Can some black-white differences in reading achievement be traced to differences in language background? Many African American children speak a dialect that differs from the mainstream dialect emphasized in school. We examined how use of alternative dialects affects decoding, an important component of early reading and marker of reading development. Behavioral data show that use of the alternat...

w w w .p os te rs es si on .c om www.postersession.com Luoshan is a small county with long history and brilliant culture. Lying in south Henan Province, it covers an area about 3000 square kilometers, with a constant population of about 200,000. Few materials on the tones of Luoshan Dialect (LSD) have been found. It is a pity that up to now no literature describing the neutral tone behavior in ...

This paper investigates the influence of phonological learning upon the perception of non-native vowels. Four groups of Korean and Japanese English learners, at two levels of English experience, and a group of older monolingual Korean listeners were assessed on the perception and production of Australian English monophthongal front vowels: /i: w e æ a:/. Korean is of interest, because of a rece...

This study investigates the relative effects of talker-specific variation and dialect-based variation on speech intelligibility. Listeners from two dialects of American English performed speech-in-noise tasks with sentences spoken by talkers of each dialect. An initial statistical model showed no significant effects for either talker or listener dialect group, and no interaction. However, a mix...

Two experiments examined whether American and British university students make different kinds of spelling errors as a function of the differences between their dialects. The American students spoke a rhotic dialect, pronouncing an /r/ in such words as leper, hermit, horde, and gnarl. The British students, with their nonrhotic dialect, did not include an /r/ in such words. The dialect differenc...

In this paper we present some results stemming from a British Academy funded grant,1 the objective of which was to determine the extent of dialect variation in relative clause constructions in Scottish Gaelic and to provide a theoretical explanation for the structures discovered. The more theoretical outcomes of the project are reported in Adger and Ramchand (2002) and Adger and Ramchand (2005)...

This article reports first results of a quantity typology study of Swedish dialects, conducted within the Swedia2000 project (see also www.swedia.nu). The examination of recordings from 20 different areas suggests three preliminary types of quantity distinctions: one type shows the usual Swedish complementary quantity distinction, one type uses an additional quantity pattern and one type shows ...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate how linguistic knowledge interacts with indexical knowledge in older children's perception under demanding listening conditions created by extensive talker variability. METHOD Twenty-five 9- to 12-year-old children, 12 from North Carolina (NC) and 13 from Wisconsin (WI), identified 12 vowels in isolated /hVd/ words produced by 120 talkers rep...