Sample records for naming speed phonological

  1. Investigating Phonological Awareness and Naming Speed as Predictors of Reading in Arabic

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tibi, Sana; Kirby, John R.

    2018-01-01

    Wolf and Bowers (1999) described a model in which phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed (NS) make independent contributions to reading ability. We tested this model in a sample of 201 Grade 3 Arabic-speaking children in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Measures of general cognitive ability, vocabulary, PA, NS, word reading, and reading…

  2. Effects of phonological awareness and naming speed on mathematics skills in children with mild intellectual disabilities.

    PubMed

    Foster, Matthew E; Sevcik, Rose A; Romski, Maryann; Morris, Robin D

    2015-01-01

    Both phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed have been identified as two skills related to the development of mathematics skills for children with and without learning disabilities. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationships between PA and colour naming speed for 265 elementary school students with mild intellectual disabilities (MID). Participants were assessed using the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processes and the KeyMath Revised Diagnostic Inventory of Essential Mathematics. Hierarchical regression analyses accounting for the effects of age indicated that children with MID rely on both PA and naming speed when solving mathematics problems, although PA was the more robust indicator of the two. As a whole, these results suggest that children with intellectual disabilities evidence the same types of reading and math relationships as shown for other populations of children.

  3. Students' performance in phonological awareness, rapid naming, reading, and writing.

    PubMed

    Capellini, Simone Aparecida; Lanza, Simone Cristina

    2010-01-01

    phonological awareness, rapid naming, reading and writing in students with learning difficulties of a municipal public school. to characterize and compare the performance of students from public schools with and without learning difficulties in phonological awareness, rapid naming, reading and writing. participants were 60 students from the 2nd to the 4th grades of municipal public schools divided into 6 groups. Each group was composed by 10 students, being 3 groups of students without learning difficulties and 3 groups with students with learning difficulties. As testing procedure phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, oral reading and writing under dictation assessments were used. the results highlighted the better performance of students with no learning difficulties. Students with learning difficulties presented a higher ratios considering time/speed in rapid naming tasks and, consequently, lower production in activities of phonological awareness and reading and writing, when compared to students without learning difficulties. students with learning difficulties presented deficits when considering the relationship between naming and automatization skills, and among lexical access, visual discrimination, stimulus frequency use and competition in using less time for code naming, i.e. necessary for the phoneme-grapheme conversion process required in the reading and writing alphabetic system like the Portuguese language.

  4. The dorsal stream contribution to phonological retrieval in object naming

    PubMed Central

    Faseyitan, Olufunsho; Kim, Junghoon; Coslett, H. Branch

    2012-01-01

    Meaningful speech, as exemplified in object naming, calls on knowledge of the mappings between word meanings and phonological forms. Phonological errors in naming (e.g. GHOST named as ‘goath’) are commonly seen in persisting post-stroke aphasia and are thought to signal impairment in retrieval of phonological form information. We performed a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping analysis of 1718 phonological naming errors collected from 106 individuals with diverse profiles of aphasia. Voxels in which lesion status correlated with phonological error rates localized to dorsal stream areas, in keeping with classical and contemporary brain-language models. Within the dorsal stream, the critical voxels were concentrated in premotor cortex, pre- and postcentral gyri and supramarginal gyrus with minimal extension into auditory-related posterior temporal and temporo-parietal cortices. This challenges the popular notion that error-free phonological retrieval requires guidance from sensory traces stored in posterior auditory regions and points instead to sensory-motor processes located further anterior in the dorsal stream. In a separate analysis, we compared the lesion maps for phonological and semantic errors and determined that there was no spatial overlap, demonstrating that the brain segregates phonological and semantic retrieval operations in word production. PMID:23171662

  5. Cross-Language Correlates in Phonological Awareness and Naming Speed: Evidence from Deep and Shallow Orthographies

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Pae, Hye Kyeong; Sevcik, Rose A.; Morris, Robin D.

    2010-01-01

    Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatised naming (RAN) skills in relation to reading acquisition were examined using two languages, one with a deep orthography (English) and the other with a shallow orthography (Korean). Participants were 50 Korean American children who spoke English as a dominant language (DL) and were learning to read…

  6. Phonological therapy in jargon aphasia: effects on naming and neologisms.

    PubMed

    Bose, Arpita

    2013-01-01

    Jargon aphasia is one of the most intractable forms of aphasia with limited recommendation on amelioration of associated naming difficulties and neologisms. The few naming therapy studies that exist in jargon aphasia have utilized either semantic or phonological approaches, but the results have been equivocal. Moreover, the effect of therapy on the characteristics of neologisms is less explored. This study investigates the effectiveness of a phonological naming therapy (i.e., phonological component analysis-PCA) on picture-naming abilities and on quantitative and qualitative changes in neologisms for an individual with jargon aphasia (FF). FF showed evidence of jargon aphasia with severe naming difficulties and produced a very high proportion of neologisms. A single-subject multiple probe design across behaviours was employed to evaluate the effects of PCA therapy on the accuracy for three sets of words. In therapy, a phonological components analysis chart was used to identify five phonological components (i.e. rhymes, first sound, first sound associate, final sound and number of syllables) for each target word. Generalization effects-change in per cent accuracy and error pattern-were examined comparing pre- and post-therapy responses on the Philadelphia Naming Test, and these responses were analysed to explore the characteristics of the neologisms. The quantitative change in neologisms was measured by change in the proportion of neologisms from pre- to post-therapy and the qualitative change was indexed by the phonological overlap between target and neologism. As a consequence of PCA therapy, FF showed a significant improvement in his ability to name the treated items. His performance in maintenance and follow-up phases remained comparable with his performance during the therapy phases. Generalization to other naming tasks did not show a change in accuracy, but distinct differences in error pattern (an increase in proportion of real word responses and a decrease

  7. [Picture naming and memory in children: phonological and semantic effects].

    PubMed

    Scheuer, Claudia Ines; Stivanin, Luciene; Mangilli, Laura Davidson

    2004-01-01

    [corrected] The relation between picture naming and the short and long term memories. to verify the ability of picture naming based on phonological and semantic queues, relating it to memory. 80 pictures selected from a set of 400 (Cycowicz et al., 1997) were presented to 80 children with ages ranging from 3 to 6 years. Responses were classified in semantic and phonologic errors and number of correct answers. The effect of the articulatory complexity was significant and the effect of the semantic complexity was not significant. Naming is the result of memory activation which is organized in categories, physical properties and function; phonologic effects do interfere in the activity of naming, whereas the semantic effects reflect that the long term memory is organized in categories which are dependant of the context and of the development.

  8. Rapid Naming and Phonological Processing as Predictors of Reading and Spelling

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Christo, Catherine; Davis, Jack

    2008-01-01

    This study examined the relationships between the cognitive processes of rapid naming and phonological processing and various literacy skills. Variables measured and used in this analysis were phonological processing, rapid naming, reading comprehension, isolated and nonsense word reading, and spelling. Data were collected from 65 second-to-fifth…

  9. Developmental dyslexia and phonological processing in European Portuguese orthography.

    PubMed

    Moura, Octávio; Moreno, Joana; Pereira, Marcelino; Simões, Mário R

    2015-02-01

    This study analysed the performance of phonological processing, the diagnostic accuracy and the influence on reading in children who were native speakers of an orthography of intermediate depth. Portuguese children with developmental dyslexia (DD; N=24; aged 10-12 years), chronological age (CA)-matched controls (N=24; aged 10-12 years) and reading level (RL)-matched controls (N=24; aged 7-9 years) were tested on measures of phonological processing (phonological awareness, naming speed and verbal short-term memory) and reading. The results indicated that the children with DD performed significantly poorer in all measures compared with the CA and RL. Phonological awareness and naming speed showed a high accuracy (receiver operating characteristics curve analysis) for discriminating the children with DD from the CA and RL, whereas the presence of abnormally low scores in phonological awareness and naming speed was more frequent in the DD group than in the controls and the normative population. Hierarchical linear regression analyses revealed that phonological awareness was the most important predictor of all reading accuracy measures, whereas naming speed was particularly related to text reading fluency. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  10. Phonological Stereotypes and Names in Temne.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nemer, Julie F.

    1987-01-01

    Many personal names in Temne (a Mel language spoken in Sierra Leone) are borrowed from other languages, containing foreign sounds and sequences which are unpronounceable for Temne speakers when they appear in other words. These exceptions are treated as instances of phonological stereotyping (cases remaining resistant to assimilation processes).…

  11. Eye Movements and Articulations during a Letter Naming Speed Task: Children with and without Dyslexia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Al Dahhan, Noor Z.; Kirby, John R.; Brien, Donald C.; Munoz, Douglas P.

    2017-01-01

    Naming speed (NS) refers to how quickly and accurately participants name a set of familiar stimuli (e.g., letters). NS is an established predictor of reading ability, but controversy remains over why it is related to reading. We used three techniques (stimulus manipulations to emphasize phonological and/or visual aspects, decomposition of NS times…

  12. Implicit Object Naming in Visual Search: Evidence from Phonological Competition

    PubMed Central

    Walenchok, Stephen C.; Hout, Michael C.; Goldinger, Stephen D.

    2016-01-01

    During visual search, people are distracted by objects that visually resemble search targets; search is impaired when targets and distractors share overlapping features. In this study, we examined whether a nonvisual form of similarity, overlapping object names, can also affect search performance. In three experiments, people searched for images of real-world objects (e.g., a beetle) among items whose names either all shared the same phonological onset (/bi/), or were phonologically varied. Participants either searched for one or three potential targets per trial, with search targets designated either visually or verbally. We examined standard visual search (Experiments 1 and 3) and a self-paced serial search task wherein participants manually rejected each distractor (Experiment 2). We hypothesized that people would maintain visual templates when searching for single targets, but would rely more on object names when searching for multiple items and when targets were verbally cued. This reliance on target names would make performance susceptible to interference from similar-sounding distractors. Experiments 1 and 2 showed the predicted interference effect in conditions with high memory load and verbal cues. In Experiment 3, eye-movement results showed that phonological interference resulted from small increases in dwell time to all distractors. The results suggest that distractor names are implicitly activated during search, slowing attention disengagement when targets and distractors share similar names. PMID:27531018

  13. Contributions of phonological awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid automated naming, toward decoding ability in students with mild intellectual disability.

    PubMed

    Soltani, Amanallah; Roslan, Samsilah

    2013-03-01

    Reading decoding ability is a fundamental skill to acquire word-specific orthographic information necessary for skilled reading. Decoding ability and its underlying phonological processing skills have been heavily investigated typically among developing students. However, the issue has rarely been noticed among students with intellectual disability who commonly suffer from reading decoding problems. This study is aimed at determining the contributions of phonological awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid automated naming, as three well known phonological processing skills, to decoding ability among 60 participants with mild intellectual disability of unspecified origin ranging from 15 to 23 years old. The results of the correlation analysis revealed that all three aspects of phonological processing are significantly correlated with decoding ability. Furthermore, a series of hierarchical regression analysis indicated that after controlling the effect of IQ, phonological awareness, and rapid automated naming are two distinct sources of decoding ability, but phonological short-term memory significantly contributes to decoding ability under the realm of phonological awareness. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  14. Reading speed and phonological awareness deficits among Arabic-speaking children with dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Layes, Smail; Lalonde, Robert; Rebaï, Mohamed

    2015-02-01

    Although reading accuracy of isolated words and phonological awareness represent the main criteria of subtyping developmental dyslexia, there is increasing evidence that reduced reading speed also represents a defining characteristic. In the present study, reading speed and accuracy were measured in Arabic-speaking phonological and mixed dyslexic children matched with controls of the same age. Participants in third and fourth grades, aged from 9-10 to 9-8 years, were given single frequent and infrequent word and pseudo-word reading and phonological awareness tasks. Results showed that the group with dyslexia scored significantly lower than controls in accuracy and speed in reading tasks. Phonological and mixed dyslexic subgroups differed in infrequent and frequent word reading accuracy, the latter being worse. In contrast, the subgroups were comparable in pseudo-word identification and phonological awareness. Delayed phonological and recognition processes of infrequent and frequent words, respectively, were placed in the context of the dual route model of reading and the specific orthographic features of the Arabic language. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  15. Conceptual Coherence Affects Phonological Activation of Context Objects during Object Naming

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Oppermann, Frank; Jescheniak, Jorg D.; Schriefers, Herbert

    2008-01-01

    In 4 picture-word interference experiments, speakers named a target object that was presented with a context object. Using auditory distractors that were phonologically related or unrelated either to the target object or the context object, the authors assessed whether phonological processing was confined to the target object or not. Phonological…

  16. Is Phonological Encoding in Naming Influenced by Literacy?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ventura, Paulo; Kolinsky, Regine; Querido, Jose-Luis; Fernandes, Sandra; Morais, Jose

    2007-01-01

    We examined phonological priming in illiterate adults, using a cross-modal picture-word interference task. Participants named pictures while hearing distractor words at different Stimulus Onset Asynchronies (SOAs). Ex-illiterates and university students were also tested. We specifically assessed the ability of the three populations to use…

  17. Rapid Automatized Naming in Children with Dyslexia: Is Inhibitory Control Involved?

    PubMed

    Bexkens, Anika; van den Wildenberg, Wery P M; Tijms, Jurgen

    2015-08-01

    Rapid automatized naming (RAN) is widely seen as an important indicator of dyslexia. The nature of the cognitive processes involved in rapid naming is however still a topic of controversy. We hypothesized that in addition to the involvement of phonological processes and processing speed, RAN is a function of inhibition processes, in particular of interference control. A total 86 children with dyslexia and 31 normal readers were recruited. Our results revealed that in addition to phonological processing and processing speed, interference control predicts rapid naming in dyslexia, but in contrast to these other two cognitive processes, inhibition is not significantly associated with their reading and spelling skills. After variance in reading and spelling associated with processing speed, interference control and phonological processing was partialled out, naming speed was no longer consistently associated with the reading and spelling skills of children with dyslexia. Finally, dyslexic children differed from normal readers on naming speed, literacy skills, phonological processing and processing speed, but not on inhibition processes. Both theoretical and clinical interpretations of these results are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  18. Phonological Therapy in Jargon Aphasia: Effects on Naming and Neologisms

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bose, Arpita

    2013-01-01

    Background: Jargon aphasia is one of the most intractable forms of aphasia with limited recommendation on amelioration of associated naming difficulties and neologisms. The few naming therapy studies that exist in jargon aphasia have utilized either semantic or phonological approaches, but the results have been equivocal. Moreover, the effect of…

  19. What Does a Cue Do? Comparing Phonological and Semantic Cues for Picture Naming in Aphasia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Meteyard, Lotte; Bose, Arpita

    2018-01-01

    Purpose: Impaired naming is one of the most common symptoms in aphasia, often treated with cued picture naming paradigms. It has been argued that semantic cues facilitate the reliable categorization of the picture, and phonological cues facilitate the retrieval of target phonology. To test these hypotheses, we compared the effectiveness of…

  20. Investigating the flow of information during speaking: the impact of morpho-phonological, associative, and categorical picture distractors on picture naming

    PubMed Central

    Bölte, Jens; Böhl, Andrea; Dobel, Christian; Zwitserlood, Pienie

    2015-01-01

    In three experiments, participants named target pictures by means of German compound words (e.g., Gartenstuhl–garden chair), each accompanied by two different distractor pictures (e.g., lawn mower and swimming pool). Targets and distractor pictures were semantically related either associatively (garden chair and lawn mower) or by a shared semantic category (garden chair and wardrobe). Within each type of semantic relation, target and distractor pictures either shared morpho-phonological (word-form) information (Gartenstuhl with Gartenzwerg, garden gnome, and Gartenschlauch, garden hose) or not. A condition with two completely unrelated pictures served as baseline. Target naming was facilitated when distractor and target pictures were morpho-phonologically related. This is clear evidence for the activation of word-form information of distractor pictures. Effects were larger for associatively than for categorically related distractors and targets, which constitute evidence for lexical competition. Mere categorical relatedness, in the absence of morpho-phonological overlap, resulted in null effects (Experiments 1 and 2), and only speeded target naming when effects reflect only conceptual, but not lexical processing (Experiment 3). Given that distractor pictures activate their word forms, the data cannot be easily reconciled with discrete serial models. The results fit well with models that allow information to cascade forward from conceptual to word-form levels. PMID:26528209

  1. Investigating the flow of information during speaking: the impact of morpho-phonological, associative, and categorical picture distractors on picture naming.

    PubMed

    Bölte, Jens; Böhl, Andrea; Dobel, Christian; Zwitserlood, Pienie

    2015-01-01

    In three experiments, participants named target pictures by means of German compound words (e.g., Gartenstuhl-garden chair), each accompanied by two different distractor pictures (e.g., lawn mower and swimming pool). Targets and distractor pictures were semantically related either associatively (garden chair and lawn mower) or by a shared semantic category (garden chair and wardrobe). Within each type of semantic relation, target and distractor pictures either shared morpho-phonological (word-form) information (Gartenstuhl with Gartenzwerg, garden gnome, and Gartenschlauch, garden hose) or not. A condition with two completely unrelated pictures served as baseline. Target naming was facilitated when distractor and target pictures were morpho-phonologically related. This is clear evidence for the activation of word-form information of distractor pictures. Effects were larger for associatively than for categorically related distractors and targets, which constitute evidence for lexical competition. Mere categorical relatedness, in the absence of morpho-phonological overlap, resulted in null effects (Experiments 1 and 2), and only speeded target naming when effects reflect only conceptual, but not lexical processing (Experiment 3). Given that distractor pictures activate their word forms, the data cannot be easily reconciled with discrete serial models. The results fit well with models that allow information to cascade forward from conceptual to word-form levels.

  2. Letter names and phonological awareness help children to learn letter-sound relations.

    PubMed

    Cardoso-Martins, Cláudia; Mesquita, Tereza Cristina Lara; Ehri, Linnea

    2011-05-01

    Two experimental training studies with Portuguese-speaking preschoolers in Brazil were conducted to investigate whether children benefit from letter name knowledge and phonological awareness in learning letter-sound relations. In Experiment 1, two groups of children were compared. The experimental group was taught the names of letters whose sounds occur either at the beginning (e.g., the letter /be/) or in the middle (e.g., the letter /'eli/) of the letter name. The control group was taught the shapes of the letters but not their names. Then both groups were taught the sounds of the letters. Results showed an advantage for the experimental group, but only for beginning-sound letters. Experiment 2 investigated whether training in phonological awareness could boost the learning of letter sounds, particularly middle-sound letters. In addition to learning the names of beginning- and middle-sound letters, children in the experimental group were taught to categorize words according to rhyme and alliteration, whereas controls were taught to categorize the same words semantically. All children were then taught the sounds of the letters. Results showed that children who were given phonological awareness training found it easier to learn letter sounds than controls. This was true for both types of letters, but especially for middle-sound letters. Copyright © 2011. Published by Elsevier Inc.

  3. Letter Names and Phonological Awareness Help Children to Learn Letter-Sound Relations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cardoso-Martins, Claudia; Mesquita, Tereza Cristina Lara; Ehri, Linnea

    2011-01-01

    Two experimental training studies with Portuguese-speaking preschoolers in Brazil were conducted to investigate whether children benefit from letter name knowledge and phonological awareness in learning letter-sound relations. In Experiment 1, two groups of children were compared. The experimental group was taught the names of letters whose sounds…

  4. The use of semantic- and phonological-based feature approaches to treat naming deficits in aphasia.

    PubMed

    Hashimoto, Naomi

    2012-06-01

    The aim of the study was to compare approaches highlighting either semantic or phonological features to treat naming deficits in aphasia. Treatment focused on improving picture naming. An alternating treatments design was used with a multiple baseline design across stimuli to examine effects of both approaches in two participants with varying degrees of anomia. The features approaches were modified in that three, rather than six, features were used. Significant differential effects were found across participants; this appeared to be a function of each participant's strengths or preferences over the course of treatment. Modest generalization effects were obtained for one participant. Naming error analyses revealed patterns suggestive of increased lexical access for both participants. These findings provide evidence that using a modified features-based protocol can improve naming when incorporating both semantic and phonological feature cues. Naming error patterns can provide additional evidence of improved naming during treatment.

  5. The Relationship between Rapid Naming and Word Spelling in English

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Stainthorp, Rhona; Powell, Daisy; Stuart, Morag

    2013-01-01

    A study of the concurrent relationships between naming speed, phonological awareness and spelling ability in 146 children in Years 3 and 4 of state-funded schools in South-East England (equivalent to US Grades 2 and 3) is reported. Seventy-two children identified as having normal phonological awareness but reduced rapid automatised naming (RAN)…

  6. Chinese Children's Character Recognition: Visuo-Orthographic, Phonological Processing and Morphological Skills

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Li, Hong; Shu, Hua; McBride-Chang, Catherine; Liu, Hongyun; Peng, Hong

    2012-01-01

    Tasks tapping visual skills, orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, speeded naming, morphological awareness and Chinese character recognition were administered to 184 kindergarteners and 273 primary school students from Beijing. Regression analyses indicated that only syllable deletion, morphological construction and speeded number naming…

  7. The Locus of Naming Difficulties in Children with Dyslexia: Evidence of Inefficient Phonological Encoding

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Truman, Amanda; Hennessey, Neville W.

    2006-01-01

    Twenty-four children with dyslexia (aged 7;7 to 12;1) and twenty-four age-matched controls named pictures aloud while hearing nonsense syllables either phonologically related (i.e., part of) or unrelated to the target picture name. Compared with controls, dyslexics had slower reaction times overall and, for low frequency items, the degree of…

  8. Phonological Inconsistency in Word Naming: Determinants of the Interference Effect between Languages

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Smits, Erica; Sandra, Dominiek; Martensen, Heike; Dijkstra, Ton

    2009-01-01

    Dutch-English participants named words and nonwords with a between-language phonologically inconsistent rime, e.g., GREED and PREED, and control words with a language-typical rime, e.g., GROAN, in a monolingual stimulus list or in a mixed list containing Dutch words. Inconsistent items had longer latencies and more errors than typical items in the…

  9. Early Parallel Activation of Semantics and Phonology in Picture Naming: Evidence from a Multiple Linear Regression MEG Study

    PubMed Central

    Miozzo, Michele; Pulvermüller, Friedemann; Hauk, Olaf

    2015-01-01

    The time course of brain activation during word production has become an area of increasingly intense investigation in cognitive neuroscience. The predominant view has been that semantic and phonological processes are activated sequentially, at about 150 and 200–400 ms after picture onset. Although evidence from prior studies has been interpreted as supporting this view, these studies were arguably not ideally suited to detect early brain activation of semantic and phonological processes. We here used a multiple linear regression approach to magnetoencephalography (MEG) analysis of picture naming in order to investigate early effects of variables specifically related to visual, semantic, and phonological processing. This was combined with distributed minimum-norm source estimation and region-of-interest analysis. Brain activation associated with visual image complexity appeared in occipital cortex at about 100 ms after picture presentation onset. At about 150 ms, semantic variables became physiologically manifest in left frontotemporal regions. In the same latency range, we found an effect of phonological variables in the left middle temporal gyrus. Our results demonstrate that multiple linear regression analysis is sensitive to early effects of multiple psycholinguistic variables in picture naming. Crucially, our results suggest that access to phonological information might begin in parallel with semantic processing around 150 ms after picture onset. PMID:25005037

  10. Verbal Working Memory in Older Adults: The Roles of Phonological Capacities and Processing Speed

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nittrouer, Susan; Lowenstein, Joanna H.; Wucinich, Taylor; Moberly, Aaron C.

