the complex patterns of adult phonology. In general, phonological theories present extensive descriptions about sound structures in many...

The influence of phonological (i.e., individual sounds), lexical (i.e., whole-word forms) and semantic (i.e., meaning) characteristics on the words known by infants age 1.4 to 2.6 was examined, using an existing database (Dale & Fenson, 1996). For each noun, word frequency, two phonological (i.e., positional segment average, biphone average), two lexical (i.e., neighborhood density, word length...

This study examined the relations between reading-related cognitive skills and word reading development of Chinese children with dyslexia in their Chinese language (L1) and in English (L2). A total of 84 bilingual children-28 with dyslexia, 28 chronological age (CA) controls, and 28 reading-level (RL) controls-participated and were administered measures of word reading, rapid naming, visual-ort...

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and, more generally, African American English (AAE) are the most heavily studied group of dialects in North American English. Much of the enquiry has focused on morphosyntactic variation, but a significant amount has dealt with phonological and phonetic variables. Linguistic variables that can set AAE off from local European American varieties (EAE) in...

Phonetic and phonological data on today’s Swedish dialects are scarce. The aim of this project is to record and analyze comparable speech samples from about 90 dialect areas. A central theoretical goal is to establish phonetic and phonological typologies on the basis of segmental and prosodic characteristics of the Swedish dialects. A practical goal is the creation of a digital database for use...

There is an obvious interest in capturing general trends in the structure of phonological systems of the world’s extant languages. These may hint at overall design properties of human language, which in turn may have origins in basic human cognitive properties or characteristics inherited from the earliest human language(s). One tool that can be used to study such trends is a broadly-based cros...

Preschool-age children (N=58) were randomly assigned to receive instruction in letter names and sounds, letter sounds only, or numbers (control). Multilevel modeling was used to examine letter name and sound learning as a function of instructional condition and characteristics of both letters and children. Specifically, learning was examined in light of letter name structure, whether letter nam...

PURPOSE To describe (a) the assessment of residual speech sound disorders (SSDs) in bilinguals by distinguishing speech patterns associated with second language acquisition from patterns associated with misarticulations and (b) how assessment of domains such as speech motor control and phonological awareness can provide a more complete understanding of SSDs in bilinguals. METHOD A review of J...

Many studies have shown that the phonology of sign language has much in common with that of spoken language, including the existence of meaningless phonological features and feature classes, phonological constraints, rules of assimilation, and more. At the same time, the phonetics of the two language modalities is shaped in part by articulators with very different anatomical and physiological c...