    2016-01-01

    Purpose: This study examined the potential roles of phonological sensitivity and processing speed in age-related declines of verbal working memory. Method: Twenty younger and 25 older adults with age-normal hearing participated. Two measures of verbal working memory were collected: digit span and serial recall of words. Processing speed was…

  11. Phonological Awareness Deficits in Developmental Dyslexia and the Phonological Representations Hypothesis.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Swan, Denise; Goswami, Usha

    1997-01-01

    Used picture-naming task to identify accurate/inaccurate phonological representations by dyslexic and control children; compared performance on phonological measures for words with precise/imprecise representations. Found that frequency effects in phonological tasks disappeared after considering representational quality, and that availability of…

  12. Subliminal repetition primes help detection of phonemes in a picture: Evidence for a phonological level of the priming effects.

    PubMed

    Manoiloff, Laura; Segui, Juan; Hallé, Pierre

    2016-01-01

    In this research, we combine a cross-form word-picture visual masked priming procedure with an internal phoneme monitoring task to examine repetition priming effects. In this paradigm, participants have to respond to pictures whose names begin with a prespecified target phoneme. This task unambiguously requires retrieving the word-form of the target picture's name and implicitly orients participants' attention towards a phonological level of representation. The experiments were conducted within Spanish, whose highly transparent orthography presumably promotes fast and automatic phonological recoding of subliminal, masked visual word primes. Experiments 1 and 2 show that repetition primes speed up internal phoneme monitoring in the target, compared to primes beginning with a different phoneme from the target, or sharing only their first phoneme with the target. This suggests that repetition primes preactivate the phonological code of the entire target picture's name, hereby speeding up internal monitoring, which is necessarily based on such a code. To further qualify the nature of the phonological code underlying internal phoneme monitoring, a concurrent articulation task was used in Experiment 3. This task did not affect the repetition priming effect. We propose that internal phoneme monitoring is based on an abstract phonological code, prior to its translation into articulation.

  13. The role of selected lexical factors on confrontation naming accuracy, speed, and fluency in adults who do and do not stutter.

    PubMed

    Newman, Rochelle S; Bernstein Ratner, Nan

    2007-02-01

    The purpose of this study was to investigate whether lexical access in adults who stutter (AWS) differs from that in people who do not stutter. Specifically, the authors examined the role of 3 lexical factors on naming speed, accuracy, and fluency: word frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency. If stuttering results from an impairment in lexical access, these factors were hypothesized to differentially affect AWS performance on a confrontation naming task. Twenty-five AWS and 25 normally fluent comparison speakers, matched for age and education, participated in a confrontation naming task designed to explore within-speaker performance on naming accuracy, speed, and fluency based on stimulus word frequency and neighborhood characteristics. Accuracy, fluency, and reaction time (from acoustic waveform analysis) were computed. In general, AWS demonstrated the same effects of lexical factors on their naming as did adults who do not stutter. However, accuracy of naming was reduced for AWS. Stuttering rate was influenced by word frequency but not other factors. Results suggest that AWS could have a fundamental deficit in lexical retrieval, but this deficit is unlikely to be at the level of the word's abstract phonological representation. Implications for further research are discussed.

  14. Auditory phonological priming in children and adults during word repetition

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Cleary, Miranda; Schwartz, Richard G.

    2004-05-01

    Short-term auditory phonological priming effects involve changes in the speed with which words are processed by a listener as a function of recent exposure to other similar-sounding words. Activation of phonological/lexical representations appears to persist beyond the immediate offset of a word, influencing subsequent processing. Priming effects are commonly cited as demonstrating concurrent activation of word/phonological candidates during word identification. Phonological priming is controversial, the direction of effects (facilitating versus slowing) varying with the prime-target relationship. In adults, it has repeatedly been demonstrated, however, that hearing a prime word that rhymes with the following target word (ISI=50 ms) decreases the time necessary to initiate repetition of the target, relative to when the prime and target have no phonemic overlap. Activation of phonological representations in children has not typically been studied using this paradigm, auditory-word + picture-naming tasks being used instead. The present study employed an auditory phonological priming paradigm being developed for use with normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children. Initial results from normal-hearing adults replicate previous reports of faster naming times for targets following a rhyming prime word than for targets following a prime having no phonemes in common. Results from normal-hearing children will also be reported. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD T32DC000039.

  15. Naming Problems Do Not Reflect a Second Independent Core Deficit in Dyslexia: Double Deficits Explored

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Vaessen, Anniek; Gerretsen, Patty; Blomert, Leo

    2009-01-01

    The double deficit hypothesis states that naming speed problems represent a second core deficit in dyslexia independent from a phonological deficit. The current study investigated the main assumptions of this hypothesis in a large sample of well-diagnosed dyslexics. The three main findings were that (a) naming speed was consistently related only…

  16. Why Does Rapid Naming Predict Chinese Word Reading?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Shum, Kathy Kar-man; Au, Terry Kit-fong

    2017-01-01

    Rapid automatized naming (RAN) robustly predicts early reading abilities across languages, but its underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study found that RAN associated significantly with processing speed but not with phonological awareness or orthographic knowledge in 89 Hong Kong Chinese second-graders. RAN overlaps more with processing…

  17. Name Writing but not Environmental Print Recognition Is Related to Letter-Sound Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Pre-Readers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Blair, Rebecca; Savage, Robert

    2006-01-01

    This paper reports a study exploring the associations between measures of two levels of phonological representation: recognition (epi-linguistic) and production (meta-linguistic) tasks, and very early reading and writing skills. Thirty-eight pre-reading Ottawa-area children, aged 4-5 years, named environmental print (EP), wrote their own name,…

  18. Naming-Speed Processes, Timing, and Reading: A Conceptual Review.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wolf, Maryanne; Bowers, Patricia Greig; Biddle, Kathleen

    2000-01-01

    This article reviews evidence for seven central questions about the role of naming-speed deficits in developmental reading disabilities. Cross-sectional, longitudinal, and cross-linguistic research on naming-speed processes, timing processes, and reading is presented. An evolving model of visual naming illustrates areas of difference and areas of…

  19. A Principled Relation between Reading and Naming in Acquired and Developmental Anomia: Surface Dyslexia Following Impairment in the Phonological Output Lexicon

    PubMed Central

    Gvion, Aviah; Friedmann, Naama

    2016-01-01

    Lexical retrieval and reading aloud are often viewed as two separate processes. However, they are not completely separate—they share components. This study assessed the effect of an impairment in a shared component, the phonological output lexicon, on lexical retrieval and on reading aloud. Because the phonological output lexicon is part of the lexical route for reading, individuals with an impairment in this lexicon may be forced to read aloud via the sublexical route and therefore show a reading pattern that is typical of surface dyslexia. To examine the effect of phonological output lexicon deficit on reading, we tested the reading of 16 Hebrew-speaking individuals with phonological output lexicon anomia, eight with acquired anomia following brain damage and eight with developmental anomia. We established that they had a phonological output lexicon deficit according to the types of errors and the effects on their naming in a picture naming task, and excluded other deficit loci in the lexical retrieval process according to a line of tests assessing their picture and word comprehension, word and non-word repetition, and phonological working memory. After we have established that the participants have a phonological output lexicon deficit, we tested their reading. To assess their reading and type of reading impairment, we tested their reading aloud, lexical decision, and written word comprehension. We found that all of the participants with phonological output lexicon impairment showed, in addition to anomia, also the typical surface dyslexia errors in reading aloud of irregular words, words with ambiguous conversion to phonemes, and potentiophones (words like “now” that, when read via the sublexical route, can be sounded out as another word, “know”). Importantly, the participants performed normally on pseudohomophone lexical decision and on homophone/potentiophone reading comprehension, indicating spared orthographic input lexicon and spared access to it

  20. Grammatical constraints on phonological encoding in speech production.

    PubMed

    Heller, Jordana R; Goldrick, Matthew

    2014-12-01

    To better understand the influence of grammatical encoding on the retrieval and encoding of phonological word-form information during speech production, we examine how grammatical class constraints influence the activation of phonological neighbors (words phonologically related to the target--e.g., MOON, TWO for target TUNE). Specifically, we compare how neighbors that share a target's grammatical category (here, nouns) influence its planning and retrieval, assessed by picture naming latencies, and phonetic encoding, assessed by word productions in picture names, when grammatical constraints are strong (in sentence contexts) versus weak (bare naming). Within-category (noun) neighbors influenced planning time and phonetic encoding more strongly in sentence contexts. This suggests that grammatical encoding constrains phonological processing; the influence of phonological neighbors is grammatically dependent. Moreover, effects on planning times could not fully account for phonetic effects, suggesting that phonological interaction affects articulation after speech onset. These results support production theories integrating grammatical, phonological, and phonetic processes.

  1. Review of Research: Naming Speed and Reading--From Prediction to Instruction

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kirby, John R.; Georgiou, George K.; Martinussen, Rhonda; Parrila, Rauno

    2010-01-01

    Current theoretical interpretations of naming speed and the research literature on its relation to reading are reviewed in this article. The authors examine naming speed's effects across languages and the shape of its relationship to reading. Also considered is the double-deficit hypothesis, by which students with both slow naming speed and low…

  2. Role of Visual Speech in Phonological Processing by Children With Hearing Loss

    PubMed Central

    Jerger, Susan; Tye-Murray, Nancy; Abdi, Hervé

    2011-01-01

    Purpose This research assessed the influence of visual speech on phonological processing by children with hearing loss (HL). Method Children with HL and children with normal hearing (NH) named pictures while attempting to ignore auditory or audiovisual speech distractors whose onsets relative to the pictures were either congruent, conflicting in place of articulation, or conflicting in voicing—for example, the picture “pizza” coupled with the distractors “peach,” “teacher,” or “beast,” respectively. Speed of picture naming was measured. Results The conflicting conditions slowed naming, and phonological processing by children with HL displayed the age-related shift in sensitivity to visual speech seen in children with NH, although with developmental delay. Younger children with HL exhibited a disproportionately large influence of visual speech and a negligible influence of auditory speech, whereas older children with HL showed a robust influence of auditory speech with no benefit to performance from adding visual speech. The congruent conditions did not speed naming in children with HL, nor did the addition of visual speech influence performance. Unexpectedly, the /∧/-vowel congruent distractors slowed naming in children with HL and decreased articulatory proficiency. Conclusions Results for the conflicting conditions are consistent with the hypothesis that speech representations in children with HL (a) are initially disproportionally structured in terms of visual speech and (b) become better specified with age in terms of auditorily encoded information. PMID:19339701

  3. Letter Names, Letter Sounds and Phonological Awareness: An Examination of Kindergarten Children across Letters and of Letters across Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Evans, Mary Ann; Bell, Michelle; Shaw, Deborah; Moretti, Shelley; Page, Jodi

    2006-01-01

    In this study 149 kindergarten children were assessed for knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, phonological awareness, and cognitive abilities. Through this it examined child and letter characteristics influencing the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge in a naturalistic context, the relationship between letter-sound knowledge and…

  4. The Impact of Rapid Automatized Naming and Phonological Awareness on the Reading Fluency of a Minority Student Population

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Taub, Gordon E.; Szente, Judit

    2012-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) on the reading fluency (RF) of students from traditionally underrepresented groups. The study included 86 participants attending 1st through 4th grade within an inner-city charter school located in a high-poverty, urban…

  5. The contribution to immediate serial recall of rehearsal, search speed, access to lexical memory, and phonological coding: an investigation at the construct level.

    PubMed

    Tehan, Gerald; Fogarty, Gerard; Ryan, Katherine

    2004-07-01

    Rehearsal speed has traditionally been seen to be the prime determinant of individual differences in memory span. Recent studies, in the main using young children as the participant population, have suggested other contributors to span performance. In the present research, we used structural equation modeling to explore, at the construct level, individual differences in immediate serial recall with respect to rehearsal, search, phonological coding, and speed of access to lexical memory. We replicated standard short-term phenomena; we showed that the variables that influence children's span performance influence adult performance in the same way; and we showed that speed of access to lexical memory and facility with phonological codes appear to be more potent sources of individual differences in immediate memory than is either rehearsal speed or search factors.

  6. Reading component skills in dyslexia: word recognition, comprehension and processing speed.

    PubMed

    de Oliveira, Darlene G; da Silva, Patrícia B; Dias, Natália M; Seabra, Alessandra G; Macedo, Elizeu C

    2014-01-01

    The cognitive model of reading comprehension (RC) posits that RC is a result of the interaction between decoding and linguistic comprehension. Recently, the notion of decoding skill was expanded to include word recognition. In addition, some studies suggest that other skills could be integrated into this model, like processing speed, and have consistently indicated that this skill influences and is an important predictor of the main components of the model, such as vocabulary for comprehension and phonological awareness of word recognition. The following study evaluated the components of the RC model and predictive skills in children and adolescents with dyslexia. 40 children and adolescents (8-13 years) were divided in a Dyslexic Group (DG; 18 children, MA = 10.78, SD = 1.66) and control group (CG 22 children, MA = 10.59, SD = 1.86). All were students from the 2nd to 8th grade of elementary school and groups were equivalent in school grade, age, gender, and IQ. Oral and RC, word recognition, processing speed, picture naming, receptive vocabulary, and phonological awareness were assessed. There were no group differences regarding the accuracy in oral and RC, phonological awareness, naming, and vocabulary scores. DG performed worse than the CG in word recognition (general score and orthographic confusion items) and were slower in naming. Results corroborated the literature regarding word recognition and processing speed deficits in dyslexia. However, dyslexics can achieve normal scores on RC test. Data supports the importance of delimitation of different reading strategies embedded in the word recognition component. The role of processing speed in reading problems remain unclear.

  7. Relationships among Rapid Digit Naming, Phonological Processing, Motor Automaticity, and Speech Perception in Poor, Average, and Good Readers and Spellers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Savage, Robert S.; Frederickson, Norah; Goodwin, Roz; Patni, Ulla; Smith, Nicola; Tuersley, Louise

    2005-01-01

    In this article, we explore the relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and other cognitive processes among below-average, average, and above-average readers and spellers. Nonsense word reading, phonological awareness, RAN, automaticity of balance, speech perception, and verbal short-term and working memory were measured. Factor…

  8. Effects of word frequency and phonological neighborhood characteristics on confrontation naming in children who stutter and normally fluent peers.

    PubMed

    Ratner, Nan Bernstein; Newman, Rochelle; Strekas, Amy

    2009-12-01

    In a prior study (Newman & Bernstein Ratner, 2007), we examined the effects of word frequency and phonological neighborhood characteristics on confrontation naming latency, accuracy and fluency in adults who stutter and typically fluent speakers. A small difference in accuracy favoring fluent adults was noted, but no other patterns differentiated fluent speaker responses from those obtained from the adults who stutter. Because lexical organization or retrieval differences might be more easily observed in less mature language users, we replicated the experiment using 15 children who stutter (ages 4;10 16;2) and age- and gender-matched peers. Results replicated the earlier study: the two groups of participants showed strikingly similar patterns of responses based on word frequency and neighborhood characteristics. There were also no differences in naming accuracy overall between the two groups. Given our results and those of other researchers who have explored the impact of neighborhood variables on lexical retrieval in people who stutter, we suggest that differences between language production in PWS and fluent speakers are not likely to involve atypical phonological organization of lexical neighborhoods. After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) define and illustrate words that have differing frequency and phonological neighborhood characteristics; (2) evaluate whether or not children who stutter appear to organize their mental lexicons differently than those of children who are typically fluent; (3) suggest future areas of research into language processing in people who stutter.

  9. Phonologically driven variability: the case of determiners.

    PubMed

    Bürki, Audrey; Laganaro, Marina; Alario, F Xavier

    2014-09-01

    Speakers usually produce words in connected speech. In such contexts, the form in which many words are uttered is influenced by the phonological properties of neighboring words. The current article examines the representations and processes underlying the production of phonologically constrained word form variations. For this purpose, we consider determiners whose form is sensitive to phonological context (e.g., in English: a car vs. an animal; in French: le chien 'the dog' vs. l'âne 'the donkey'). Two hypotheses have been proposed regarding how these words are processed. Determiners either are thought to have different representations for each of their surface forms, or they are thought to have only 1 representation while other forms are generated online after selection through a rule-based process. We tested the predictions derived from these 2 views in 3 picture naming experiments. Participants named pictures using determiner-adjective-noun phrases (e.g., la nouvelle table 'the new table'). Phonologically consistent or inconsistent conditions were contrasted, based on the phonological onsets of the adjective and the noun. Results revealed shorter naming latencies for consistent than for inconsistent sequences (i.e., a phonological consistency effect) for all the determiner types tested. Our interpretation of these findings converges on the assumption that determiners with varying surface forms are represented in memory with multiple phonological-lexical representations. This conclusion is discussed in relation to models of determiner processing and models of lexical variability.

  10. Prevalence and Profile of Phonological and Surface Subgroups in College Students with a History of Reading Disability

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Birch, Stacy L.

    2016-01-01

    The purpose of the present study was to identify and characterize surface and phonological subgroups of readers among college students with a prior diagnosis of developmental reading disability (RD). Using a speeded naming task derived from Castles and Coltheart's subtyping study, we identified subgroups of readers from among college students with…

  11. Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming Predicting Early Development in Reading and Spelling: Results from a Cross-Linguistic Longitudinal Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Furnes, Bjarte; Samuelsson, Stefan

    2011-01-01

    In this study, the relationship between latent constructs of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) was investigated and related to later measures of reading and spelling in children learning to read in different alphabetic writing systems (i.e., Norwegian/Swedish vs. English). 750 U.S./Australian children and 230…

  12. Effects of Phonological and Musical Training on the Reading Readiness of Native- and Foreign-Spanish-Speaking Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Herrera, Lucia; Lorenzo, Oswaldo; Defior, Sylvia; Fernandez-Smith, Gerard; Costa-Giomi, Eugenia

    2011-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a music training program on children's phonological awareness and naming speed in Spanish. Participants were preschool children whose first language was either Spanish (n = 45) or Tamazight ( n = 52), a Berber dialect spoken in Morocco's Rif area. The two-year pretest/posttest study…

  13. Impaired reading comprehension in schizophrenia: evidence for underlying phonological processing deficits.

    PubMed

    Arnott, Wendy; Sali, Lauren; Copland, David

    2011-05-15

    The present study examined reading ability in high functioning people with schizophrenia. To this end, 16 people with schizophrenia who were living in the community and 12 matched controls completed tests of passage reading (comprehension, accuracy, and rate), word recognition, and phonological processing (phonological awareness, phonological memory and rapid naming) and ratings of reading self-concept and practices. Performance of the participants with schizophrenia was impaired relative to control participants on reading comprehension and rapid naming and relative to the population norms on phonological awareness, and rapid naming. In addition, self-rating data revealed that participants with schizophrenia had poorer perceptions of their reading ability and engaged in reading activities less frequently than their control counterparts. Consistent with earlier research, significant correlations were found between phonological awareness and reading comprehension. These findings expand on previous research in the area to suggest that community-based individuals with schizophrenia experience problems with reading comprehension that may have a phonological basis. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  14. Dual-Dimension Naming Speed and Language-Dominance Ratings by Bilingual Hispanic Adults

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Langdon, Henriette W.; Wiig, Elisabeth H.; Nielsen, Niels Peter

    2005-01-01

    This study compared the efficacy of measures of naming speed, verbal fluency and self-ratings for establishing language dominance in 25 bilingual English-Spanish adults with college degrees. Naming speed was measured by total naming times (in seconds) for five "Alzheimer's Quick Test" tasks (Wiig, Nielsen, Minthon & Warkentin, 2002)…

  15. Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words.

    PubMed

    McQueen, James M; Huettig, Falk

    2014-01-01

    Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of preexposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase (Experiment 3). Auditory stimuli were preceded by primes, which were pictures (Experiments 1 and 3) or those pictures' printed names (Experiment 2). Prime-target pairs were phonologically onset related (e.g., pijl-pijn, arrow-pain), were from the same semantic category (e.g., pijl-zwaard, arrow-sword), or were unrelated on both dimensions. Phonological interference and semantic facilitation were observed in all experiments. Priming magnitude was similar for pictures and printed words and did not vary with picture viewing time or number of pictures in the display (either one or four). These effects arose even though participants were not explicitly instructed to name the pictures and where strategic naming would interfere with lexical decision making. This suggests that, by default, processing of related pictures and printed words influences how quickly we recognize spoken words.

  16. The Structure of Phonological Processing and Its Relationship to Basic Reading

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nelson, Jason M.; Lindstrom, Jennifer H.; Lindstrom, Will; Denis, Daniel

    2012-01-01

    We investigated various structural models of phonological processing and the relationship of phonological processing abilities to basic reading. Data were collected on 116 kindergarten and first grade students. The specific ability model, which included phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid automatized naming as separate…

  17. Writing Quality in Chinese Children: Speed and Fluency Matter

    PubMed Central

    Yan, Cathy Ming Wai; McBride-Chang, Catherine; Wagner, Richard K.; Zhang, Juan; Wong, Anita M. Y.; Shu, Hua

    2015-01-01

    There were two goals of the present study. The first was to create a scoring scheme by which 9-year-old Chinese children’s writing compositions could be rated to form a total score for writing quality. The second was to examine cognitive correlates of writing quality at age 9 from measures administered at ages 6–9. Age 9 writing compositions were scored using a 7-element rubric; following confirmatory factor analyses, 5 of these elements were retained to represent overall writing quality for subsequent analyses. Measures of vocabulary knowledge, Chinese word dictation, phonological awareness, speed of processing, speeded naming, and handwriting fluency at ages 6–9 were all significantly associated with the obtained overall writing quality measure even when the statistical effect of age was removed. With vocabulary knowledge, dictation skill, age, gender, and phonological awareness included in a regression equation, 35% of the variance in age 9 writing quality was explained. With the variables of speed of processing, speeded naming, and handwriting fluency additionally included as a block, 12% additional variance in the equation was explained. In addition to gender, overall unique correlates of writing quality were dictation, speed of processing, and handwriting fluency, underscoring the importance of both general automaticity and specific writing fluency for writing quality development in children. PMID:25750486

  18. Text Comprehension in Chinese Children: Relative Contribution of Verbal Working Memory, Pseudoword Reading, Rapid Automated Naming, and Onset-Rime Phonological Segmentation

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Leong, Che Kan; Tse, Shek Kam; Loh, Ka Yee; Hau, Kit Tai

    2008-01-01

    The present study examined the role of verbal working memory (memory span, tongue twister), 2-character Chinese pseudoword reading, rapid automatized naming (letters, numbers), and phonological segmentation (deletion of rimes and onsets) in inferential text comprehension in Chinese in 518 Chinese children in Hong Kong in Grades 3 to 5. It was…

  19. Multimodal therapy of word retrieval disorder due to phonological encoding dysfunction.

    PubMed

    Weill-Chounlamountry, Agnès; Capelle, Nathalie; Tessier, Catherine; Pradat-Diehl, Pascale

    2013-01-01

    To determine whether phonological multimodal therapy can improve naming and communication in a patient showing a lexical phonological naming disorder. This study employed oral and written learning tasks, using an error reduction procedure. A single-case design computer-assisted treatment was used with a 52 year-old woman with fluent aphasia consecutive to a cerebral infarction. The cognitive analysis of her word retrieval disorder exhibited a phonological encoding dysfunction. Thus, a phonological procedure was designed addressing the output phonological lexicon using computer analysis of spoken and written words. The effects were tested for trained words, generalization to untrained words, maintenance and specificity. Transfer of improvement to daily life was also assessed. After therapy, the verbal naming of both trained and untrained words was improved at p < 0.001. The improvement was still maintained after 3 months without therapy. This treatment was specific since the word dictation task did not change. Communication in daily life was improved at p < 0.05. This study of a patient with word retrieval disorder due to phonological encoding dysfunction demonstrated the effectiveness of a phonological and multimodal therapeutic treatment.

  20. Naming Speed of Adolescents and Young Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Differences in Alphanumeric Versus Color/Object Naming.

    PubMed

    Whipple, Brittany D; Nelson, Jason M

    2016-02-01

    This study investigated the performance of adolescents and young adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Reading Disorder (RD), and ADHD/RD on measures of alphanumeric and nonalphanumeric naming speed and the relationship between naming speed and academic achievement. The sample (N = 203) included students aged 17-28 years diagnosed with ADHD (n = 83), RD (n = 71), or ADHD/RD (n = 49). Individuals with ADHD performed significantly faster on measures of alphanumeric naming compared with RD and comorbid groups and, within group, demonstrated significantly quicker naming of letters/digits compared with colors/objects. Both alphanumeric rapid naming scores and processing speed scores variably predicted academic achievement scores across groups, whereas nonalphanumeric rapid naming only predicted reading comprehension scores within the ADHD group. Results support findings that older individuals with ADHD show relative weakness in rapid naming of objects and colors. Implications of these findings in regard to assessment of older individuals for ADHD are discussed. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  1. Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming Are Independent Phonological Competencies With Specific Impacts on Word Reading and Spelling: An Intervention Study.

    PubMed

    Vander Stappen, Caroline; Reybroeck, Marie Van

    2018-01-01

    Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have been shown to be powerful predictors of reading achievement across many languages. However, literature remains unclear: (a) whether RAN is independent of PA, (b) about the specific influences of PA and RAN on reading and spelling, and (c) about the efficacy of a RAN intervention. This study aims to address these issues by means of an intervention design. Precisely, the objectives are (a) to determine whether training one competence involves or not an effect on the other, (b) to examine whether each intervention based on oral abilities (PA vs. RAN) could improve word reading and word spelling performances, and (c) to assess the efficacy of a RAN-objects' intervention. Thirty-six French-speaking second graders, from two Belgian elementary schools, were divided into two groups, and received either a PA- or a RAN-objects' intervention. Twenty-five-minute lessons took place at school twice a week over a period of 2 months. Both groups were compared on multiple experimental measures (PA, RAN, word reading, and word spelling), before and immediately after the intervention, and 6 months later. Results showed specific efficacy of the two interventions, with participants trained in one ability outperforming those from the other group on this specific ability at post-test. Moreover, the PA intervention revealed transfer effects on the sub-lexical processes of spelling, while the RAN intervention enhanced word reading speed. Finally, the results demonstrated the efficacy of a RAN-objects' intervention for the first time. These findings provide a new piece of evidence showing the independence of PA and RAN, each process influencing the acquisition of literacy skills in a different way. The efficacy and the specific transfer effects of both interventions open up new perspectives for prevention and targeted remediation of reading disabilities.

  2. Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming Are Independent Phonological Competencies With Specific Impacts on Word Reading and Spelling: An Intervention Study

    PubMed Central

    Vander Stappen, Caroline; Reybroeck, Marie Van

    2018-01-01

    Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have been shown to be powerful predictors of reading achievement across many languages. However, literature remains unclear: (a) whether RAN is independent of PA, (b) about the specific influences of PA and RAN on reading and spelling, and (c) about the efficacy of a RAN intervention. This study aims to address these issues by means of an intervention design. Precisely, the objectives are (a) to determine whether training one competence involves or not an effect on the other, (b) to examine whether each intervention based on oral abilities (PA vs. RAN) could improve word reading and word spelling performances, and (c) to assess the efficacy of a RAN-objects’ intervention. Thirty-six French-speaking second graders, from two Belgian elementary schools, were divided into two groups, and received either a PA- or a RAN-objects’ intervention. Twenty-five-minute lessons took place at school twice a week over a period of 2 months. Both groups were compared on multiple experimental measures (PA, RAN, word reading, and word spelling), before and immediately after the intervention, and 6 months later. Results showed specific efficacy of the two interventions, with participants trained in one ability outperforming those from the other group on this specific ability at post-test. Moreover, the PA intervention revealed transfer effects on the sub-lexical processes of spelling, while the RAN intervention enhanced word reading speed. Finally, the results demonstrated the efficacy of a RAN-objects’ intervention for the first time. These findings provide a new piece of evidence showing the independence of PA and RAN, each process influencing the acquisition of literacy skills in a different way. The efficacy and the specific transfer effects of both interventions open up new perspectives for prevention and targeted remediation of reading disabilities. PMID:29593618

  3. Do perceived context pictures automatically activate their phonological code?

    PubMed

    Jescheniak, Jörg D; Oppermann, Frank; Hantsch, Ansgar; Wagner, Valentin; Mädebach, Andreas; Schriefers, Herbert

    2009-01-01

    Morsella and Miozzo (Morsella, E., & Miozzo, M. (2002). Evidence for a cascade model of lexical access in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 555-563) have reported that the to-be-ignored context pictures become phonologically activated when participants name a target picture, and took this finding as support for cascaded models of lexical retrieval in speech production. In a replication and extension of their experiment in German, we failed to obtain priming effects from context pictures phonologically related to a to-be-named target picture. By contrast, corresponding context words (i.e., the names of the respective pictures) and the same context pictures, when used in an identity condition, did reliably facilitate the naming process. This pattern calls into question the generality of the claim advanced by Morsella and Miozzo that perceptual processing of pictures in the context of a naming task automatically leads to the activation of corresponding lexical-phonological codes.

  4. Rapid Naming Speed and Chinese Character Recognition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Liao, Chen-Huei; Georgiou, George K.; Parrila, Rauno

    2008-01-01

    We examined the relationship between rapid naming speed (RAN) and Chinese character recognition accuracy and fluency. Sixty-three grade 2 and 54 grade 4 Taiwanese children were administered four RAN tasks (colors, digits, Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, characters), and two character recognition tasks. RAN tasks accounted for more reading variance in grade 4 than…

  5. Large grain instruction and phonological awareness skill influence rime sensitivity, processing speed, and early decoding skill in adult L2 learners

    PubMed Central

    Brennan, Christine; Booth, James R.

    2016-01-01

    Linguistic knowledge, cognitive ability, and instruction influence how adults acquire a second orthography yet it remains unclear how different forms of instruction influence grain size sensitivity and subsequent decoding skill and speed. Thirty-seven monolingual, literate English-speaking adults were trained on a novel artificial orthography given initial instruction that directed attention to either large or small grain size units (i.e., words or letters). We examined how initial instruction influenced processing speed (i.e., reaction time (RT)) and sensitivity to different orthographic grain sizes (i.e., rimes and letters). Directing attention to large grain size units during initial instruction resulted in higher accuracy for rimes, whereas directing attention to smaller grain size units resulted in slower RTs across all measures. Additionally, phonological awareness skill modulated early learning effects, compensating for the limitations of the initial instruction provided. Collectively, these findings suggest that when adults are learning to read a second orthography, consideration should be given to how initial instruction directs attention to different grain sizes and inherent phonological awareness ability. PMID:27829705

  6. Prevalence of phonological disorders and phonological processes in typical and atypical phonological development.

    PubMed

    Ceron, Marizete Ilha; Gubiani, Marileda Barichello; Oliveira, Camila Rosa de; Gubiani, Marieli Barichello; Keske-Soares, Márcia

    2017-05-08

    To determine the occurrence of phonological disorders by age, gender and school type, and analyze the phonological processes observed in typical and atypical phonological development across different age groups. The sample consisted of 866 children aged between 3:0 and 8:11 years, recruited from public and private schools in the city of Santa Maria/RS. A phonological evaluation was performed to analyze the operative phonological processes. 15.26% (n = 132) of the sample presented atypical phonological acquisition (phonological disorders). Phonological impairments were more frequent in public school students across all age groups. Phonological alterations were most frequent between ages 4 -to 6, and more prevalent in males than females in all but the youngest age group. The most common phonological processes in typical phonological acquisition were: cluster reduction; nonlateral liquid deletion in coda; nonlateral liquid substitution in onset; semivocalization of lateral liquids in coda; and unstressed syllable deletion. In children with phonological disorders, the most common phonological processes were: lateral and nonlateral liquid substitution in onset position; nonlateral liquid deletion; fronting of fricatives in onset position; unstressed syllable deletion; semivocalization of nonlateral liquid in coda; and nonlateral liquid deletion in coda position. Phonological processes were highly prevalent in the present sample, and occurred more often in boys than in girls. Information regarding the type and frequency of phonological processes in both typical phonological acquisition and phonological disorders may contribute to early diagnosis and increase the efficiency of treatment planning.

  7. Phonotactic Probability of Brand Names: I'd buy that!

    PubMed Central

    Vitevitch, Michael S.; Donoso, Alexander J.

    2011-01-01

    Psycholinguistic research shows that word-characteristics influence the speed and accuracy of various language-related processes. Analogous characteristics of brand names influence the retrieval of product information and the perception of risks associated with that product. In the present experiment we examined how phonotactic probability—the frequency with which phonological segments and sequences of segments appear in a word—might influence consumer behavior. Participants rated brand names that varied in phonotactic probability on the likelihood that they would buy the product. Participants indicated that they were more likely to purchase a product if the brand name was comprised of common segments and sequences of segments rather than less common segments and sequences of segments. This result suggests that word-characteristics may influence higher-level cognitive processes, in addition to language-related processes. Furthermore, the benefits of using objective measures of word characteristics in the design of brand names are discussed. PMID:21870135

  8. Exploring semantic and phonological picture-word priming in adults who stutter using event-related potentials

    PubMed Central

    Maxfield, Nathan D.; Pizon-Moore, Angela A.; Frisch, Stefan A.; Constantine, Joseph L.

    2011-01-01

    Objective Our aim was to investigate how semantic and phonological information is processed in adults who stutter (AWS) preparing to name pictures, following-up a report that event-related potentials (ERPs) in AWS evidenced atypical semantic picture-word priming (Maxfield et al., 2010). Methods Fourteen AWS and 14 typically-fluent adults (TFA) participated. Pictures, named at a delay, were followed by probe words. Design elements not used in Maxfield et al. (2010) let us evaluate both phonological and semantic picture-word priming. Results TFA evidenced typical priming effects in probe-elicited ERPs. AWS evidenced diminished Semantic priming, and reverse Phonological N400 priming. Conclusions Results point to atypical processing of semantic and phonological information in AWS. Discussion considers whether AWS ERP effects reflect unstable activation of target label semantic and phonological representations, strategic inhibition of target label phonological neighbors, and/or phonological label-probe competition. Significance Results raise questions about how mechanisms that regulate activation spreading operate in AWS. PMID:22055837

  9. Phonological encoding in speech-sound disorder: evidence from a cross-modal priming experiment.

    PubMed

    Munson, Benjamin; Krause, Miriam O P

    2017-05-01

    Psycholinguistic models of language production provide a framework for determining the locus of language breakdown that leads to speech-sound disorder (SSD) in children. To examine whether children with SSD differ from their age-matched peers with typical speech and language development (TD) in the ability phonologically to encode lexical items that have been accessed from memory. Thirty-six children (18 with TD, 18 with SSD) viewed pictures while listening to interfering words (IW) or a non-linguistic auditory stimulus presented over headphones either 150 ms before, concurrent with or 150 ms after picture presentation. The phonological similarity of the IW and the pictures' names varied. Picture-naming latency, accuracy and duration were tallied. All children named pictures more quickly in the presence of an IW identical to the picture's name than in the other conditions. At the +150 ms stimulus onset asynchrony, pictures were named more quickly when the IW shared phonemes with the picture's name than when they were phonologically unrelated to the picture's name. The size of this effect was similar for children with SSD and children with TD. Variation in the magnitude of inhibition and facilitation on cross-modal priming tasks across children was more strongly affected by the size of the expressive and receptive lexicons than by speech-production accuracy. Results suggest that SSD is not associated with reduced phonological encoding ability, at least as it is reflected by cross-modal naming tasks. © 2016 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

  10. Reconciling phonological neighborhood effects in speech production through single trial analysis.

    PubMed

    Sadat, Jasmin; Martin, Clara D; Costa, Albert; Alario, F-Xavier

    2014-02-01

    A crucial step for understanding how lexical knowledge is represented is to describe the relative similarity of lexical items, and how it influences language processing. Previous studies of the effects of form similarity on word production have reported conflicting results, notably within and across languages. The aim of the present study was to clarify this empirical issue to provide specific constraints for theoretical models of language production. We investigated the role of phonological neighborhood density in a large-scale picture naming experiment using fine-grained statistical models. The results showed that increasing phonological neighborhood density has a detrimental effect on naming latencies, and re-analyses of independently obtained data sets provide supplementary evidence for this effect. Finally, we reviewed a large body of evidence concerning phonological neighborhood density effects in word production, and discussed the occurrence of facilitatory and inhibitory effects in accuracy measures. The overall pattern shows that phonological neighborhood generates two opposite forces, one facilitatory and one inhibitory. In cases where speech production is disrupted (e.g. certain aphasic symptoms), the facilitatory component may emerge, but inhibitory processes dominate in efficient naming by healthy speakers. These findings are difficult to accommodate in terms of monitoring processes, but can be explained within interactive activation accounts combining phonological facilitation and lexical competition. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  11. Words we do not say-Context effects on the phonological activation of lexical alternatives in speech production.

    PubMed

    Jescheniak, Jörg D; Kurtz, Franziska; Schriefers, Herbert; Günther, Josefine; Klaus, Jana; Mädebach, Andreas

    2017-06-01

    There is compelling evidence that context strongly influences our choice of words (e.g., whether we refer to a particular animal with the basic-level name "bird" or the subordinate-level name "duck"). However, little is known about whether the context already affects the degree to which the alternative words are activated. In this study, we explored the effect of a preceding linguistic context on the phonological activation of alternative picture names. In Experiments 1 to 3, the context was established by a request produced by an imaginary interlocutor. These requests either constrained the naming response to the subordinate level on pragmatic grounds (e.g., "name the bird!") or not (e.g., "name the object!"). In Experiment 4, the context was established by the speaker's own previous naming response. Participants named the pictures with their subordinate-level names and the phonological activation of the basic-level names was assessed with distractor words phonologically related versus unrelated to that name (e.g., "birch" vs. "lamp"). In all experiments, we consistently found that distractor words phonologically related to the basic-level name interfered with the naming response more strongly than unrelated distractor words. Moreover, this effect was of comparable size for nonconstraining and constraining contexts indicating that the alternative name was phonologically activated and competed for selection, even when it was not an appropriate lexical option. Our results suggest that the speech production system is limited in its ability of flexibly adjusting and fine-tuning the lexical activation patterns of words (among which to choose from) as a function of pragmatic constraints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

  12. Do deep dyslexia, dysphasia and dysgraphia share a common phonological impairment?

    PubMed Central

    Jefferies, Elizabeth; Sage, Karen; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.

    2007-01-01

    This study directly compared four patients who, to varying degrees, showed the characteristics of deep dyslexia, dysphasia and/or dysgraphia – i.e., they made semantic errors in oral reading, repetition and/or spelling to dictation. The “primary systems” hypothesis proposes that these different conditions result from severe impairment to a common phonological system, rather than damage to task-specific mechanisms (i.e. grapheme-phoneme conversion). By this view, deep dyslexic/dysphasic patients should show overlapping deficits but previous studies have not directly compared them. All four patients in the current study showed poor phonological production across different tasks, including repetition, reading aloud and spoken picture naming, in line with the primary systems hypothesis. They also showed severe deficits in tasks that required the manipulation of phonology, such as phoneme addition and deletion. Some of the characteristics of the deep syndromes – namely lexicality and imageability effects – were typically observed in all of the tasks, regardless of whether semantic errors occurred or not, suggesting that the patients’ phonological deficits impacted on repetition, reading aloud and spelling to dictation in similar ways. Differences between the syndromes were accounted for by variation in other primary systems – particularly auditory processing. Deep dysphasic symptoms occurred when the impact of phonological input on spoken output was disrupted or reduced, either as a result of auditory/phonological impairment, or for patients with good phonological input analysis, when repetition was delayed. ‘Deep’ disorders of reading aloud, repetition and spelling can therefore be explained in terms of damage to interacting primary systems such as phonology, semantics and vision, with phonology playing a critical role. PMID:17227679

  13. What Phonological Facilitation Tells about Semantic Interference: A Dual-Task Study

    PubMed Central

    Ayora, Pauline; Peressotti, Francesca; Alario, F.-Xavier; Mulatti, Claudio; Pluchino, Patrick; Job, Remo; Dell'Acqua, Roberto

    2011-01-01

    Despite increasing interest in the topic, the extent to which linguistic processing demands attentional resources remains poorly understood. We report an empirical re-examination of claims about lexical processing made on the basis of the picture–word interference task when merged in a dual-task psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. Two experiments were conducted in which participants were presented with a tone followed, at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), by a picture–word stimulus. In Experiment 1, the phonological relatedness between pictures and words was manipulated. Begin- and end-related words decreased picture naming latencies relative to unrelated words. This effect was additive with SOA effects. In Experiment 2, both the semantic and the phonological relatedness between pictures and words were manipulated. Replicating Experiment 1, effects arising from the phonological manipulation were additive with SOA effects on picture naming latencies. In contrast, effects arising from the semantic manipulation were under additive with SOA effects on picture naming latencies, that is, semantic interference decreased as SOA was decreased. Such contrastive pattern suggests that semantic and phonological effects on picture naming latencies are characterized by distinguishable sources, the former prior to the PRP bottleneck and the latter at the PRP bottleneck or after. The present findings are discussed in relation to current models of language production. PMID:21716584

  14. Phonological Codes Constrain Output of Orthographic Codes via Sublexical and Lexical Routes in Chinese Written Production

    PubMed Central

    Wang, Cheng; Zhang, Qingfang

    2015-01-01

    To what extent do phonological codes constrain orthographic output in handwritten production? We investigated how phonological codes constrain the selection of orthographic codes via sublexical and lexical routes in Chinese written production. Participants wrote down picture names in a picture-naming task in Experiment 1or response words in a symbol—word associative writing task in Experiment 2. A sublexical phonological property of picture names (phonetic regularity: regular vs. irregular) in Experiment 1and a lexical phonological property of response words (homophone density: dense vs. sparse) in Experiment 2, as well as word frequency of the targets in both experiments, were manipulated. A facilitatory effect of word frequency was found in both experiments, in which words with high frequency were produced faster than those with low frequency. More importantly, we observed an inhibitory phonetic regularity effect, in which low-frequency picture names with regular first characters were slower to write than those with irregular ones, and an inhibitory homophone density effect, in which characters with dense homophone density were produced more slowly than those with sparse homophone density. Results suggested that phonological codes constrained handwritten production via lexical and sublexical routes. PMID:25879662

  15. Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming Predicting Early Development in Reading and Spelling: Results from a Cross-Linguistic Longitudinal Study

    PubMed Central

    Furnes, Bjarte; Samuelsson, Stefan

    2010-01-01

    In this study, the relationship between latent constructs of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) were investigated and related to later measures of reading and spelling in children learning to read in different alphabetic writing systems (i.e., Norwegian/Swedish vs. English). 750 U.S./Australian children and 230 Scandinavian children were followed longitudinally between kindergarten and 2nd grade. PA and RAN were measured in kindergarten and Grade 1, while word recognition, phonological decoding, and spelling were measured in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. In general, high stability was observed for the various reading and spelling measures, such that little additional variance was left open for PA and RAN. However, results demonstrated that RAN was more related to reading than spelling across orthographies, with the opposite pattern shown for PA. In addition, tests of measurement invariance show that the factor loadings of each observed indicator on the latent PA factor was the same across U.S./Australia and Scandinavia. Similar findings were obtained for RAN. In general, tests of structural invariance show that models of early literacy development are highly transferable across languages. PMID:21359098

  16. Contrasting Effects of Phonological Priming in Aphasic Word Production

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wilshire, Carolyn E.; Saffran, Eleanor M.

    2005-01-01

    Two fluent aphasics, IG and GL, performed a phonological priming task in which they repeated an auditory prime then named a target picture. The two patients both had selective deficits in word production: they were at or near ceiling on lexical comprehension tasks, but were significantly impaired in picture naming. IG's naming errors included both…

  17. Is rapid automatized naming related to reading and mathematics for the same reason(s)? A follow-up study from kindergarten to Grade 1.

    PubMed

    Georgiou, George K; Tziraki, Niki; Manolitsis, George; Fella, Argyro

    2013-07-01

    We examined (a) what rapid automatized naming (RAN) components (articulation time and/or pause time) predict reading and mathematics ability and (b) what processing skills involved in RAN (speed of processing, response inhibition, working memory, and/or phonological awareness) may explain its relationship with reading and mathematics. A sample of 72 children were followed from the beginning of kindergarten until the end of Grade 1 and were assessed on measures of RAN, general cognitive ability, speed of processing, attention, working memory, phonological awareness, reading, and mathematics. The results indicated that pause time was the critical component in both the RAN-reading and RAN-mathematics relationships and that it shared most of its predictive variance in reading and mathematics with speed of processing and working memory. Our findings further suggested that, unlike the relationship between RAN and reading fluency in Grade 1, there is nothing in the RAN task that is uniquely related to math. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  18. Enhancing Phonological Awareness and Letter Knowledge in Preschool Children with Down Syndrome

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van Bysterveldt, Anne K.; Gillon, Gail T.; Moran, Catherine

    2006-01-01

    This study investigated the effectiveness of a phonological awareness intervention for 4-year-old children with Down syndrome. Seven children with Down syndrome who attended an early intervention centre participated in the intervention. Their performance on measures of phonological awareness (initial phoneme identity), letter name and sound…

  19. Contributions of Phonological Processing Skills to Reading Skills in Arabic Speaking Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Taibah, Nadia J.; Haynes, Charles W.

    2011-01-01

    This cross-sectional study investigated contributions of phonological awareness (Elision and blending), rapid naming (object, color, letter, and digit), and phonological memory (nonword repetition and Digit Span) to basic decoding and fluency skills in Arabic. Participants were 237 Arabic speaking children from Grades K-3. Dependent measures…

  20. Beyond Phonology: Visual Processes Predict Alphanumeric and Nonalphanumeric Rapid Naming in Poor Early Readers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kruk, Richard S.; Luther Ruban, Cassia

    2018-01-01

    Visual processes in Grade 1 were examined for their predictive influences in nonalphanumeric and alphanumeric rapid naming (RAN) in 51 poor early and 69 typical readers. In a lagged design, children were followed longitudinally from Grade 1 to Grade 3 over 5 testing occasions. RAN outcomes in early Grade 2 were predicted by speeded and nonspeeded…

  1. Acquisition of /S/-Clusters in Hebrew-Speaking Children with Phonological Disorders

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ben-David, Avivit; Ezrati, Ruth; Stulman, Navah

    2010-01-01

    This study examines the production and reduction patterns of initial /s/ clusters by Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders. Data were collected from 30 children with phonological disorders between the ages of 3;5-5;2. The data were elicited by means of a picture-naming task combined with a sentence completion task. Target words…

  2. Effects of mora deletion, nonword repetition, rapid naming, and visual search performance on beginning reading in Japanese.

    PubMed

    Kobayashi, Maya Shiho; Haynes, Charles W; Macaruso, Paul; Hook, Pamela E; Kato, Junko

    2005-06-01

    This study examined the extent to which mora deletion (phonological analysis), nonword repetition (phonological memory), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual search abilities predict reading in Japanese kindergartners and first graders. Analogous abilities have been identified as important predictors of reading skills in alphabetic languages like English. In contrast to English, which is based on grapheme-phoneme relationships, the primary components of Japanese orthography are two syllabaries-hiragana and katakana (collectively termed "kana")-and a system of morphosyllabic symbols (kanji). Three RAN tasks (numbers, objects, syllabary symbols [hiragana]) were used with kindergartners, with an additional kanji RAN task included for first graders. Reading measures included accuracy and speed of passage reading for kindergartners and first graders, and reading comprehension for first graders. In kindergartners, hiragana RAN and number RAN were the only significant predictors of reading accuracy and speed. In first graders, kanji RAN and hiragana RAN predicted reading speed, whereas accuracy was predicted by mora deletion. Reading comprehension was predicted by kanji RAN, mora deletion, and nonword repetition. Although number RAN did not contribute unique variance to any reading measure, it correlated highly with kanji RAN. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.

  3. Neither action nor phonological video games make dyslexic children read better.

    PubMed

    Łuniewska, Magdalena; Chyl, Katarzyna; Dębska, Agnieszka; Kacprzak, Agnieszka; Plewko, Joanna; Szczerbiński, Marcin; Szewczyk, Jakub; Grabowska, Anna; Jednoróg, Katarzyna

    2018-01-11

    The prevalence and long-term consequences of dyslexia make it crucial to look for effective and efficient ways of its therapy. Action video games (AVG) were implied as a possible remedy for difficulties in reading in Italian and English-speaking children. However, the studies examining the effectiveness of AVG application in dyslexia suffered from significant methodological weaknesses such as small sample sizes and lack of a control group with no intervention. In our study, we tested how two forms of training: based on AVG and on phonological non-action video games (PNAVG), affect reading in a group of fifty-four Polish children with dyslexia. Both speed and accuracy of reading increased in AVG as much as in PNAVG group. Moreover, both groups improved in phonological awareness, selective attention and rapid naming. Critically, the reading progress in the two groups did not differ from a dyslexic control group which did not participate in any training. Thus, the observed improvement in reading in AVG and PNAVG can be attributed either to the normal reading development related to schooling or to test practice effect. Overall, we failed to replicate previous studies: Neither AVG nor PNAVG remedy difficulties in reading in school children.

  4. The Role of Categorical Speech Perception and Phonological Processing in Familial Risk Children With and Without Dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Hakvoort, Britt; de Bree, Elise; van der Leij, Aryan; Maassen, Ben; van Setten, Ellie; Maurits, Natasha; van Zuijen, Titia L

    2016-12-01

    This study assessed whether a categorical speech perception (CP) deficit is associated with dyslexia or familial risk for dyslexia, by exploring a possible cascading relation from speech perception to phonology to reading and by identifying whether speech perception distinguishes familial risk (FR) children with dyslexia (FRD) from those without dyslexia (FRND). Data were collected from 9-year-old FRD (n = 37) and FRND (n = 41) children and age-matched controls (n = 49) on CP identification and discrimination and on the phonological processing measures rapid automatized naming, phoneme awareness, and nonword repetition. The FRD group performed more poorly on CP than the FRND and control groups. Findings on phonological processing align with the literature in that (a) phonological processing related to reading and (b) the FRD group showed the lowest phonological processing outcomes. Furthermore, CP correlated weakly with reading, but this relationship was fully mediated by rapid automatized naming. Although CP phonological skills are related to dyslexia, there was no strong evidence for a cascade from CP to phonology to reading. Deficits in CP at the behavioral level are not directly associated with dyslexia.

  5. Exploring Dyslexics' Phonological Deficit II: Phonological Grammar

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Szenkovits, Gayaneh; Darma, Quynliaan; Darcy, Isabelle; Ramus, Franck

    2016-01-01

    Language learners have to acquire the phonological grammar of their native language, and different levels of representations on which the grammar operates. Developmental dyslexia is associated with a phonological deficit, which is commonly assumed to stem from degraded phonological representations. The present study investigates one aspect of the…

  6. Difficulties in Lexical Stress versus Difficulties in Segmental Phonology among Adolescents with Dyslexia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Anastasiou, Dimitris; Protopapas, Athanassios

    2015-01-01

    Dyslexic difficulties in lexical stress were compared to difficulties in segmental phonology. Twenty-nine adolescents with dyslexia and 29 typically developing adolescents, matched on age and nonverbal ability, were assessed on reading, spelling, phonological and stress awareness, rapid naming, and short-term memory. Group differences in stress…

  7. Contributions of Phonological Awareness, Phonological Short-Term Memory, and Rapid Automated Naming, toward Decoding Ability in Students with Mild Intellectual Disability

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Soltani, Amanallah; Roslan, Samsilah

    2013-01-01

    Reading decoding ability is a fundamental skill to acquire word-specific orthographic information necessary for skilled reading. Decoding ability and its underlying phonological processing skills have been heavily investigated typically among developing students. However, the issue has rarely been noticed among students with intellectual…

  8. The double-deficit hypothesis: a comprehensive analysis of the evidence.

    PubMed

    Vukovic, Rose K; Siegel, Linda S

    2006-01-01

    The double-deficit hypothesis of developmental dyslexia proposes that deficits in phonological processing and naming speed represent independent sources of dysfunction in dyslexia. The present article is a review of the evidence for the double-deficit hypothesis, including a discussion of recent findings related to the hypothesis. Studies in this area have been characterized by variability in methodology--how dyslexia is defined and identified, and how dyslexia subtypes are classified. Such variability sets limitations on the extent to which conclusions may be drawn with respect to the double-deficit hypothesis. Furthermore, the literature is complicated by the persistent finding that measures of phonological processing and naming speed are significantly correlated, resulting in a statistical artifact that makes it difficult to disentangle the influence of naming speed from that of phonological processing. Longitudinal and intervention studies of the double-deficit hypothesis are needed to accumulate evidence that investigates a naming speed deficit that is independent of a phonological deficit for readers with dyslexia. The existing evidence does not support a persistent core deficit in naming speed for readers with dyslexia.

  9. Phonological Priming in Adults Who Stutter

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Vincent, Irena; Grela, Bernard G.; Gilbert, Harvey R.

    2012-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to compare the speed of phonological encoding between adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (ANS). Fifteen male AWS and 15 age- and gender-matched ANS participated in the study. Speech onset latency was obtained for both groups and stuttering frequency was calculated for AWS during three phonological…

  10. Do Children with Phonological Delay Have Phonological Short-Term and Phonological Working Memory Deficits?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Waring, Rebecca; Eadie, Patricia; Liow, Susan Rickard; Dodd, Barbara

    2017-01-01

    While little is known about why children make speech errors, it has been hypothesized that cognitive-linguistic factors may underlie phonological speech sound disorders. This study compared the phonological short-term and phonological working memory abilities (using immediate memory tasks) and receptive vocabulary size of 14 monolingual preschool…

  11. Young readers' use of phonological information: phonological awareness, memory, and comprehension.

    PubMed

    Gray, Audra; McCutchen, Deborah

    2006-01-01

    In this study, we explored the relationship between beginning readers' phonological awareness and other aspects of phonological processing, specifically as manifested in short-term memory and comprehension tasks. The theoretical questions underlying the study were (a) what roles phonological processes play in children's beginning reading, from word identification through sentence comprehension, and (b) whether those roles are sufficiently related that potential difficulties at one level directly affect processing at other levels. Phonologically induced effects were observed for word-list memory and for sentence judgments for both novice readers (at the end of kindergarten) and relatively more experienced readers (end of Grades 1 and 2). For both age groups, correlational analyses revealed relationships among phonological awareness, phonological processing in list memory, and word reading. However, phonological processing in sentence comprehension was not related to other types of phonological processing. These results indicate that although phonology plays a role during comprehension, phonological processing may not be as limiting a factor in comprehension as in word reading.

  12. The Proximate Phonological Unit of Chinese-English Bilinguals: Proficiency Matters

    PubMed Central

    Verdonschot, Rinus Gerardus; Nakayama, Mariko; Zhang, Qingfang; Tamaoka, Katsuo; Schiller, Niels Olaf

    2013-01-01

    An essential step to create phonology according to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer is to assemble phonemes into a metrical frame. However, recently, it has been proposed that different languages may rely on different grain sizes of phonological units to construct phonology. For instance, it has been proposed that, instead of phonemes, Mandarin Chinese uses syllables and Japanese uses moras to fill the metrical frame. In this study, we used a masked priming-naming task to investigate how bilinguals assemble their phonology for each language when the two languages differ in grain size. Highly proficient Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals showed a significant masked onset priming effect in English (L2), and a significant masked syllabic priming effect in Mandarin Chinese (L1). These results suggest that their proximate unit is phonemic in L2 (English), and that bilinguals may use different phonological units depending on the language that is being processed. Additionally, under some conditions, a significant sub-syllabic priming effect was observed even in Mandarin Chinese, which indicates that L2 phonology exerts influences on L1 target processing as a consequence of having a good command of English. PMID:23646107

  13. Cross-language phonological activation: evidence from masked onset priming and ERPs.

    PubMed

    Jouravlev, Olessia; Lupker, Stephen J; Jared, Debra

    2014-07-01

    The goal of the present research was to provide direct evidence for the cross-language interaction of phonologies at the sub-lexical level by using the masked onset priming paradigm. More specifically, we investigated whether there is a cross-language masked onset priming effect (MOPE) with L2 (English) primes and L1 (Russian) targets and whether it is modulated by the orthographic similarity of primes and targets. Primes and targets had onsets that overlapped either only phonologically, only orthographically, both phonologically and orthographically, or did not have any overlap. Phonological overlap, but not orthographic overlap, between primes and targets led to faster naming latencies. In contrast, the ERP data provided evidence for effects of both phonological and orthographic overlap. Finally, the time-course of phonological and orthographic processing for our bilinguals mirrored the time-course previously reported for monolinguals in the ERP data. These results provide evidence for shared representations at the sub-lexical level for a bilingual's two languages. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  14. Differential Reading, Naming, and Transcribing Speeds of Japanese Romaji and Hiragana

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Yamada, Jun; Leong, Che Kan

    2005-01-01

    The morpho-syllabic Japanese writing system consists of the phonetic scripts of hiragana and katakana, the logographic kanji derived from Chinese characters and the less well researched romaji based on the Roman alphabet. In four experiments we investigated the speed with which Japanese college students read, named, and transcribed romaji as…

  15. Development of phonological constancy: 19-month-olds, but not 15-month-olds, identify words in a non-native regional accent

    PubMed Central

    Mulak, Karen E.; Best, Catherine T.; Tyler, Michael D.; Kitamura, Christine; Irwin, Julia R.

    2014-01-01

    By 12 months, children grasp that a phonetic change to a word can change its identity (phonological distinctiveness). However, they must also grasp that some phonetic changes do not (phonological constancy). To test development of phonological constancy, 16 15-month-olds and 16 19-month-olds completed an eye-tracking task that tracked their gaze to named versus unnamed images for familiar words spoken in their native (Australian) and an unfamiliar non-native (Jamaican) regional accent of English. Both groups looked longer at named than unnamed images for Australian pronunciations, but only 19-month-olds did so for Jamaican pronunciations, indicating that phonological constancy emerges by 19 months. Vocabulary size predicted 15-month-olds' identifications for the Jamaican pronunciations, suggesting vocabulary growth is a viable predictor for phonological constancy development. PMID:23521607

  16. The Contribution of Naming Speed to the Simple View of Reading

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Johnston, Timothy C.; Kirby, John R.

    2006-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to investigate whether naming speed makes a contribution to the prediction of reading comprehension, after taking into account the product of word decoding and listening comprehension (i.e., the Simple View of Reading; [Gough, P.B. & Tunmer, W.E. (1986). "Remedial and Special Education 7," 6-10]), and…

  17. How reading differs from object naming at the neuronal level.

    PubMed

    Price, C J; McCrory, E; Noppeney, U; Mechelli, A; Moore, C J; Biggio, N; Devlin, J T

    2006-01-15

    This paper uses whole brain functional neuroimaging in neurologically normal participants to explore how reading aloud differs from object naming in terms of neuronal implementation. In the first experiment, we directly compared brain activation during reading aloud and object naming. This revealed greater activation for reading in bilateral premotor, left posterior superior temporal and precuneus regions. In a second experiment, we segregated the object-naming system into object recognition and speech production areas by factorially manipulating the presence or absence of objects (pictures of objects or their meaningless scrambled counterparts) with the presence or absence of speech production (vocal vs. finger press responses). This demonstrated that the areas associated with speech production (object naming and repetitively saying "OK" to meaningless scrambled pictures) corresponded exactly to the areas where responses were higher for reading aloud than object naming in Experiment 1. Collectively the results suggest that, relative to object naming, reading increases the demands on shared speech production processes. At a cognitive level, enhanced activation for reading in speech production areas may reflect the multiple and competing phonological codes that are generated from the sublexical parts of written words. At a neuronal level, it may reflect differences in the speed with which different areas are activated and integrate with one another.

  18. Longitudinal trajectories of the representation and access to phonological information in bilingual children with specific language impairment.

    PubMed

    Buil-Legaz, Lucia; Aguilar-Mediavilla, Eva; Adrover-Roig, Daniel

    2016-10-01

    Language development in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is still poorly understood, especially if children with SLI are bilingual. This study describes the longitudinal trajectory of several linguistic abilities in bilingual children with SLI relative to bilingual control children matched by their age and socioeconomic status. A set of measures of non-word repetition, sentence repetition, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming and verbal fluency were collected at three time points, from 6-12 years of age using a prospective longitudinal design. Results revealed that, at all ages, children with SLI obtained lower values in measures of sentence repetition, non-word repetition, phonological fluency and phonological awareness (without visual cues) when compared to typically-developing children. Other measures, such as rapid automatic naming, improved over time, given that differences at 6 years of age did not persist at further moments of testing. Other linguistic measures, such as phonological awareness (with visual cues) and semantic fluency were equivalent between both groups across time. Children with SLI manifest persistent difficulties in tasks involved in manipulating segments of words and in maintaining verbal units active in phonological working memory, while other abilities, such as the access to underlying phonological representations are unaffected.

  19. Visual naming deficits in dyslexia: An ERP investigation of different processing domains.

    PubMed

    Araújo, Susana; Faísca, Luís; Reis, Alexandra; Marques, J Frederico; Petersson, Karl Magnus

    2016-10-01

    Naming speed deficits are well documented in developmental dyslexia, expressed by slower naming times and more errors in response to familiar items. Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine at what processing level the deficits in dyslexia emerge during a discrete-naming task. Dyslexic and skilled adult control readers performed a primed object-naming task, in which the relationship between the prime and the target was manipulated along perceptual, semantic and phonological dimensions. A 3×2 design that crossed Relationship Type (Visual, Phonemic Onset, and Semantic) with Relatedness (Related and Unrelated) was used. An attenuated N/P190 - indexing early visual processing - and N300 - which index late visual processing - was observed to pictures preceded by perceptually related (vs. unrelated) primes in the control but not in the dyslexic group. These findings suggest suboptimal processing in early stages of object processing in dyslexia, when integration and mapping of perceptual information to a more form-specific percept in memory take place. On the other hand, both groups showed an N400 effect associated with semantically related pictures (vs. unrelated), taken to reflect intact integration of semantic similarities in both dyslexic and control readers. We also found an electrophysiological effect of phonological priming in the N400 range - that is, an attenuated N400 to objects preceded by phonemic related primes vs. unrelated - while it showed a more widespread distributed and more pronounced over the right hemisphere in the dyslexics. Topographic differences between groups might have originated from a word form encoding process with different characteristics in dyslexics compared to control readers. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  20. [Intervention in dyslexic disorders: phonological awareness training].

    PubMed

    Etchepareborda, M C

    2003-02-01

    Taking into account the systems for the treatment of brain information when drawing up a work plan allows us to recreate processing routines that go from multisensory perception to motor, oral and cognitive production, which is the step prior to executive levels of thought, bottom-up and top-down processing systems. In recent years, the use of phonological methods to prevent or resolve reading disorders has become the fundamental mainstay in the treatment of dyslexia. The work is mainly based on phonological proficiency, which enables the patient to detect phonemes (input), to think about them (performance) and to use them to build words (output). Daily work with rhymes, the capacity to listen, the identification of phrases and words, and handling syllables and phonemes allows us to perform a preventive intervention that enhances the capacity to identify letters, phonological analysis and the reading of single words. We present the different therapeutic models that are most frequently employed. Fast For Word (FFW) training helps make progress in phonematic awareness and other linguistic skills, such as phonological awareness, semantics, syntax, grammar, working memory and event sequencing. With Deco-Fon, a programme for training phonological decoding, work is carried out on the auditory discrimination of pure tones, letters and consonant clusters, auditory processing speed, auditory and phonematic memory, and graphophonological processing, which is fundamental for speech, language and reading writing disorders. Hamlet is a programme based on categorisation activities for working on phonological conceptualisation. It attempts to encourage the analysis of the segments of words, syllables or phonemes, and the classification of a certain segment as belonging or not to a particular phonological or orthographical category. Therapeutic approaches in the early phases of reading are oriented towards two poles based on the basic mechanisms underlying the process of learning

  1. [The phonological variant of primary progressive aphasia, a single case study].

    PubMed

    Diesfeldt, H F A

    2011-04-01

    Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome characterized by an insidious onset and gradual progression of deficits that can involve any aspect of language, including word finding, object naming, fluency, syntax, phonology and word comprehension. The initial symptoms occur in the absence of major deficits in other cognitive domains, including episodic memory, visuospatial abilities and visuoconstruction. According to recent diagnostic guidelines, PPA is typically divided into three variants: nonfluent variant PPA (also termed progressive nonfluent aphasia), semantic variant PPA (also termed semantic dementia) and logopenic/phonological variant PPA (also termed logopenic progressive aphasia). The paper describes a 79-yr old man, who presented with normal motor speech and production rate, impaired single word retrieval and phonemic errors in spontaneous speech and confrontational naming. Confrontation naming was strongly affected by lexical frequency. He was impaired on repetition of sentences and phrases. Reading was intact for regularly spelled words but not for irregular words (surface dyslexia). Comprehension was spared at the single word level, but impaired for complex sentences. He performed within the normal range on the Dutch equivalent of the Pyramids and Palm Trees (PPT) Pictures Test, indicating that semantic processing was preserved. There was, however, a slight deficiency on the PPT Words Test, which appeals to semantic knowledge of verbal associations. His core deficit was interpreted as an inability to retrieve stored lexical-phonological information for spoken word production in spontaneous speech, confrontation naming, repetition and reading aloud.

  2. Phonological Coding Abilities: Identification of Impairments Related to Phonologically Based Reading Problems.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Swank, Linda K.

    1994-01-01

    Relationships between phonological coding abilities and reading outcomes have implications for differential diagnosis of language-based reading problems. The theoretical construct of specific phonological coding ability is explained, including phonological encoding, phonological awareness and metaphonology, lexical access, working memory, and…

  3. The use of the picture–word interference paradigm to examine naming abilities in aphasic individuals

    PubMed Central

    Hashimoto, Naomi; Thompson, Cynthia K.

    2015-01-01

    Background Although naming deficits are well documented in aphasia, on-line measures of naming processes have been little investigated. The use of on-line measures may offer further insight into the nature of aphasic naming deficits that would otherwise be difficult to interpret when using off-line measures. Aims The temporal activation of semantic and phonological processes was tracked in older normal control and aphasic individuals using a picture–word interference paradigm. The purpose of the study was to examine how word interference results can augment and/or corroborate standard language testing in the aphasic group, as well as to examine temporal patterns of activation in the aphasic group when compared to a normal control group. Methods & Procedures A total of 20 older normal individuals and 11 aphasic individuals participated. Detailed measures of each aphasic individual's language and naming skills were obtained. A visual picture–word interference paradigm was used in which the words bore either a semantic, phonological, or no relationship to 25 pictures. These competitor words were presented at stimulus onset asynchronies of −300 ms, +300 ms, and 0 ms. Outcomes & Results Analyses of naming RTs in both groups revealed significant early semantic interference effects, mid-semantic interference effects, and mid-phonological facilitation effects. A matched control-aphasic group comparison revealed no differences in the temporal activation of effects during the course of naming. Partial support for this RT pattern was found in the aphasic naming error pattern. The aphasic group also demonstrated greater SIEs and PFEs compared to the matched control group, which indicated disruptions of the phonological processing stage. Analyses of behavioural performances of the aphasic group corroborated this finding. Conclusions The aphasic naming RTs results were unexpected given the results from the priming literature, which has supported the idea of slowed or

  4. Topographical gradients of semantics and phonology revealed by temporal lobe stimulation.

    PubMed

    Miozzo, Michele; Williams, Alicia C; McKhann, Guy M; Hamberger, Marla J

    2017-02-01

    Word retrieval is a fundamental component of oral communication, and it is well established that this function is supported by left temporal cortex. Nevertheless, the specific temporal areas mediating word retrieval and the particular linguistic processes these regions support have not been well delineated. Toward this end, we analyzed over 1000 naming errors induced by left temporal cortical stimulation in epilepsy surgery patients. Errors were primarily semantic (lemon → "pear"), phonological (horn → "corn"), non-responses, and delayed responses (correct responses after a delay), and each error type appeared predominantly in a specific region: semantic errors in mid-middle temporal gyrus (TG), phonological errors and delayed responses in middle and posterior superior TG, and non-responses in anterior inferior TG. To the extent that semantic errors, phonological errors and delayed responses reflect disruptions in different processes, our results imply topographical specialization of semantic and phonological processing. Specifically, results revealed an inferior-to-superior gradient, with more superior regions associated with phonological processing. Further, errors were increasingly semantically related to targets toward posterior temporal cortex. We speculate that detailed semantic input is needed to support phonological retrieval, and thus, the specificity of semantic input increases progressively toward posterior temporal regions implicated in phonological processing. Hum Brain Mapp 38:688-703, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  5. Development of phonological constancy: 19-month-olds, but not 15-month-olds, identify words in a non-native regional accent.

    PubMed

    Mulak, Karen E; Best, Catherine T; Tyler, Michael D; Kitamura, Christine; Irwin, Julia R

    2013-01-01

    By 12 months, children grasp that a phonetic change to a word can change its identity (phonological distinctiveness). However, they must also grasp that some phonetic changes do not (phonological constancy). To test development of phonological constancy, sixteen 15-month-olds and sixteen 19-month-olds completed an eye-tracking task that tracked their gaze to named versus unnamed images for familiar words spoken in their native (Australian) and an unfamiliar non-native (Jamaican) regional accent of English. Both groups looked longer at named than unnamed images for Australian pronunciations, but only 19-month-olds did so for Jamaican pronunciations, indicating that phonological constancy emerges by 19 months. Vocabulary size predicted 15-month-olds' identifications for the Jamaican pronunciations, suggesting vocabulary growth is a viable predictor for phonological constancy development. © 2013 The Authors. Child Development © 2013 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

  6. Naming abilities in low-proficiency second language learners.

    PubMed

    Borodkin, Katy; Faust, Miriam

    2014-01-01

    Difficulties in second language (L2) learning are often associated with recognizable learning difficulties in native language (L1), such as in dyslexia. However, some individuals have low L2 proficiency but intact L1 reading skills. These L2 learners experience frequent tip-of-the-tongue states while naming in L1, which indicates that they have a weakness in retrieval of phonological codes of words. The authors hypothesized that if naming ability is shared across languages, this difficulty would reemerge in L2 naming, which was tested using the tip-of-the-tongue experimental paradigm. Consistent with this hypothesis, low-proficiency L2 learners (n = 15) reported more tip-of-the-tongue states, more frequently mispronounced correctly retrieved words, and benefited less from phonological cuing compared to high-proficiency L2 learners (n = 23). It is notable that low-proficiency L2 learners performed worse than individuals with dyslexia (n = 16) on some of these measures, despite the same level of L2 proficiency. These results indicate that L2 naming difficulties of low-proficiency L2 learners are a manifestation not merely of their low L2 proficiency but rather of a general weakness in phonological word form retrieval, which is shared across languages. More broadly, the study provides further evidence for the existence of a distinct profile of cognitive weaknesses characteristic of the behavioral phenotype of low-proficiency L2 learners.

  7. The interface between morphology and phonology: Exploring a morpho-phonological deficit in spoken production

    PubMed Central

    Cohen-Goldberg, Ariel M.; Cholin, Joana; Miozzo, Michele; Rapp, Brenda

    2013-01-01

    Morphological and phonological processes are tightly interrelated in spoken production. During processing, morphological processes must combine the phonological content of individual morphemes to produce a phonological representation that is suitable for driving phonological processing. Further, morpheme assembly frequently causes changes in a word's phonological well-formedness that must be addressed by the phonology. We report the case of an aphasic individual (WRG) who exhibits an impairment at the morpho-phonological interface. WRG was tested on his ability to produce phonologically complex sequences (specifically, coda clusters of varying sonority) in heteromorphemic and tautomorphemic environments. WRG made phonological errors that reduced coda sonority complexity in multimorphemic words (e.g., passed→[pæstɪd]) but not in monomorphemic words (e.g., past). WRG also made similar insertion errors to repair stress clash in multimorphemic environments, confirming his sensitivity to cross-morpheme well-formedness. We propose that this pattern of performance is the result of an intact phonological grammar acting over the phonological content of morphemic representations that were weakly joined because of brain damage. WRG may constitute the first case of a morpho-phonological impairment—these results suggest that the processes that combine morphemes constitute a crucial component of morpho-phonological processing. PMID:23466641

  8. The Impact of Early Classroom Inattention on Phonological Processing and Word-Reading Development.

    PubMed

    Dittman, Cassandra K

    2016-08-01

    The present study investigated the longitudinal relationships between inattention, phonological processing and word reading across the first 2 years of formal reading instruction. In all, 136 school entrants were administered measures of letter knowledge, phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid naming, and word reading at the start and end of their 1st year of school, and the end of their 2nd year, while teachers completed rating scales of inattention. School entry inattentiveness predicted unique variance in word reading at the end of first grade, after controlling for verbal ability, letter knowledge, and phonological processing. End-of-first-grade inattention predicted a small but significant amount of unique variance in second-grade word reading and word-reading efficiency. Inattention, however, was not a reliable predictor of phonological processing in either first or second grade. Early classroom inattentiveness influences learning to read independent of critical developmental precursors of word-reading development. © The Author(s) 2013.

  9. Reading comprehension skills of young adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Ransby, Marilyn J; Swanson, H Lee

    2003-01-01

    This study explores the contribution of cognitive processes to comprehension skills in adults who suffered from childhood developmental dyslexia (CD). The performance of adults with CD (ages 17 to 23), chronological age-matched (CA) adults, and reading level-matched (RL) children was compared on measures of phonological processing, naming speed, working memory (WM), general knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension. The results showed that adults with CD scored lower on measures of phonological processing, naming speed, WM, general knowledge, and vocabulary when compared to CA readers but were comparable to RL children on the majority of process measures. Phonological processing, naming speed, vocabulary, general knowledge, and listening comprehension contributed independent variance to reading comprehension accuracy, whereas WM, intelligence, phonological processing, and listening comprehension contributed independent variance to comprehension fluency. Adults with CD scored lower than CA adults and higher than RL children on measures of lexical processing, WM, and listening comprehension when word recognition and intelligence were partialed from the analysis. In summary, constraints in phonological processing and naming speed mediate only some of the influence of high-order processes on reading comprehension. Furthermore, adults with CD experience difficulties in WM, listening comprehension, and vocabulary independently of their word recognition problems and intellectual ability.

  10. Semantic and phonological coding in poor and normal readers.

    PubMed

    Vellutino, F R; Scanlon, D M; Spearing, D

    1995-02-01

    Three studies were conducted evaluating semantic and phonological coding deficits as alternative explanations of reading disability. In the first study, poor and normal readers in second and sixth grade were compared on various tests evaluating semantic development as well as on tests evaluating rapid naming and pseudoword decoding as independent measures of phonological coding ability. In a second study, the same subjects were given verbal memory and visual-verbal learning tasks using high and low meaning words as verbal stimuli and Chinese ideographs as visual stimuli. On the semantic tasks, poor readers performed below the level of the normal readers only at the sixth grade level, but, on the rapid naming and pseudoword learning tasks, they performed below the normal readers at the second as well as at the sixth grade level. On both the verbal memory and visual-verbal learning tasks, performance in poor readers approximated that of normal readers when the word stimuli were high in meaning but not when they were low in meaning. These patterns were essentially replicated in a third study that used some of the same semantic and phonological measures used in the first experiment, and verbal memory and visual-verbal learning tasks that employed word lists and visual stimuli (novel alphabetic characters) that more closely approximated those used in learning to read. It was concluded that semantic coding deficits are an unlikely cause of reading difficulties in most poor readers at the beginning stages of reading skills acquisition, but accrue as a consequence of prolonged reading difficulties in older readers. It was also concluded that phonological coding deficits are a probable cause of reading difficulties in most poor readers.

  11. Evaluating Phonological Processing Skills in Children With Prelingual Deafness Who Use Cochlear Implants

    PubMed Central

    Tomblin, J. Bruce

    2009-01-01

    This study investigated the phonological processing skills of 29 children with prelingual, profound hearing loss with 4 years of cochlear implant experience. Results were group matched with regard to word-reading ability and mother’s educational level with the performance of 29 hearing children. Results revealed that it is possible to obtain a valid measure of phonological processing (PP) skills in children using CIs. They could complete rhyming tasks and were able to complete sound-based tasks using standard test materials provided by a commercial test distributor. The CI children completed tasks measuring PP, but there were performance differences between the CI users and the hearing children. The process of learning phonological awareness (PA) for the children with CIs was characterized by a longer, more protracted learning phase than their counterparts with hearing. Tests of phonological memory skills indicated that when the tasks were controlled for presentation method and response modality, there were no differences between the performance of children with CIs and their counterparts with hearing. Tests of rapid naming revealed that there were no differences between rapid letter and number naming between the two groups. Results yielded a possible PP test battery for children with CI experience. PMID:18424771

  12. The Nature of Phonological Encoding During Spoken Word Retrieval.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sullivan, Michael P.; Riffel, Brian

    1999-01-01

    Examined whether phonological selection occurs sequentially or in parallel. College students named picture primes and targets, with varied response stimulus intervals between primes and targets. Results were consistent with Dell's (1988) two-stage sequential model of encoding, which shows an initial parallel activation within a lexical network…

  13. Phonological skills, visual attention span, and visual stress in developmental dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Saksida, Amanda; Iannuzzi, Stéphanie; Bogliotti, Caroline; Chaix, Yves; Démonet, Jean-François; Bricout, Laure; Billard, Catherine; Nguyen-Morel, Marie-Ange; Le Heuzey, Marie-France; Soares-Boucaud, Isabelle; George, Florence; Ziegler, Johannes C; Ramus, Franck

    2016-10-01

    In this study, we concurrently investigated 3 possible causes of dyslexia-a phonological deficit, visual stress, and a reduced visual attention span-in a large population of 164 dyslexic and 118 control French children, aged between 8 and 13 years old. We found that most dyslexic children showed a phonological deficit, either in terms of response accuracy (92.1% of the sample), speed (84.8%), or both (79.3%). Deficits in visual attention span, as measured by partial report ability, affected 28.1% of dyslexic participants, all of which also showed a phonological deficit. Visual stress, as measured by subjective reports of visual discomfort, affected 5.5% of dyslexic participants, not more than controls (8.5%). Although phonological variables explained a large amount of variance in literacy skills, visual variables did not explain any additional variance. Finally, children with comorbid phonological and visual deficits did not show more severe reading disability than children with a pure phonological deficit. These results (a) confirm the importance of phonological deficits in dyslexia; (b) suggest that visual attention span may play a role, but a minor one, at least in this population; (c) do not support any involvement of visual stress in dyslexia. Among the factors that may explain some differences with previously published studies, the present sample is characterized by very stringent inclusion criteria, in terms of the severity of reading disability and in terms of exclusion of comorbidities. This may exacerbate the role of phonological deficits to the detriment of other factors playing a role in reading acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

  14. The Temporal Courses of Phonological and Orthographic Encoding in Handwritten Production in Chinese: An ERP Study

    PubMed Central

    Zhang, Qingfang; Wang, Cheng

    2016-01-01

    A central issue in written production concerns how phonological codes influence the output of orthographic codes. We used a picture-word interference paradigm combined with the event-related potential technique to investigate the temporal courses of phonological and orthographic activation and their interplay in Chinese writing. Distractors were orthographically related, phonologically related, orthographically plus phonologically related, or unrelated to picture names. The behavioral results replicated the classic facilitation effect for all three types of relatedness. The ERP results indicated an orthographic effect in the time window of 370–500 ms (onset latency: 370 ms), a phonological effect in the time window of 460–500 ms (onset latency: 464 ms), and an additive pattern of both effects in both time windows, thus indicating that orthographic codes were accessed earlier than, and independent of, phonological codes in written production. The orthographic activation originates from the semantic system, whereas the phonological effect results from the activation spreading from the orthographic lexicon to the phonological lexicon. These findings substantially strengthen the existing evidence that shows that access to orthographic codes is not mediated by phonological information, and they provide important support for the orthographic autonomy hypothesis. PMID:27605911

  15. Modeling the relationship between rapid automatized naming and literacy skills across languages varying in orthographic consistency.

    PubMed

    Georgiou, George K; Aro, Mikko; Liao, Chen-Huei; Parrila, Rauno

    2016-03-01

    The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to contrast the prominent theoretical explanations of the rapid automatized naming (RAN)-reading relationship across languages varying in orthographic consistency (Chinese, English, and Finnish) and (b) to examine whether the same accounts can explain the RAN-spelling relationship. In total, 304 Grade 4 children (102 Chinese-speaking Taiwanese children, 117 English-speaking Canadian children, and 85 Finnish-speaking children) were assessed on measures of RAN, speed of processing, phonological processing, orthographic processing, reading fluency, and spelling. The results of path analysis indicated that RAN had a strong direct effect on reading fluency that was of the same size across languages and that only in English was a small proportion of its predictive variance mediated by orthographic processing. In contrast, RAN did not exert a significant direct effect on spelling, and a substantial proportion of its predictive variance was mediated by phonological processing (in Chinese and Finnish) and orthographic processing (in English). Given that RAN predicted reading fluency equally well across languages and that phonological/orthographic processing had very little to do with this relationship, we argue that the reason why RAN is related to reading fluency should be sought in domain-general factors such as serial processing and articulation. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  16. Phonological coding during reading

    PubMed Central

    Leinenger, Mallorie

    2014-01-01

    The exact role that phonological coding (the recoding of written, orthographic information into a sound based code) plays during silent reading has been extensively studied for more than a century. Despite the large body of research surrounding the topic, varying theories as to the time course and function of this recoding still exist. The present review synthesizes this body of research, addressing the topics of time course and function in tandem. The varying theories surrounding the function of phonological coding (e.g., that phonological codes aid lexical access, that phonological codes aid comprehension and bolster short-term memory, or that phonological codes are largely epiphenomenal in skilled readers) are first outlined, and the time courses that each maps onto (e.g., that phonological codes come online early (pre-lexical) or that phonological codes come online late (post-lexical)) are discussed. Next the research relevant to each of these proposed functions is reviewed, discussing the varying methodologies that have been used to investigate phonological coding (e.g., response time methods, reading while eyetracking or recording EEG and MEG, concurrent articulation) and highlighting the advantages and limitations of each with respect to the study of phonological coding. In response to the view that phonological coding is largely epiphenomenal in skilled readers, research on the use of phonological codes in prelingually, profoundly deaf readers is reviewed. Finally, implications for current models of word identification (activation-verification model (Van Order, 1987), dual-route model (e.g., Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001), parallel distributed processing model (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989)) are discussed. PMID:25150679

  17. Density, Frequency and the Expressive Phonology of Children with Phonological Delay

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gierut, Judith A.; Morrisette, Michele L.

    2012-01-01

    The effect of word-level variables on expressive phonology has not been widely studied, although the properties of words likely bear on the emergence of sound structure (Stoel-Gammon, 2011). Eight preschoolers, diagnosed with phonological delay, were assigned to treatment to experimentally induce gains in expressive phonology. Erred sounds were…

  18. Phonological coding during reading.

    PubMed

    Leinenger, Mallorie

    2014-11-01

    The exact role that phonological coding (the recoding of written, orthographic information into a sound based code) plays during silent reading has been extensively studied for more than a century. Despite the large body of research surrounding the topic, varying theories as to the time course and function of this recoding still exist. The present review synthesizes this body of research, addressing the topics of time course and function in tandem. The varying theories surrounding the function of phonological coding (e.g., that phonological codes aid lexical access, that phonological codes aid comprehension and bolster short-term memory, or that phonological codes are largely epiphenomenal in skilled readers) are first outlined, and the time courses that each maps onto (e.g., that phonological codes come online early [prelexical] or that phonological codes come online late [postlexical]) are discussed. Next the research relevant to each of these proposed functions is reviewed, discussing the varying methodologies that have been used to investigate phonological coding (e.g., response time methods, reading while eye-tracking or recording EEG and MEG, concurrent articulation) and highlighting the advantages and limitations of each with respect to the study of phonological coding. In response to the view that phonological coding is largely epiphenomenal in skilled readers, research on the use of phonological codes in prelingually, profoundly deaf readers is reviewed. Finally, implications for current models of word identification (activation-verification model, Van Orden, 1987; dual-route model, e.g., M. Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; parallel distributed processing model, Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

  19. Phonological Feature Repetition Suppression in the Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus.

    PubMed

    Okada, Kayoko; Matchin, William; Hickok, Gregory

    2018-06-07

    Models of speech production posit a role for the motor system, predominantly the posterior inferior frontal gyrus, in encoding complex phonological representations for speech production, at the phonemic, syllable, and word levels [Roelofs, A. A dorsal-pathway account of aphasic language production: The WEAVER++/ARC model. Cortex, 59(Suppl. C), 33-48, 2014; Hickok, G. Computational neuroanatomy of speech production. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13, 135-145, 2012; Guenther, F. H. Cortical interactions underlying the production of speech sounds. Journal of Communication Disorders, 39, 350-365, 2006]. However, phonological theory posits subphonemic units of representation, namely phonological features [Chomsky, N., & Halle, M. The sound pattern of English, 1968; Jakobson, R., Fant, G., & Halle, M. Preliminaries to speech analysis. The distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1951], that specify independent articulatory parameters of speech sounds, such as place and manner of articulation. Therefore, motor brain systems may also incorporate phonological features into speech production planning units. Here, we add support for such a role with an fMRI experiment of word sequence production using a phonemic similarity manipulation. We adapted and modified the experimental paradigm of Oppenheim and Dell [Oppenheim, G. M., & Dell, G. S. Inner speech slips exhibit lexical bias, but not the phonemic similarity effect. Cognition, 106, 528-537, 2008; Oppenheim, G. M., & Dell, G. S. Motor movement matters: The flexible abstractness of inner speech. Memory & Cognition, 38, 1147-1160, 2010]. Participants silently articulated words cued by sequential visual presentation that varied in degree of phonological feature overlap in consonant onset position: high overlap (two shared phonological features; e.g., /r/ and /l/) or low overlap (one shared phonological feature, e.g., /r/ and /b/). We found a significant repetition suppression effect in the left

  20. An exploratory study of phonological awareness and working memory differences and literacy performance of people that use AAC.

    PubMed

    Gómez Taibo, María Luisa; Vieiro Iglesias, Pilar; González Raposo, María del Salvador; Sotillo Méndez, María

    2010-11-01

    Twelve cerebral palsied adolescents and young adults with complex communicative needs who used augmentative and alternative communication were studied. They were classified according to their working memory capacity (high vs. low) into two groups of 6 participants. They were also divided into two groups of 6 participants according to their high vs. low phonological skills. These groups were compared on their performance in reading tests -orthographic knowledge, a word test and a pseudoword reading test- and in the spelling of words, pseudowords and pictures' names. Statistical differences were found between high vs. low phonological skills groups, and between high and low working memory groups. High working memory capacity group scored significantly higher than low working memory group in the orthographic and word reading tests. The high phonological skills group outperformed the low phonological skills group in the word reading test and in the spelling of pseudowords and pictures' names. From a descriptive point of view, phonological skills and working memory, factors known to be highly predictive of literacy skills in people without disabilities, also hold as factors for the participants that used AAC in our study. Implications of the results are discussed.

  1. Cross-Language Activation of Phonology in Young Bilingual Readers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jared, Debra; Cormier, Pierre; Levy, Betty Ann; Wade-Woolley, Lesly

    2012-01-01

    We investigated whether children who were learning to read simultaneously in English and French activate phonological representations from only the language in which they are reading or from both of their languages. Children in French Immersion programs in Grade 3 were asked to name aloud cognates, interlingual homographs, interlingual homophones,…

  2. Does tip-of-the-tongue for proper names discriminate amnestic mild cognitive impairment?

    PubMed

    Juncos-Rabadán, Onésimo; Facal, David; Lojo-Seoane, Cristina; Pereiro, Arturo X

    2013-04-01

    Difficulty in retrieving people's names is very common in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment. Such difficulty is often observed as the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon. The main aim of this study was to explore whether a famous people's naming task that elicited the TOT state can be used to discriminate between amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) patients and normal controls. Eighty-four patients with aMCI and 106 normal controls aged over 50 years performed a task involving naming 50 famous people shown in pictures. Univariate and multivariate regression analyses were used to study the relationships between aMCI and semantic and phonological measures in the TOT paradigm. Univariate regression analyses revealed that all TOT measures significantly predicted aMCI. Multivariate analysis of all these measures correctly classified 70% of controls (specificity) and 71.6% of aMCI patients (sensitivity), with an AUC (area under curve ROC) value of 0.74, but only the phonological measure remained significant. This classification value was similar to that obtained with the Semantic verbal fluency test. TOTs for proper names may effectively discriminate aMCI patients from normal controls through measures that represent one of the naming processes affected, that is, phonological access.

  3. Cognitive Abilities Underlying Reading Accuracy, Fluency and Spelling Acquisition in Korean Hangul Learners from Grades 1 to 4: A Cross-Sectional Study.

    PubMed

    Park, Hyun-Rin; Uno, Akira

    2015-08-01

    The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine the cognitive abilities that predict reading and spelling performance in Korean children in Grades 1 to 4, depending on expertise and reading experience. As a result, visual cognition, phonological awareness, naming speed and receptive vocabulary significantly predicted reading accuracy in children in Grades 1 and 2, whereas visual cognition, phonological awareness and rapid naming speed did not predict reading accuracy in children in higher grades. For reading, fluency, phonological awareness, rapid naming speed and receptive vocabulary were crucial abilities in children in Grades 1 to 3, whereas phonological awareness was not a significant predictor in children in Grade 4. In spelling, reading ability and receptive vocabulary were the most important abilities for accurate Hangul spelling. The results suggested that the degree of cognitive abilities required for reading and spelling changed depending on expertise and reading experience. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  4. A phonology-free mobile communication app.

    PubMed

    Kondapalli, Ananya; Zhang, Lee R; Patel, Shreya; Han, Xiao; Kim, Hee Jin; Li, Xintong; Altschuler, Eric L

    2016-11-01

    Aphasia - loss of comprehension or expression of language - is a devastating functional sequela of stroke. There are as yet no effective methods for rehabilitation of aphasia. An assistive device that allows aphasia patients to communicate and interact at speeds approaching real time is urgently needed. Behavioral and linguistic studies of aphasia patients show that they retain normal thinking processes and most aspects of language. They lack only phonology: the ability to translate (input) and/or output sounds (or written words) such as "ta-ble" into the image of a four-legged object with a top at which one works or eats. We have made a phonology-free communication mobile app that may be useful for patients with aphasia and other communication disorders. Particular innovations of our app include calling Google Images as a "subroutine" to allow a near-infinite number of choices (e.g. food or clothing items) for patients without having to make countless images, and by the use of animation for words, phrases or concepts that cannot be represented by a single image. We have tested our app successfully in one patient. The app may be of great benefit to patients with aphasia and other communication disorders. Implications for Rehabilitation We have made a phonology-free mobile communication app. This app may facilitate communication for patients with aphasia and other communication disorders.

  5. Executive functions and aphasia treatment outcomes: data from an ortho-phonological cueing therapy for anomia in Chinese.

    PubMed

    Yeung, Olivia; Law, Sam-Po

    2010-12-01

    This study examined the existence of a possible relationship between anomic treatment outcomes and executive functions. An ortho-phonological cueing method was used to facilitate object naming in 12 Cantonese-speaking anomic individuals. Treatment effectiveness for each participant was quantified and correlated with the performance of executive functions and language tasks. It was found that 10 participants showed significant improvement in naming treated items. Eight of the participants were able to maintain treatment gains for at least 1 month. Phonological generalization effects were observed in two participants. Performance on the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI-3) was significantly correlated with effect sizes of treatment, treatment generalization and maintenance and the Attention Network Test (ANT) was significantly correlated with phonological generalization. The result of a simultaneous multiple regression suggested that the performance of the ANT played an important role in phonological generalization. The findings reinforce the current view about the role of executive functions in language rehabilitation. They also shed light on the effect of inhibitory control on treatment generalization.

  6. Developmental delays in phonological recoding among children and adolescents with Down syndrome and Williams syndrome.

    PubMed

    Danielsson, Henrik; Henry, Lucy; Messer, David; Carney, Daniel P J; Rönnberg, Jerker

    2016-08-01

    This study examined the development of phonological recoding in short-term memory (STM) span tasks among two clinical groups with contrasting STM and language profiles: those with Down syndrome (DS) and Williams syndrome (WS). Phonological recoding was assessed by comparing: (1) performance on phonologically similar and dissimilar items (phonological similarity effects, PSE); and (2) items with short and long names (word length effects, WLE). Participant groups included children and adolescents with DS (n=29), WS (n=25) and typical development (n=51), all with average mental ages around 6 years. The group with WS, contrary to predictions based on their relatively strong verbal STM and language abilities, showed no evidence for phonological recoding. Those in the group with DS, with weaker verbal STM and language abilities, showed positive evidence for phonological recoding (PSE), but to a lesser degree than the typical group (who showed PSE and WLE). These findings provide new information about the memory systems of these groups of children and adolescents, and suggest that STM processes involving phonological recoding do not fit with the usual expectations of the abilities of children and adolescents with WS and DS. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  7. A taxometric investigation of developmental dyslexia subtypes.

    PubMed

    O'Brien, Beth A; Wolf, Maryanne; Lovett, Maureen W

    2012-02-01

    Long-standing issues with the conceptualization, identification and subtyping of developmental dyslexia persist. This study takes an alternative approach to examine the heterogeneity of developmental dyslexia using taxometric classification techniques. These methods were used with a large sample of 671 children ages 6-8 who were diagnosed with severe reading disorders. Latent characteristics of the sample are assessed in regard to posited subtypes with phonological deficits and naming speed deficits, thus extending prior work by addressing whether these deficits embody separate classes of individuals. Findings support separate taxa of dyslexia with and without phonological deficits. Different latent structure for naming speed deficits was found depending on the definitional criterion used to define dyslexia. Non-phonologically based forms of dyslexia showed particular difficulty with naming speed and reading fluency. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  8. Phonological processing of ignored distractor pictures, an fMRI investigation.

    PubMed

    Bles, Mart; Jansma, Bernadette M

    2008-02-11

    Neuroimaging studies of attention often focus on interactions between stimulus representations and top-down selection mechanisms in visual cortex. Less is known about the neural representation of distractor stimuli beyond visual areas, and the interactions between stimuli in linguistic processing areas. In the present study, participants viewed simultaneously presented line drawings at peripheral locations, while in the MRI scanner. The names of the objects depicted in these pictures were either phonologically related (i.e. shared the same consonant-vowel onset construction), or unrelated. Attention was directed either at the linguistic properties of one of these pictures, or at the fixation point (i.e. away from the pictures). Phonological representations of unattended pictures could be detected in the posterior superior temporal gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the insula. Under some circumstances, the name of ignored distractor pictures is retrieved by linguistic areas. This implies that selective attention to a specific location does not completely filter out the representations of distractor stimuli at early perceptual stages.

  9. Cascaded Processing in Written Naming: Evidence from the Picture-Picture Interference Paradigm

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Roux, Sebastien; Bonin, Patrick

    2012-01-01

    The issue of how information flows within the lexical system in written naming was investigated in five experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named target pictures that were accompanied by context pictures having phonologically and orthographically related or unrelated names (e.g., a picture of a "ball" superimposed on a picture of…

  10. Relationships among cognitive deficits and component skills of reading in younger and older students with developmental dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Park, Heeyoung; Lombardino, Linda J

    2013-09-01

    Processing speed deficits along with phonological awareness deficits have been identified as risk factors for dyslexia. This study was designed to examine the behavioral profiles of two groups, a younger (6-8 years) and an older (10-15 years) group of dyslexic children for the purposes of (1) evaluating the degree to which phonological awareness and processing speed deficits occur in the two developmental cohorts; (2) determining the strength of relationships between the groups' respective mean scores on cognitive tasks of phonological awareness and processing speed and their scores on component skills of reading; and (3) evaluating the degree to which phonological awareness and processing speed serve as concurrent predictors of component reading skills for each group. The mean scaled scores for both groups were similar on all but one processing speed task. The older group was significantly more depressed on a visual matching test of attention, scanning, and speed. Correlations between reading skills and the cognitive constructs were very similar for both age-groups. Neither of the two phonological awareness tasks correlated with either of the two processing speed tasks or with any of the three measures of reading. One of the two processing speed measures served as a concurrent predictor of word- and text-level reading in the younger, however, only the rapid naming measure functioned as a concurrent predictor of word reading in the older group. Conversely, phonological processing measures did not serve as concurrent predictors for word-level or text-level reading in either of the groups. Descriptive analyses of individual subjects' deficits in the domains of phonological awareness and processing speed revealed that (1) both linguistic and nonlinguistic processing speed deficits in the younger dyslexic children occurred at higher rates than deficits in phonological awareness and (2) cognitive deficits within and across these two domains were greater in the older

  11. Phonological priming in young children who stutter: holistic versus incremental processing.

    PubMed

    Byrd, Courtney T; Conture, Edward G; Ohde, Ralph N

    2007-02-01

    To investigate the holistic versus incremental phonological encoding processes of young children who stutter (CWS; N = 26) and age- and gender-matched children who do not stutter (CWNS; N = 26) via a picture-naming auditory priming paradigm. Children named pictures during 3 auditory priming conditions: neutral, holistic, and incremental. Speech reaction time (SRT) was measured from the onset of picture presentation to the onset of participant response. CWNS shifted from being significantly faster in the holistic priming condition to being significantly faster in the incremental priming condition from 3 to 5 years of age. In contrast, the majority of 3- and 5-year-old CWS continued to exhibit faster SRT in the holistic than the incremental condition. CWS are delayed in making the developmental shift in phonological encoding from holistic to incremental processing, a delay that may contribute to their difficulties establishing fluent speech.

  12. Contrast Responsivity in MT+ Correlates with Phonological Awareness and Reading Measures in Children

    PubMed Central

    Ben-Shachar, Michal; Dougherty, Robert F.; Deutsch, Gayle K.; Wandell, Brian A.

    2007-01-01

    There are several independent sets of findings concerning the neural basis of reading. One set demonstrates a powerful relationship between phonological processing and reading skills. Another set reveals a relationship between visual responses in the motion pathways and reading skills. It is widely assumed that these two findings are unrelated. We tested the hypothesis that phonological awareness is related to motion responsivity in children’s MT+. We measured BOLD signals to drifting gratings as a function of contrast. Subjects were 35 children ages 7–12y with a wide range of reading skills. Contrast responsivity in MT+, but not V1, was correlated with phonological awareness and to a lesser extent with two other measures of reading. No correlation was found between MT+ signals and rapid naming, age or general IQ measures. These results establish an important link between visual and phonological processing in children and suggest that MT+ responsivity is a marker for healthy reading development. PMID:17689981

  13. Efficacy of a Classroom Integrated Intervention of Phonological Awareness and Word Recognition in "Double-Deficit Children" Learning a Regular Orthography

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mayer, Andreas; Motsch, Hans-Joachim

    2015-01-01

    This study analysed the effects of a classroom intervention focusing on phonological awareness and/or automatized word recognition in children with a deficit in the domains of phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming ("double deficit"). According to the double-deficit hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers, 1999), these children belong…

  14. Phonological Models.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ballard, W.L.

    1968-01-01

    The article discusses models of synchronic and diachronic phonology and suggests changes in them. The basic generative model of phonology is outlined with the author's reinterpretations. The systematic phonemic level is questioned in terms of its unreality with respect to linguistic performance and its lack of validity with respect to historical…

  15. Learning and Forgetting New Names and Objects in MCI and AD

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gronholm-Nyman, Petra; Rinne, Juha O.; Laine, Matti

    2010-01-01

    We studied how subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), early Alzheimer's disease (AD) and age-matched controls learned and maintained the names of unfamiliar objects that were trained with or without semantic support (object definitions). Naming performance, phonological cueing, incidental learning of the definitions and recognition of the…

  16. The processing of English regular inflections: Phonological cues to morphological structure

    PubMed Central

    Post, Brechtje; Marslen-Wilson, William D.; Randall, Billi; Tyler, Lorraine K.

    2008-01-01

    Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular (caught) and regular (filled) past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into a stem plus an inflectional affix (e.g., {fill} + {-ed}), as opposed to irregular forms, which do not have an overt stem + affix structure and must be analysed as full forms [Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1997). Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature, 387, 592–594; Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1998). Rules, representations, and the English past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2, 428–435]. On this account, any incoming string that shows the critical diagnostic properties of an inflected form – a final coronal consonant (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/) that agrees in voicing with the preceding segment as in filled, mild, or nilled – will automatically trigger an attempt at segmentation. We report an auditory speeded judgment experiment which explored the contribution of these critical morpho-phonological properties (labelled as the English inflectional rhyme pattern) to the processing of English regular inflections. The results show that any stimulus that can be interpreted as ending in a regular inflection, whether it is a real inflection (filled–fill), a pseudo-inflection (mild–mile) or a phonologically matched nonword (nilled–nill), is responded to more slowly than an unambiguously monomorphemic stimulus pair (e.g., belt–bell). This morpho-phonological effect was independent of phonological effects of voicing and syllabicity. The findings are interpreted as evidence for a basic morpho-phonological parsing process that applies to all items with the criterial phonological properties. PMID:18834584

  17. Phonological Working Memory of Children in Two German Special Schools

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hasselhorn, Marcus; Mahler, Claudia

    2007-01-01

    In two studies, 10-year-olds from 2 German special schools as well as typically developing children of the same chronological age (CA controls) or the same mental age (MA controls) were compared on several aspects of working memory functions (i.e., size and input quality of the phonological store, speed and automatic activation of the subvocal…

  18. Object Interference in Children's Colour and Position Naming: Lexical Interference or Task-Set Competition?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    La Heij, Wido; Boelens, Harrie; Kuipers, Jan-Rouke

    2010-01-01

    Cascade models of word production assume that during lexical access all activated concepts activate their names. In line with this view, it has been shown that naming an object's colour is facilitated when colour name and object name are phonologically related (e.g., "blue" and "blouse"). Prevor and Diamond's (2005) recent observation that…

  19. Viewing a Phonological Deficit within a Multifactorial Model of Dyslexia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Catts, Hugh W.; McIlraith, Autumn; Bridges, Mindy Sittner; Nielsen, Diane Corcoran

    2017-01-01

    Participants were administered multiple measures of phonological awareness, oral language, and rapid automatized naming at the beginning of kindergarten and multiple measures of word reading at the end of second grade. A structural equation model was fit to the data and latent scores were used to identify children with a deficit in phonological…

  20. Proper name retrieval in temporal lobe epilepsy: naming of famous faces and landmarks.

    PubMed

    Benke, Thomas; Kuen, Eva; Schwarz, Michael; Walser, Gerald

    2013-05-01

    The objective of this study was to further explore proper name (PN) retrieval and conceptual knowledge in patients with left and right temporal lobe epilepsy (69 patients with LTLE and 62 patients with RTLE) using a refined assessment procedure. Based on the performance of a large group of age- and education-matched normals, a new test of famous faces and famous landmarks was designed. Recognition, naming, and semantic knowledge were assessed consecutively, allowing for a better characterization of deficient levels in the naming system. Impairment in PN retrieval was common in the cohort with TLE. Furthermore, side of seizure onset impaired stages of name retrieval differently: LTLE impaired the lexico-phonological processing, whereas RTLE mainly impaired the perceptual-semantic stage of object recognition. In addition to deficient PN retrieval, patients with TLE had reduced conceptual knowledge regarding famous persons and landmarks. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  1. Word learning in adults with second-language experience: effects of phonological and referent familiarity.

    PubMed

    Kaushanskaya, Margarita; Yoo, Jeewon; Van Hecke, Stephanie

    2013-04-01

    The goal of this research was to examine whether phonological familiarity exerts different effects on novel word learning for familiar versus unfamiliar referents and whether successful word learning is associated with increased second-language experience. Eighty-one adult native English speakers with various levels of Spanish knowledge learned phonologically familiar novel words (constructed using English sounds) or phonologically unfamiliar novel words (constructed using non-English and non-Spanish sounds) in association with either familiar or unfamiliar referents. Retention was tested via a forced-choice recognition task. A median-split procedure identified high-ability and low-ability word learners in each condition, and the two groups were compared on measures of second-language experience. Findings suggest that the ability to accurately match newly learned novel names to their appropriate referents is facilitated by phonological familiarity only for familiar referents but not for unfamiliar referents. Moreover, more extensive second-language learning experience characterized superior learners primarily in one word-learning condition: in which phonologically unfamiliar novel words were paired with familiar referents. Together, these findings indicate that phonological familiarity facilitates novel word learning only for familiar referents and that experience with learning a second language may have a specific impact on novel vocabulary learning in adults.

  2. Word learning in adults with second language experience: Effects of phonological and referent familiarity

    PubMed Central

    Kaushanskaya, Margarita; Yoo, Jeewon; Van Hecke, Stephanie

    2014-01-01

    Purpose The goal of this research was to examine whether phonological familiarity exerts different effects on novel word learning for familiar vs. unfamiliar referents, and whether successful word-learning is associated with increased second-language experience. Method Eighty-one adult native English speakers with various levels of Spanish knowledge learned phonologically-familiar novel words (constructed using English sounds) or phonologically-unfamiliar novel words (constructed using non-English and non-Spanish sounds) in association with either familiar or unfamiliar referents. Retention was tested via a forced-choice recognition-task. A median-split procedure identified high-ability and low-ability word-learners in each condition, and the two groups were compared on measures of second-language experience. Results Findings suggest that the ability to accurately match newly-learned novel names to their appropriate referents is facilitated by phonological familiarity only for familiar referents but not for unfamiliar referents. Moreover, more extensive second-language learning experience characterized superior learners primarily in one word-learning condition: Where phonologically-unfamiliar novel words were paired with familiar referents. Conclusions Together, these findings indicate that phonological familiarity facilitates novel word learning only for familiar referents, and that experience with learning a second language may have a specific impact on novel vocabulary learning in adults. PMID:22992709

  3. Effects of Mora Deletion, Nonword Repetition, Rapid Naming, and Visual Search Performance on Beginning Reading in Japanese

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kobayashi, Maya Shiho; Haynes, Charles W.; Macaruso, Paul; Hook, Pamela E.; Kato, Junko

    2005-01-01

    This study examined the extent to which mora deletion (phonological analysis), nonword repetition (phonological memory), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual search abilities predict reading in Japanese kindergartners and first graders. Analogous abilities have been identified as important predictors of reading skills in alphabetic languages…

  4. Inter-subject variability modulates phonological advance planning in the production of adjective-noun phrases.

    PubMed

    Michel Lange, Violaine; Laganaro, Marina

    2014-01-01

    The literature on advance phonological planning in adjective-noun phrases (NPs) presents diverging results: while many experimental studies suggest that the entire NP is encoded before articulation, other results favor a span of encoding limited to the first word. Although cross-linguistic differences in the structure of adjective-NPs may account for some of these contrasting results, divergences have been reported even among similar languages and syntactic structures. Here we examined whether inter-individual differences account for variability in the span of phonological planning in the production of French NPs, where previous results indicated encoding limited to the first word. The span of phonological encoding is tested with the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm using phonological distractors related to the noun or to the adjective of the NPs. In Experiment 1, phonological priming effects were limited to the first word in adjective NPs whichever the position of the adjective (pre-nominal or post-nominal). Crucially, phonological priming effects on the second word interacted with speakers' production speed suggesting different encoding strategies for participants. In Experiment 2, we tested this hypothesis further with a larger group of participants. Results clearly showed that slow and fast initializing participants presented different phonological priming patterns on the last element of adjective-NPs: while the first word was primed by a distractor for all speakers, only the slow speaker group presented a priming effect on the second element of the NP. These results show that the span of phonological encoding is modulated by inter-individual strategies: in experimental paradigms some speakers plan word by word whereas others encode beyond the initial word. We suggest that the diverging results reported in the literature on advance phonological planning may partly be reconciled in light of the present results.

  5. A Case-Series Test of the Interactive Two-step Model of Lexical Access: Predicting Word Repetition from Picture Naming

    PubMed Central

    Dell, Gary S.; Martin, Nadine; Schwartz, Myrna F.

    2010-01-01

    Lexical access in language production, and particularly pathologies of lexical access, are often investigated by examining errors in picture naming and word repetition. In this article, we test a computational approach to lexical access, the two-step interactive model, by examining whether the model can quantitatively predict the repetition-error patterns of 65 aphasic subjects from their naming errors. The model’s characterizations of the subjects’ naming errors were taken from the companion paper to this one (Schwartz, Dell, N. Martin, Gahl & Sobel, 2006), and their repetition was predicted from the model on the assumption that naming involves two error prone steps, word and phonological retrieval, whereas repetition only creates errors in the second of these steps. A version of the model in which lexical-semantic and lexical-phonological connections could be independently lesioned was generally successful in predicting repetition for the aphasics. An analysis of the few cases in which model predictions were inaccurate revealed the role of input phonology in the repetition task. PMID:21085621

  6. "RED" Matters When Naming "CAR": The Cascading Activation of Nontarget Properties

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Roux, Sébastien; Bonin, Patrick

    2016-01-01

    Seven experiments tested, whether when naming a colored object (e.g., "CAR"), its color (e.g., "red") is phonologically encoded. In the first experiment, adults had to say aloud the names of colored line drawings of objects that were each displayed among 3 black-and-white line drawings (Experiment 1a) or that were presented…

  7. Is the Phonological Deficit in Developmental Dyslexia Related to Impaired Phonological Representations and to Universal Phonological Grammar?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Maionchi-Pino, Norbert; Taki, Yasuyuki; Yokoyama, Satoru; Magnan, Annie; Takahashi, Kei; Hashizume, Hiroshi; Ecalle, Jean; Kawashima, Ryuta

    2013-01-01

    To date, the nature of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia is still debated. We concur with possible impairments in the representations of the universal phonological constraints that universally govern how phonemes co-occur as a source of this deficit. We were interested in whether-and how-dyslexic children have sensitivity to…

  8. Contrasting contributions of phonological short-term memory and long-term knowledge to vocabulary learning in a foreign language.

    PubMed

    Masoura, Elvira V; Gathercole, Susan E

    2005-01-01

    The contributions of phonological short-term memory and existing foreign vocabulary knowledge to the learning of new words in a second language were compared in a sample of 40 Greek children studying English at school. The children's speed of learning new English words in a paired-associate learning task was strongly influenced by their current English vocabulary, but was independent of phonological memory skill, indexed by nonword repetition ability. However, phonological memory performance was closely linked to English vocabulary scores. The findings suggest that in learners with considerable familiarity with a second language, foreign vocabulary acquisition is mediated largely by use of existing knowledge representations.

  9. Phonological Interpretation into Preordered Algebras

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Kubota, Yusuke; Pollard, Carl

    We propose a novel architecture for categorial grammar that clarifies the relationship between semantically relevant combinatoric reasoning and semantically inert reasoning that only affects surface-oriented phonological form. To this end, we employ a level of structured phonology that mediates between syntax (abstract combinatorics) and phonology proper (strings). To notate structured phonologies, we employ a lambda calculus analogous to the φ-terms of [8]. However, unlike Oehrle's purely equational φ-calculus, our phonological calculus is inequational, in a way that is strongly analogous to the functional programming language LCF [10]. Like LCF, our phonological terms are interpreted into a Henkin frame of posets, with degree of definedness ('height' in the preorder that interprets the base type) corresponding to degree of pronounceability; only maximal elements are actual strings and therefore fully pronounceable. We illustrate with an analysis (also new) of some complex constituent-order phenomena in Japanese.

  10. Phonological learning in semantic dementia.

    PubMed

    Jefferies, Elizabeth; Bott, Samantha; Ehsan, Sheeba; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A

    2011-04-01

    Patients with semantic dementia (SD) have anterior temporal lobe (ATL) atrophy that gives rise to a highly selective deterioration of semantic knowledge. Despite pronounced anomia and poor comprehension of words and pictures, SD patients have well-formed, fluent speech and normal digit span. Given the intimate connection between phonological STM and word learning revealed by both neuropsychological and developmental studies, SD patients might be expected to show good acquisition of new phonological forms, even though their ability to map these onto meanings is impaired. In contradiction of these predictions, a limited amount of previous research has found poor learning of new phonological forms in SD. In a series of experiments, we examined whether SD patient, GE, could learn novel phonological sequences and, if so, under which circumstances. GE showed normal benefits of phonological knowledge in STM (i.e., normal phonotactic frequency and phonological similarity effects) but reduced support from semantic memory (i.e., poor immediate serial recall for semantically degraded words, characterised by frequent item errors). Next, we demonstrated normal learning of serial order information for repeated lists of single-digit number words using the Hebb paradigm: these items were well-understood allowing them to be repeated without frequent item errors. In contrast, patient GE showed little learning of nonsense syllable sequences using the same Hebb paradigm. Detailed analysis revealed that both GE and the controls showed a tendency to learn their own errors as opposed to the target items. Finally, we showed normal learning of phonological sequences for GE when he was prevented from repeating his errors. These findings confirm that the ATL atrophy in SD disrupts phonological processing for semantically degraded words but leaves the phonological architecture intact. Consequently, when item errors are minimised, phonological STM can support the acquisition of new phoneme

  11. Development of Phonological Constancy

    PubMed Central

    Best, Catherine T.; Tyler, Michael D.; Gooding, Tiffany N.; Orlando, Corey B.; Quann, Chelsea A.

    2009-01-01

    Efficient word recognition depends on detecting critical phonetic differences among similar-sounding words, or sensitivity to phonological distinctiveness, an ability evident at 19 months of age but unreliable at 14 to 15 months of age. However, little is known about phonological constancy, the equally crucial ability to recognize a word's identity across natural phonetic variations, such as those in cross-dialect pronunciation differences. We show that 15- and 19-month-old children recognize familiar words spoken in their native dialect, but that only the older children recognize familiar words in a dissimilar nonnative dialect, providing evidence for emergence of phonological constancy by 19 months. These results are compatible with a perceptual-attunement account of developmental change in early word recognition, but not with statistical-learning or phonological accounts. Thus, the complementary skills of phonological constancy and distinctiveness both appear at around 19 months of age, together providing the child with a fundamental insight that permits rapid vocabulary growth and later reading acquisition. PMID:19368700

  12. Phonetics and Phonology. Occasional Papers, No. 16.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Essex Univ., Colchester (England). Dept. of Language and Linguistics.

    This volume is devoted to phonetics and phonology. It consists of the following papers: (1) "Generative Phonology, Dependency Phonology and Southern French," by J. Durand, which discusses aspects of a regional pronunciation of French, the status of syllables in generative phonology, and concepts of dependency phonology; (2) "On the…

  13. The relationship of phonological ability, speech perception, and auditory perception in adults with dyslexia

    PubMed Central

    Law, Jeremy M.; Vandermosten, Maaike; Ghesquiere, Pol; Wouters, Jan

    2014-01-01

    This study investigated whether auditory, speech perception, and phonological skills are tightly interrelated or independently contributing to reading. We assessed each of these three skills in 36 adults with a past diagnosis of dyslexia and 54 matched normal reading adults. Phonological skills were tested by the typical threefold tasks, i.e., rapid automatic naming, verbal short-term memory and phonological awareness. Dynamic auditory processing skills were assessed by means of a frequency modulation (FM) and an amplitude rise time (RT); an intensity discrimination task (ID) was included as a non-dynamic control task. Speech perception was assessed by means of sentences and words-in-noise tasks. Group analyses revealed significant group differences in auditory tasks (i.e., RT and ID) and in phonological processing measures, yet no differences were found for speech perception. In addition, performance on RT discrimination correlated with reading but this relation was mediated by phonological processing and not by speech-in-noise. Finally, inspection of the individual scores revealed that the dyslexic readers showed an increased proportion of deviant subjects on the slow-dynamic auditory and phonological tasks, yet each individual dyslexic reader does not display a clear pattern of deficiencies across the processing skills. Although our results support phonological and slow-rate dynamic auditory deficits which relate to literacy, they suggest that at the individual level, problems in reading and writing cannot be explained by the cascading auditory theory. Instead, dyslexic adults seem to vary considerably in the extent to which each of the auditory and phonological factors are expressed and interact with environmental and higher-order cognitive influences. PMID:25071512

  14. White matter pathway supporting phonological encoding in speech production: a multi-modal imaging study of brain damage patients.

    PubMed

    Han, Zaizhu; Ma, Yujun; Gong, Gaolang; Huang, Ruiwang; Song, Luping; Bi, Yanchao

    2016-01-01

    In speech production, an important step before motor programming is the retrieval and encoding of the phonological elements of target words. It has been proposed that phonological encoding is supported by multiple regions in the left frontal, temporal and parietal regions and their underlying white matter, especially the left arcuate fasciculus (AF) or superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). It is unclear, however, whether the effects of AF/SLF are indeed related to phonological encoding for output and whether there are other white matter tracts that also contribute to this process. We comprehensively investigated the anatomical connectivity supporting phonological encoding in production by studying the relationship between the integrity of all major white matter tracts across the entire brain and phonological encoding deficits in a group of 69 patients with brain damage. The integrity of each white matter tract was measured both by the percentage of damaged voxels (structural imaging) and the mean fractional anisotropy value (diffusion tensor imaging). The phonological encoding deficits were assessed by various measures in two oral production tasks that involve phonological encoding: the percentage of nonword (phonological) errors in oral picture naming and the accuracy of word reading aloud with word comprehension ability regressed out. We found that the integrity of the left SLF in both the structural and diffusion tensor imaging measures consistently predicted the severity of phonological encoding impairment in the two phonological production tasks. Such effects of the left SLF on phonological production remained significant when a range of potential confounding factors were considered through partial correlation, including total lesion volume, demographic factors, lesions on phonological-relevant grey matter regions, or effects originating from the phonological perception or semantic processes. Our results therefore conclusively demonstrate the central role of

  15. Word-Level Reading Achievement and Behavioral Inattention: Exploring Their Overlap and Relations with Naming Speed and Phonemic Awareness in a Community Sample of Children

    PubMed Central

    Martinussen, Rhonda; Grimbos, Teresa; Ferrari, Julia L. S.

    2014-01-01

    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 behavioral inattention had a significant direct effect on word reading proficiency as well as significant indirect effects through phonemic awareness and naming speed. For pseudoword reading proficiency, the effects of inattention were indirect only through phonemic awareness and naming speed. A regression analysis indicated that naming speed, but not phonemic awareness, was significantly associated with teacher inattention ratings controlling for word reading proficiency. The findings highlight the need to better understand the role of behavioral inattention in the development of emergent literacy skills and reading proficiency. PMID:25178628

  16. Phonological Processing Skills as Predictors of Literacy amongst Arabic Speaking Bahraini Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    al Mannai, Haya; Everatt, John

    2005-01-01

    This paper reports a study of the reading and spelling skills of grades 1-3 Arabic-speaking children in Bahrain. Children were tested on their literacy skills (single word reading and spelling), their ability to decode letter strings (non-word reading) and measures of phonological awareness, short-term memory, speed of processing and non-verbal…

  17. Contrasting Effects of Errorless Naming Treatment and Gestural Facilitation for Word Retrieval in Aphasia

    PubMed Central

    Raymer, Anastasia M.; McHose, Beth; Smith, Kimberly G.; Iman, Lisa; Ambrose, Alexis; Casselton, Colleen

    2011-01-01

    Purpose We compared the effects of two treatments for aphasic word retrieval impairments, errorless naming treatment (ENT) and gestural facilitation of naming (GES), within the same individuals, anticipating that the use of gesture would enhance the effect of treatment over errorless treatment alone. In addition to picture naming, we evaluated results for other outcome measures that were largely untested in earlier ENT studies. Methods In a single participant crossover treatment design, we examined the effects of ENT and GES in eight individuals with stroke-induced aphasia and word retrieval impairments (three semantic anomia, five phonologic anomia) in counterbalanced phases across participants. We evaluated effects of the two treatments for a daily picture naming/gesture production probe measure and in standardized aphasia tests and communication rating scales administered across phases of the experiment. Results Both treatments led to improvements in naming of trained words (small-to-large effect sizes) in individuals with semantic and phonologic anomia. Small generalized naming improvements were noted for three individuals with phonologic anomia. GES improved use of corresponding gestures for trained words (large effect sizes). Results were largely maintained at one month post treatment completion. Increases in scores on standardized aphasia testing also occurred for both ENT and GES training. Discussion Both ENT and GES led to improvements in naming measures, with no clear difference between treatments. Increased use of gestures following GES providing a potential compensatory means of communication for those who did not improve verbal skills. Both treatments are considered to be effective methods to promote recovery of word retrieval and verbal production skills in individuals with aphasia. PMID:22047100

  18. Metrical Phonology: German Sound System.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tice, Bradley S.

    Metrical phonology, a linguistic process of phonological stress assessment and diagrammatic simplification of sentence and word stress, is discussed as it is found in the English and German languages. The objective is to promote use of metrical phonology as a tool for enhancing instruction in stress patterns in words and sentences, particularly in…

  19. The Structure of Phonological Theory

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Samuels, Bridget D.

    2009-01-01

    This dissertation takes a Minimalist approach to phonology, treating the phonological module as a system of abstract symbolic computation, divorced from phonetic content. I investigate the position of the phonological module within the architecture of grammar and the evolutionary scenario developed by Hauser et al. (2002a) and Fitch et al. (2005).…

  20. Role of Visual Speech in Phonological Processing by Children with Hearing Loss

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jerger, Susan; Tye-Murray, Nancy; Abdi, Herve

    2009-01-01

    Purpose: This research assessed the influence of visual speech on phonological processing by children with hearing loss (HL). Method: Children with HL and children with normal hearing (NH) named pictures while attempting to ignore auditory or audiovisual speech distractors whose onsets relative to the pictures were either congruent, conflicting in…

  1. Semantic and Phonological Encoding Times in Adults Who Stutter: Brain Electrophysiological Evidence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Maxfield, Nathan D.

    2017-01-01

    Purpose: Some psycholinguistic theories of stuttering propose that language production operates along a different time course in adults who stutter (AWS) versus typically fluent adults (TFA). However, behavioral evidence for such a difference has been mixed. Here, the time course of semantic and phonological encoding in picture naming was compared…

  2. Electrophysiological correlates of brand names.

    PubMed

    Cheung, Mei-chun; Chan, Agnes S; Sze, Sophia L

    2010-11-26

    EEG coherence has been used extensively in the investigation of language processing of different words categories. In contrast, relatively less is known about EEG coherence pattern of processing brand names. The present study aimed to investigate EEG coherence pattern associated with brand names in English and Chinese. EEG coherence of 32 healthy normal participants during 4 reading conditions, including concrete English words, concrete Chinese characters, English brand names and their translated Chinese brand names, were computed and compared. Regardless whether it was in English or Chinese, brand names were generally associated with higher intrahemispheric beta coherence in both the left and right hemispheres than concrete words or characters. Compared to English brand names, Chinese brand names demonstrated increased interhemispheric theta coherence in the frontal and temporal cortical regions. These results suggest that brand names tend to be processed through semantic routes. Similar to proper names and nonwords, they are represented in the lexical systems of both hemispheres. In addition, English and Chinese brand names are processed similarly at the semantic level and the difference in EEG coherence patterns associated with English and Chinese brand names is more likely due to phonological and orthographic processing that are associated with English and Chinese, respectively. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  3. Word-level reading achievement and behavioral inattention: exploring their overlap and relations with naming speed and phonemic awareness in a community sample of children.

    PubMed

    Martinussen, Rhonda; Grimbos, Teresa; Ferrari, Julia L S

    2014-11-01

    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 behavioral inattention had a significant direct effect on word reading proficiency as well as significant indirect effects through phonemic awareness and naming speed. For pseudoword reading proficiency, the effects of inattention were indirect only through phonemic awareness and naming speed. A regression analysis indicated that naming speed, but not phonemic awareness, was significantly associated with teacher inattention ratings controlling for word reading proficiency. The findings highlight the need to better understand the role of behavioral inattention in the development of emergent literacy skills and reading proficiency. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  4. The Phonological Permeability Hypothesis: Measuring Regressive L3 Influence to Test L1 and L2 Phonological Representations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cabrelli Amaro, Jennifer Lauren

    2013-01-01

    The Phonological Permeability Hypothesis (PPH, Cabrelli Amaro & Rothman, 2010) attempts to reconcile evidence suggesting some L2 learners, however rare, attain native-like L2 phonological systems with the observation that most do not. Considering existing L2 phonology research, it is not clear that phonological differences between early and…

  5. Task difficulty modulates brain-behavior correlations in language production and cognitive control: Behavioral and fMRI evidence from a phonological go/no-go picture-naming paradigm.

    PubMed

    Zhang, Haoyun; Eppes, Anna; Beatty-Martínez, Anne; Navarro-Torres, Christian; Diaz, Michele T

    2018-06-19

    Language production and cognitive control are complex processes that involve distinct yet interacting brain networks. However, the extent to which these processes interact and their neural bases have not been thoroughly examined. Here, we investigated the neural and behavioral bases of language production and cognitive control via a phonological go/no-go picture-naming task. Naming difficulty and cognitive control demands (i.e., conflict monitoring and response inhibition) were manipulated by varying the proportion of naming trials (go trials) and inhibition trials (no-go trials) across task runs. The results demonstrated that as task demands increased, participants' behavioral performance declined (i.e., longer reaction times on naming trials, more commission errors on inhibition trials) whereas brain activation generally increased. Increased activation was found not only within the language network but also in domain-general control regions. Additionally, right superior and inferior frontal and left supramarginal gyri were sensitive to increased task difficulty during both language production and response inhibition. We also found both positive and negative brain-behavior correlations. Most notably, increased activation in sensorimotor regions, such as precentral and postcentral gyri, was associated with better behavioral performance, in both successful picture naming and successful inhibition. Moreover, comparing the strength of correlations across conditions indicated that the brain-behavior correlations in sensorimotor regions that were associated with improved performance became stronger as task demands increased. Overall, our results suggest that cognitive control demands affect language production, and that successfully coping with increases in task difficulty relies on both language-specific and domain-general cognitive control regions.

  6. The phonological loop as a buffer store: An update.

    PubMed

    Baddeley, Alan D; Hitch, Graham J

    2018-05-30

    We regard our multicomponent model of working memory as reflecting a hierarchy of buffer stores with buffer storage providing an effective way of combining information from two or more streams that may differ in either the speed of input or in the features coded. We illustrate this through the case of the phonological loop component of the model. We discuss its gradual development through a combination of evidence from mainstream cognition and neuropsychology with the need for more detailed modelling of issues such as the representation of serial order. A brief account follows of the application, beyond the laboratory and clinic, of the concept of a phonological loop and the methods designed to study it. We then discuss some criticisms of the overall multicomponent model, concluding with a discussion of the major contribution made by neuropsychological evidence to its development together with some suggestions as to comparative lack of influence from more recent studies based on neuro-imaging. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  7. Phonological or orthographic training for children with phonological or orthographic decoding deficits.

    PubMed

    Gustafson, Stefan; Ferreira, Janna; Rönnberg, Jerker

    2007-08-01

    In a longitudinal intervention study, Swedish reading disabled children in grades 2-3 received either a phonological (n = 41) or an orthographic (n = 39) training program. Both programs were computerized and interventions took place in ordinary school settings with trained special instruction teachers. Two comparison groups, ordinary special instruction and normal readers, were also included in the study. Results showed strong average training effects on text reading and general word decoding for both phonological and orthographic training, but not significantly higher improvements than for the comparison groups. The main research finding was a double dissociation: children with pronounced phonological problems improved their general word decoding skill more from phonological than from orthographic training, whereas the opposite was observed for children with pronounced orthographic problems. Thus, in this population of children, training should focus on children's relative weakness rather than their relative strength in word decoding. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  8. Describing Phonological Paraphasias in Three Variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia.

    PubMed

    Dalton, Sarah Grace Hudspeth; Shultz, Christine; Henry, Maya L; Hillis, Argye E; Richardson, Jessica D

    2018-03-01

    The purpose of this study was to describe the linguistic environment of phonological paraphasias in 3 variants of primary progressive aphasia (semantic, logopenic, and nonfluent) and to describe the profiles of paraphasia production for each of these variants. Discourse samples of 26 individuals diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia were investigated for phonological paraphasias using the criteria established for the Philadelphia Naming Test (Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, 2013). Phonological paraphasias were coded for paraphasia type, part of speech of the target word, target word frequency, type of segment in error, word position of consonant errors, type of error, and degree of change in consonant errors. Eighteen individuals across the 3 variants produced phonological paraphasias. Most paraphasias were nonword, followed by formal, and then mixed, with errors primarily occurring on nouns and verbs, with relatively few on function words. Most errors were substitutions, followed by addition and deletion errors, and few sequencing errors. Errors were evenly distributed across vowels, consonant singletons, and clusters, with more errors occurring in initial and medial positions of words than in the final position of words. Most consonant errors consisted of only a single-feature change, with few 2- or 3-feature changes. Importantly, paraphasia productions by variant differed from these aggregate results, with unique production patterns for each variant. These results suggest that a system where paraphasias are coded as present versus absent may be insufficient to adequately distinguish between the 3 subtypes of PPA. The 3 variants demonstrate patterns that may be used to improve phenotyping and diagnostic sensitivity. These results should be integrated with recent findings on phonological processing and speech rate. Future research should attempt to replicate these results in a larger sample of participants with longer speech samples and varied

  9. Auditory sequence analysis and phonological skill

    PubMed Central

    Grube, Manon; Kumar, Sukhbinder; Cooper, Freya E.; Turton, Stuart; Griffiths, Timothy D.

    2012-01-01

    This work tests the relationship between auditory and phonological skill in a non-selected cohort of 238 school students (age 11) with the specific hypothesis that sound-sequence analysis would be more relevant to phonological skill than the analysis of basic, single sounds. Auditory processing was assessed across the domains of pitch, time and timbre; a combination of six standard tests of literacy and language ability was used to assess phonological skill. A significant correlation between general auditory and phonological skill was demonstrated, plus a significant, specific correlation between measures of phonological skill and the auditory analysis of short sequences in pitch and time. The data support a limited but significant link between auditory and phonological ability with a specific role for sound-sequence analysis, and provide a possible new focus for auditory training strategies to aid language development in early adolescence. PMID:22951739

  10. Gradient Phonological Inconsistency Affects Vocabulary Learning

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Muench, Kristin L.; Creel, Sarah C.

    2013-01-01

    Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

  11. Phonological and semantic processing during comprehension in Wernicke's aphasia: An N400 and Phonological Mapping Negativity Study.

    PubMed

    Robson, Holly; Pilkington, Emma; Evans, Louise; DeLuca, Vincent; Keidel, James L

    2017-06-01

    Comprehension impairments in Wernicke's aphasia are thought to result from a combination of impaired phonological and semantic processes. However, the relationship between these cognitive processes and language comprehension has only been inferred through offline neuropsychological tasks. This study used ERPs to investigate phonological and semantic processing during online single word comprehension. EEG was recorded in a group of Wernicke's aphasia n=8 and control participants n=10 while performing a word-picture verification task. The N400 and Phonological Mapping Negativity/Phonological Mismatch Negativity (PMN) event-related potential components were investigated as an index of semantic and phonological processing, respectively. Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia displayed reduced and inconsistent N400 and PMN effects in comparison to control participants. Reduced N400 effects in the WA group were simulated in the control group by artificially degrading speech perception. Correlation analyses in the Wernicke's aphasia group found that PMN but not N400 amplitude was associated with behavioural word-picture verification performance. The results confirm impairments at both phonological and semantic stages of comprehension in Wernicke's aphasia. However, reduced N400 responses in Wernicke's aphasia are at least partially attributable to earlier phonological processing impairments. The results provide further support for the traditional model of Wernicke's aphasia which claims a causative link between phonological processing and language comprehension impairments. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  12. Phonological Priming with Nonwords in Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Brooks, Patricia J.; Seiger-Gardner, Liat; Obeid, Rita; MacWhinney, Brian

    2015-01-01

    Purpose: The cross-modal picture-word interference task is used to examine contextual effects on spoken-word production. Previous work has documented lexical-phonological interference in children with specific language impairment (SLI) when a related distractor (e.g., bell) occurs prior to a picture to be named (e.g., a bed). In the current study,…

  13. Plural Formation by Heritage Bilinguals of Spanish: A Phonological Analysis of a Morphological Variable

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Campbell, Tasha M.

    2017-01-01

    This dissertation explores Spanish nominal plural formation from a morphophonological perspective. The primary objective is to better understand heritage bilinguals' (HBs') phonological categorization of the morphological element of number in their heritage language. This is done by way of picture-naming elicitation tasks of consonant-final nouns…

  14. Learning to Fail in Aphasia: An Investigation of Error Learning in Naming

    PubMed Central

    Middleton, Erica L.; Schwartz, Myrna F.

    2013-01-01

    Purpose To determine if the naming impairment in aphasia is influenced by error learning and if error learning is related to type of retrieval strategy. Method Nine participants with aphasia and ten neurologically-intact controls named familiar proper noun concepts. When experiencing tip-of-the-tongue naming failure (TOT) in an initial TOT-elicitation phase, participants were instructed to adopt phonological or semantic self-cued retrieval strategies. In the error learning manipulation, items evoking TOT states during TOT-elicitation were randomly assigned to a short or long time condition where participants were encouraged to continue to try to retrieve the name for either 20 seconds (short interval) or 60 seconds (long). The incidence of TOT on the same items was measured on a post test after 48-hours. Error learning was defined as a higher rate of recurrent TOTs (TOT at both TOT-elicitation and post test) for items assigned to the long (versus short) time condition. Results In the phonological condition, participants with aphasia showed error learning whereas controls showed a pattern opposite to error learning. There was no evidence for error learning in the semantic condition for either group. Conclusion Error learning is operative in aphasia, but dependent on the type of strategy employed during naming failure. PMID:23816662

  15. Phonological Priming in Children with Hearing Loss: Effect of Speech Mode, Fidelity, and Lexical Status

    PubMed Central

    Jerger, Susan; Tye-Murray, Nancy; Damian, Markus F.; Abdi, Hervé

    2016-01-01

    Objectives Our research determined 1) how phonological priming of picture naming was affected by the mode (auditory-visual [AV] vs auditory), fidelity (intact vs non-intact auditory onsets), and lexical status (words vs nonwords) of speech stimuli in children with prelingual sensorineural hearing impairment (CHI) vs. children with normal hearing (CNH); and 2) how the degree of hearing impairment (HI), auditory word recognition, and age influenced results in CHI. Note that some of our AV stimuli were not the traditional bimodal input but instead they consisted of an intact consonant/rhyme in the visual track coupled to a non-intact onset/rhyme in the auditory track. Example stimuli for the word bag are: 1) AV: intact visual (b/ag) coupled to non-intact auditory (−b/ag) and 2) Auditory: static face coupled to the same non-intact auditory (−b/ag). Our question was whether the intact visual speech would “restore or fill-in” the non-intact auditory speech in which case performance for the same auditory stimulus would differ depending upon the presence/absence of visual speech. Design Participants were 62 CHI and 62 CNH whose ages had a group-mean and -distribution akin to that in the CHI group. Ages ranged from 4 to 14 years. All participants met the following criteria: 1) spoke English as a native language, 2) communicated successfully aurally/orally, and 3) had no diagnosed or suspected disabilities other than HI and its accompanying verbal problems. The phonological priming of picture naming was assessed with the multi-modal picture word task. Results Both CHI and CNH showed greater phonological priming from high than low fidelity stimuli and from AV than auditory speech. These overall fidelity and mode effects did not differ in the CHI vs. CNH—thus these CHI appeared to have sufficiently well specified phonological onset representations to support priming and visual speech did not appear to be a disproportionately important source of the CHI

  16. The nature and treatment of phonological text agraphia.

    PubMed

    Beeson, Pélagie M; Rising, Kindle; DeMarco, Andrew T; Foley, Taylor Howard; Rapcsak, Steven Z

    2018-06-01

    Phonological alexia and agraphia are written language disorders characterised by disproportionate difficulty reading and spelling nonwords in comparison to real words. In phonological alexia, it has been shown that, despite relatively accurate reading of words in isolation, text-level reading deficits are often marked and persistent. Specifically, some individuals demonstrate difficulty reading functors and affixes in sentences, a profile referred to as phonological text alexia. In this paper, we demonstrate an analogous manifestation of the phonological impairment on text-level writing and suggest the term "phonological text agraphia". We examined four individuals with phonological alexia/agraphia who also showed disproportionate difficulty writing well-formed sentences in comparison to their grammatical competence in spoken utterances. Implementation of a phonological treatment protocol resulted in significantly improved sublexical phonology skills as well as improvements in grammatical accuracy of written narratives. These findings support the notion of a common phonological impairment underlying nonword reading/spelling deficits and sentence-level difficulties.

  17. Incremental Phonological Encoding during Unscripted Sentence Production

    PubMed Central

    Jaeger, T. Florian; Furth, Katrina; Hilliard, Caitlin

    2012-01-01

    We investigate phonological encoding during unscripted sentence production, focusing on the effect of phonological overlap on phonological encoding. Previous work on this question has almost exclusively employed isolated word production or highly scripted multi-word production. These studies have led to conflicting results: some studies found that phonological overlap between two words facilitates phonological encoding, while others found inhibitory effects. One worry with many of these paradigms is that they involve processes that are not typical to everyday language use, which calls into question to what extent their findings speak to the architectures and mechanisms underlying language production. We present a paradigm to investigate the consequences of phonological overlap between words in a sentence while leaving speakers much of the lexical and structural choices typical in everyday language use. Adult native speakers of English described events in short video clips. We annotated the presence of disfluencies and the speech rate at various points throughout the sentence, as well as the constituent order. We find that phonological overlap has an inhibitory effect on phonological encoding. Specifically, if adjacent content words share their phonological onset (e.g., hand the hammer), they are preceded by production difficulty, as reflected in fluency and speech rate. We also find that this production difficulty affects speakers’ constituent order preferences during grammatical encoding. We discuss our results and previous works to isolate the properties of other paradigms that resulted in facilitatory or inhibitory results. The data from our paradigm also speak to questions about the scope of phonological planning in unscripted speech and as to whether phonological and grammatical encoding interact. PMID:23162515

  18. Phonological Planning during Sentence Production: Beyond the Verb.

    PubMed

    Schnur, Tatiana T

    2011-01-01

    The current study addresses the extent of phonological planning during spontaneous sentence production. Previous work shows that at articulation, phonological encoding occurs for entire phrases, but encoding beyond the initial phrase may be due to the syntactic relevance of the verb in planning the utterance. I conducted three experiments to investigate whether phonological planning crosses multiple grammatical phrase boundaries (as defined by the number of lexical heads of phrase) within a single phonological phrase. Using the picture-word interference paradigm, I found in two separate experiments a significant phonological facilitation effect to both the verb and noun of sentences like "He opens the gate." I also altered the frequency of the direct object and found longer utterance initiation times for sentences ending with a low-frequency vs. high-frequency object offering further support that the direct object was phonologically encoded at the time of utterance initiation. That phonological information for post-verbal elements was activated suggests that the grammatical importance of the verb does not restrict the extent of phonological planning. These results suggest that the phonological phrase is unit of planning, where all elements within a phonological phrase are encoded before articulation. Thus, consistent with other action sequencing behavior, there is significant phonological planning ahead in sentence production.

  19. Are stimulus-response rules represented phonologically for task-set preparation and maintenance?

    PubMed

    van 't Wout, Félice; Lavric, Aureliu; Monsell, Stephen

    2013-09-01

    Accounts of task-set control generally assume that the current task's stimulus-response (S-R) rules must be elevated to a privileged state of activation. How are they represented in this state? In 3 task-cuing experiments, we tested the hypothesis that phonological working memory is used to represent S-R rules for task-set control by getting participants to switch between 2 sets of arbitrary S-R rules and manipulating the articulatory duration (Experiment 1) or phonological similarity (Experiments 2 and 3) of the names of the stimulus terms. The task cue specified which of 2 objects (Experiment 1) or consonants (Experiment 2) in a display to identify with a key press. In Experiment 3, participants switched between identifying an object/consonant and its color/visual texture. After practice, neither the duration nor the similarity of the stimulus terms had detectable effects on overall performance, task-switch cost, or its reduction with preparation. Only in the initial single-task training blocks was phonological similarity a significant handicap. Hence, beyond a very transient role, there is no evidence that (declarative) phonological working memory makes a functional contribution to representing S-R rules for task-set control, arguably because once learned, they are represented in nonlinguistic procedural working memory. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

  20. Neural mechanisms underlying the facilitation of naming in aphasia using a semantic task: an fMRI study

    PubMed Central

    2012-01-01

    Background Previous attempts to investigate the effects of semantic tasks on picture naming in both healthy controls and people with aphasia have typically been confounded by inclusion of the phonological word form of the target item. As a result, it is difficult to isolate any facilitatory effects of a semantically-focused task to either lexical-semantic or phonological processing. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study examined the neurological mechanisms underlying short-term (within minutes) and long-term (within days) facilitation of naming from a semantic task that did not include the phonological word form, in both participants with aphasia and age-matched controls. Results Behavioral results showed that a semantic task that did not include the phonological word form can successfully facilitate subsequent picture naming in both healthy controls and individuals with aphasia. The whole brain neuroimaging results for control participants identified a repetition enhancement effect in the short-term, with modulation of activity found in regions that have not traditionally been associated with semantic processing, such as the right lingual gyrus (extending to the precuneus) and the left inferior occipital gyrus (extending to the fusiform gyrus). In contrast, the participants with aphasia showed significant differences in activation over both the short- and the long-term for facilitated items, predominantly within either left hemisphere regions linked to semantic processing or their right hemisphere homologues. Conclusions For control participants in this study, the short-lived facilitation effects of a prior semantic task that did not include the phonological word form were primarily driven by object priming and episodic memory mechanisms. However, facilitation effects appeared to engage a predominantly semantic network in participants with aphasia over both the short- and the long-term. The findings of the present study also suggest that right

  1. Brand names of Portuguese medication: understanding the importance of their linguistic structure and regulatory issues.

    PubMed

    Pires, Carla; Vigário, Marina; Cavaco, Afonso

    2015-08-01

    Among other regulatory requirements, medicine brands should be composed of single names without abbreviations to prevent errors in prescription of medication. The purposes of the study were to investigate the compliance of a sam ple of Portuguese medicine brand names with Portuguese pharmaceutical regulations. This includes identifying their basic linguistic characteristics and comparing these features and their frequency of occurrence with benchmark values of the colloquial or informal language. A sample of 474 brand names was selected. Names were analyzed using manual (visual analyses) and computer methods (FreP - Frequency Patterns of Phonological Objects in Portuguese and MS word). A significant number of names (61.3%) failed to comply with the Portuguese phonologic system (related to the sound of words) and/or the spelling system (related to the written form of words) contained more than one word, comprised a high proportion of infrequent syllable types or stress patterns and included abbreviations. The results suggest that some of the brand names of Portuguese medication should be reevaluated, and that regulation on this issue should be enforced and updated, taking into consideration specific linguistic and spelling codes.

  2. Gradient Weight in Phonology

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ryan, Kevin Michael

    2011-01-01

    Research on syllable weight in generative phonology has focused almost exclusively on systems in which weight is treated as an ordinal hierarchy of clearly delineated categories (e.g. light and heavy). As I discuss, canonical weight-sensitive phenomena in phonology, including quantitative meter and quantity-sensitive stress, can also treat weight…

  3. Learning Novel Phonological Representations in Developmental Dyslexia: Associations with Basic Auditory Processing of Rise Time and Phonological Awareness

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Thomson, Jennifer M.; Goswami, Usha

    2010-01-01

    Across languages, children with developmental dyslexia are known to have impaired lexical phonological representations. Here, we explore associations between learning new phonological representations, phonological awareness, and sensitivity to amplitude envelope onsets (rise time). We show that individual differences in learning novel phonological…

  4. The relationship between phonological memory, receptive vocabulary, and fast mapping in young children with specific language impairment.

    PubMed

    Gray, Shelley

    2006-10-01

    This study assessed the fast mapping performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI) across the preschool to kindergarten age span in relation to their phonological memory and vocabulary development. Fifty-three children diagnosed with SLI and 53 children with normal language (NL) matched for age and gender (30 three-year-olds, 18 four-year-olds, 28 five-year-olds, and 30 six-year-olds) participated. Children's phonological memory was assessed using nonword repetition and digit span tasks. Receptive vocabulary was assessed using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III. Children learned the names for 8 objects during 2 fast mapping tasks. Overall, the NL group demonstrated significantly better performance on phonological memory and vocabulary measures across the age span; however, performance on the fast mapping task differed significantly only at age 5. Phonological memory and existing receptive vocabulary did not predict fast mapping ability. The phonological memory skills of preschoolers with NL and SLI followed a similar developmental pattern, but the SLI group consistently scored significantly lower than the NL group. Overall, the NL group showed significantly better receptive vocabulary, with evidence that between-group differences increased at age 6. Neither short-term phonological memory nor receptive vocabulary predicted fast mapping comprehension or production performance, even though both have been shown to correlate with later stages of word learning.

  5. Metrical Phonology and SLA.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tice, Bradley S.

    Metrical phonology, a linguistic process of phonological stress assessment and diagrammatic simplification of sentence and word stress, is discussed as it is found in the English language with the intention that it may be used in second language instruction. Stress is defined by its physical and acoustical correlates, and the principles of…

  6. Orthographic and phonological contributions to reading development: tracking developmental trajectories using masked priming.

    PubMed

    Ziegler, Johannes C; Bertrand, Daisy; Lété, Bernard; Grainger, Jonathan

    2014-04-01

    The present study used a variant of masked priming to track the development of 2 marker effects of orthographic and phonological processing from Grade 1 through Grade 5 in a cross-sectional study. Pseudohomophone (PsH) priming served as a marker for phonological processing, whereas transposed-letter (TL) priming was a marker for coarse-grained orthographic processing. The results revealed a clear developmental picture. First, the PsH priming effect was significant and remained stable across development, suggesting that phonology not only plays an important role in early reading development but continues to exert a robust influence throughout reading development. This finding challenges the view that more advanced readers should rely less on phonological information than younger readers. Second, the TL priming effect increased monotonically with grade level and reading age, which suggests greater reliance on coarse-grained orthographic coding as children become better readers. Thus, TL priming effects seem to be a good marker effect for children's ability to use coarse-grained orthographic coding to speed up direct lexical access in alphabetic languages. The results were predicted by the dual-route model of orthographic processing, which suggests that direct orthographic access is achieved through coarse-grained orthographic coding that tolerates some degree of flexibility in letter order. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

  7. Can a bird brain do phonology?

    PubMed Central

    Samuels, Bridget D.

    2015-01-01

    A number of recent studies have revealed correspondences between song- and language-related neural structures, pathways, and gene expression in humans and songbirds. Analyses of vocal learning, song structure, and the distribution of song elements have similarly revealed a remarkable number of shared characteristics with human speech. This article reviews recent developments in the understanding of these issues with reference to the phonological phenomena observed in human language. This investigation suggests that birds possess a host of abilities necessary for human phonological computation, as evidenced by behavioral, neuroanatomical, and molecular genetic studies. Vocal-learning birds therefore present an excellent model for studying some areas of human phonology, though differences in the primitives of song and language as well as the absence of a human-like morphosyntax make human phonology differ from birdsong phonology in crucial ways. PMID:26284006

  8. Rapid Serial Naming Is a Unique Predictor of Spelling in Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Savage, Robert; Pillay, Vanitha; Melidona, Santo

    2008-01-01

    Some previous research has shown strong associations between spelling ability and rapid automatic naming (RAN) after controls for phonological processing and nonsense-word reading ability, consistent with the double-deficit hypothesis in reading and spelling. Previous studies did not, however, control for nonsense-word spelling ability before…

  9. [Phonological awareness improvement in primary school students].

    PubMed

    Cárnio, Maria Sílvia; dos Santos, Daniele

    2005-01-01

    Phonological awareness in primary school students. To verify the improvement of phonological awareness in primary school students after a speech and language stimulation program. 20 students with the worst results in the first literacy exam were selected. Phonological awareness tests were analyzed at the beginning and at the end of the stimulation program. Most of the subjects demonstrated to have a notion about phonological awareness activities. Students demonstrated improvement, suggesting the effectiveness of the program.

  10. The Effects of Training in Music and Phonological Skills on Phonological Awareness in 4- to 6-Year-Old Children of Immigrant Families

    PubMed Central

    Patscheke, Hanne; Degé, Franziska; Schwarzer, Gudrun

    2016-01-01

    Children of immigrant families often have great difficulties with language and disadvantages in schooling. Phonological problems appear especially common. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine whether music training has a positive effect on the phonological awareness in these children. The effects of a music program were compared with an established phonological skills program and with a sports control group. Preschoolers of immigrants (19 boys, 20 girls) were randomly assigned to one of the three groups. All groups were trained three times a week for 20 min each, over a period of 14 weeks. Phonological awareness was tested prior to the beginning of the training and after the training phase. At the pre-test, no differences between the groups were found regarding phonological awareness and control variables (age, gender, intelligence, socioeconomic status, language background, music experience). At the post-test, the music group and the phonological skills group showed a significant increase in phonological awareness of large phonological units. The effect size of the music training was larger compared to the phonological skills program. In contrast, the sports control group showed no significant increase in phonological awareness. The current results indicate that a music program could be used as an additional opportunity to promote phonological skills in children of immigrant families. PMID:27818643

  11. Phonological Representations and Early Literacy in Chinese

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kidd, Joanna C.; Shum, Kathy Kar-Man; Ho, Connie Suk-Han; Au, Terry Kit-fong

    2015-01-01

    Phonological processing skills predict early reading development, but what underlies developing phonological processing skills? Phonological representations of 140 native Cantonese-speaking Chinese children (age 4-10) were assessed with speech gating, mispronunciation detection, and nonword repetition tasks; their nonverbal IQ, reading, and…

  12. Phonological Awareness Training and Short-Term Working Memory: Clinical Implications.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gillam, Ronald B.; van Kleeck, Anne

    1996-01-01

    This article finds that two aspects of phonological working memory, phonological coding and phonological recoding, appear to be important elements in the relationship between phonological working memory and phonological awareness. It suggests an approach to training in phonological awareness and reports an intervention study in which phonological…

  13. Subtyping Children with Speech Sound Disorders by Endophenotypes

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lewis, Barbara A.; Avrich, Allison A.; Freebairn, Lisa A.; Taylor, H. Gerry; Iyengar, Sudha K.; Stein, Catherine M.

    2011-01-01

    Purpose: The present study examined associations of 5 endophenotypes (i.e., measurable skills that are closely associated with speech sound disorders and are useful in detecting genetic influences on speech sound production), oral motor skills, phonological memory, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and speeded naming, with 3 clinical criteria…

  14. DISFLUENCY PATTERNS AND PHONOLOGICAL SKILLS NEAR STUTTERING ONSET

    PubMed Central

    Gregg, Brent Andrew; Yairi, Ehud

    2012-01-01

    There is a substantial amount of literature reporting the incidence of phonological difficulties to be higher for children who stutter when compared to normally fluent children, suggesting a link between stuttering and phonology. In view of this, the purpose of the investigation was to determine whether, among children who stutter, there are relationships between phonological skills and the initial characteristics of stuttering. That is, close to the onset of stuttering, are there differences in specific stuttering patterns between children who exhibit minimal and moderate phonological deviations in terms of frequency of stuttering and length of stuttering events? Twenty-nine preschool children near the onset of stuttering, ranging in age from 29 to 49 months, with a mean of 39.17 months, were divided into two groups based on the level of phonological ability: minimal phonological deviations and moderate phonological deviations. The children’s level of stuttering-like disfluencies was examined. Results revealed no statistically significant differences in the stuttering characteristics of the two groups near onset, calling into the question the nature of the stuttering-phonology link. PMID:22939524

  15. Phonological awareness and writing skills in children with Down syndrome.

    PubMed

    Lavra-Pinto, Bárbara de; Lamprecht, Regina Ritter

    2010-01-01

    Down syndrome, phonological awareness, writing and working memory. to evaluate the phonological awareness of Brazilian children with Down syndrome; to analyze the relationship between the writing hypothesis and the phonological awareness scores of the participants; to compare the performance of children with Down syndrome to that of children with typical development according to the Phonological Awareness: Tool for sequential evaluation (PHONATSE), using the writing hypothesis as a matching criteria; to verify the correlation between the phonological awareness measurements and the phonological working memory. a group of eleven children aged between 7 and 14 years (average: 9 y 10 m) was selected for the study. Phonological awareness was evaluated using the PHONATSE. The phonological working memory was evaluated through an instrument developed by the researcher. all subjects presented measurable levels of phonological awareness through the PHONATSE. The phonological awareness scores and the writing hypothesis presented a significant positive association. The performance of children with Down syndrome was significantly lower than children with typical development who presented the same writing hypothesis. Measurements of phonological awareness and phonological working memory presented significant positive correlations. the phonological awareness of Brazilian children with Down syndrome can be evaluated through the PHONATSE. Syllable awareness improves with literacy, whereas phonemic awareness seems to result from written language learning. The phonological working memory influences the performance of children with Down syndrome in phonological awareness tasks.

  16. Lexical access via letter naming in a profoundly alexic and anomic patient: a treatment study.

    PubMed

    Greenwald, M L; Gonzalez Rothi, L J

    1998-11-01

    We report the results of a letter naming treatment designed to facilitate letter-by-letter reading in an aphasic patient with no reading ability. Patient M.R.'s anomia for written letters reflected two loci of impairment within visual naming: impaired letter activation from print (a deficit commonly seen in pure alexic patients who read letter by letter) and impaired access to phonology via semantics (documented in a severe multimodality anomia). Remarkably, M.R. retained an excellent ability to pronounce orally spelled words, demonstrating that abstract letter identities could be activated normally via spoken letter names, and also that lexical phonological representations were intact when accessed via spoken letter names. M.R.'s training in oral naming of written letters resulted in significant improvement in her oral naming of trained letters. Importantly, as M.R.'s letter naming improved, she became able to employ letter-by-letter reading as a compensatory strategy for oral word reading. M.R.'s success in letter naming and letter-by-letter reading suggests that other patients with a similar pattern of spared and impaired cognitive abilities may benefit from a similar treatment. Moreover, this study highlights the value of testing the pronunciation of orally spelled words in localizing the source of prelexical reading impairment and in predicting the functional outcome of treatment for impaired letter activation in reading.

  17. Early Contribution of Phonological Awareness and Later Influence of Phonological Memory throughout Reading Acquisition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nithart, Christelle; Demont, Elisabeth; Metz-Lutz, Marie-Noelle; Majerus, Steve; Poncelet, Martine; Leybaert, Jacqueline

    2011-01-01

    The acquisition of reading skills is known to rely on early phonological abilities, but only a few studies have investigated the independent contribution of the different steps involved in phonological processing. This 1-year longitudinal study, spanning the initial year of reading instruction, aimed at specifying the development of phonological…

  18. Working Memory, Short-Term Memory, and Naming Speed as Predictors of Children's Mathematical Performance

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Swanson, Lee; Kim, Kenny

    2007-01-01

    Working memory (WM) has been associated with the acquisition of arithmetic skills, however, the components of WM that underlie this acquisition have not been explored. This study explored the contribution of two WM systems (the phonological loop and the central executive) to mathematical performance in young children. The results showed that a…

  19. The Dynamics of Phonological Planning

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Roon, Kevin D.

    2013-01-01

    This dissertation proposes a dynamical computational model of the timecourse of phonological parameter setting. In the model, phonological representations embrace phonetic detail, with phonetic parameters represented as activation fields that evolve over time and determine the specific parameter settings of a planned utterance. Existing models of…

  20. The influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation in spoken word production.

    PubMed

    Li, Chuchu; Wang, Min

    2017-08-01

    Three sets of experiments using the picture naming tasks with the form preparation paradigm investigated the influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation unit in spoken word production in native Mandarin-speaking children. Participants included kindergarten children who have not received formal literacy instruction, Grade 1 children who are comparatively more exposed to the alphabetic pinyin system and have very limited Chinese character knowledge, Grades 2 and 4 children who have better character knowledge and more exposure to characters, and skilled adult readers who have the most advanced character knowledge and most exposure to characters. Only Grade 1 children showed the form preparation effect in the same initial consonant condition (i.e., when a list of target words shared the initial consonant). Both Grade 4 children and adults showed the preparation effect when the initial syllable (but not tone) among target words was shared. Kindergartners and Grade 2 children only showed the preparation effect when the initial syllable including tonal information was shared. These developmental changes in phonological preparation could be interpreted as a joint function of the modification of phonological representation and attentional shift. Extensive pinyin experience encourages speakers to attend to and select onset phoneme in phonological preparation, whereas extensive character experience encourages speakers to prepare spoken words in syllables.

  1. Addressing Phonological Questions with Ultrasound

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Davidson, Lisa

    2005-01-01

    Ultrasound can be used to address unresolved questions in phonological theory. To date, some studies have shown that results from ultrasound imaging can shed light on how differences in phonological elements are implemented. Phenomena that have been investigated include transitional schwa, vowel coalescence, and transparent vowels. A study of…

  2. Visual Processing Deficits in Children with Slow RAN Performance

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Stainthorp, Rhona; Stuart, Morag; Powell, Daisy; Quinlan, Philip; Garwood, Holly

    2010-01-01

    Two groups of 8- to 10-year-olds differing in rapid automatized naming speed but matched for age, verbal and nonverbal ability, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visual acuity participated in four experiments investigating early visual processing. As low RAN children had significantly slower simple reaction times (SRT) this was…

  3. Learning to Read in Arabic: The Long and Winding Road

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Asaad, Hanan; Eviatar, Zohar

    2014-01-01

    We examined the relative contribution of visual abilities, accessibility of letter names, and phonological awareness, to text reading speed and accuracy of Arabic in first, third, and fifth grades. The results revealed that for all levels of skill, phonological awareness contributes significantly to reading accuracy, to the same degree. For…

  4. Extracting Phonological Patterns for L2 Word Learning: The Effect of Poor Phonological Awareness

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hu, Chieh-Fang

    2014-01-01

    An implicit word learning paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that children who came to the task of L2 vocabulary acquisition with poorer L1 phonological awareness (PA) are less capable of extracting phonological patterns from L2 and thus have difficulties capitalizing on this knowledge to support L2 vocabulary learning. A group of…

  5. Bidirectional Relations between Phonological Awareness and Letter Knowledge in Preschool Revisited: A Growth Curve Analysis of the Relation between Two Code-Related Skills

    PubMed Central

    Lerner, Matthew D.; Lonigan, Christopher J.

    2017-01-01

    Despite the importance of phonological awareness for the development of reading in alphabetic languages, little attention has been paid to its developmental origins. In this study, dual-process, latent growth models were used to examine patterns of bidirectional relations between letter knowledge and phonological awareness during preschool. The sample comprised 358 children (mean age = 48.60 months, SD = 7.26). Growth models were used to quantify the unique longitudinal relations between the initial level of each skill and growth in the other skill during the preschool year, after controlling for initial level of the same skill, vocabulary, age, and growth in the code-related skill being used as a predictor. Letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness were bi-directionally related; the initial level of each uniquely predicted growth in the other. Initial letter-sound knowledge and phonological awareness growth were not uniquely related, and vocabulary was not related to growth in phonological awareness. These findings extend the evidence of the relation between letter knowledge and phonological awareness to supra-phonemic tasks, indicating that this bidirectional relation begins at an earlier point in the development of phonological awareness than previously reported. In addition, these findings help to rule out general growth in letter knowledge and phonological awareness as an alternative explanation for the bidirectional relation between these two code-related skills. PMID:26745710

  6. Phonological awareness and oral language proficiency in learning to read English among Chinese kindergarten children in Hong Kong.

    PubMed

    Yeung, Susanna S; Chan, Carol K K

    2013-12-01

    Learning to read is very challenging for Hong Kong children who learn English as a second language (ESL), as they must acquire two very different writing systems, beginning at the age of three. Few studies have examined the role of phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels, oral language proficiency, and L1 tone awareness in L2 English reading among Hong Kong ESL kindergarteners. This study aims to investigate L1 and L2 phonological awareness and oral language proficiency as predictors of English reading among children with Chinese as L1. One hundred and sixty-one typically developing children with a mean age of 5.16 (SD=.35) selected from seven preschools in Hong Kong. Participants were assessed for English reading, English and Chinese phonological awareness at different levels, English oral language skills, and letter naming ability. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that both oral language proficiency and phonological awareness measures significantly predicted L2 word reading, when statistically controlled for age and general intelligence. Among various phonological awareness units, L2 phonemic awareness was the best predictor of L2 word reading. Cross-language transfer was shown with L1 phonological awareness at the tone level, uniquely predicting L2 word reading. The present findings show the important role of phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels (rime and phoneme) and oral language proficiency in the course of L2 reading development in Chinese ESL learners. The significant contribution of L1 tone awareness to L2 reading suggests that phonological sensitivity is a general competence that ESL children need to acquire in early years. The findings have significant implications for understanding L2 reading development and curriculum development. © 2012 The British Psychological Society.

  7. Phonology without universal grammar

    PubMed Central

    Archangeli, Diana; Pulleyblank, Douglas

    2015-01-01

    The question of identifying the properties of language that are specific human linguistic abilities, i.e., Universal Grammar, lies at the center of linguistic research. This paper argues for a largely Emergent Grammar in phonology, taking as the starting point that memory, categorization, attention to frequency, and the creation of symbolic systems are all nonlinguistic characteristics of the human mind. The articulation patterns of American English rhotics illustrate categorization and systems; the distribution of vowels in Bantu vowel harmony uses frequencies of particular sequences to argue against Universal Grammar and in favor of Emergent Grammar; prefix allomorphy in Esimbi illustrates the Emergent symbolic system integrating phonological and morphological generalizations. The Esimbi case has been treated as an example of phonological opacity in a Universal Grammar account; the Emergent analysis resolves the pattern without opacity concerns. PMID:26388791

  8. The Universality of Acquisitional Phonology.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Salus, Peter H.

    This paper is concerned with the Aristotelian notion of "universal" as applied to phonological phenomena. It is claimed that speech production in children and adults, in normal and deviant speakers, and in a variety of languages, can all be described according to the same universal phonological rules which constitute the universal process of…

  9. The roles of family history of dyslexia, language, speech production and phonological processing in predicting literacy progress.

    PubMed

    Carroll, Julia M; Mundy, Ian R; Cunningham, Anna J

    2014-09-01

    It is well established that speech, language and phonological skills are closely associated with literacy, and that children with a family risk of dyslexia (FRD) tend to show deficits in each of these areas in the preschool years. This paper examines what the relationships are between FRD and these skills, and whether deficits in speech, language and phonological processing fully account for the increased risk of dyslexia in children with FRD. One hundred and fifty-three 4-6-year-old children, 44 of whom had FRD, completed a battery of speech, language, phonology and literacy tasks. Word reading and spelling were retested 6 months later, and text reading accuracy and reading comprehension were tested 3 years later. The children with FRD were at increased risk of developing difficulties in reading accuracy, but not reading comprehension. Four groups were compared: good and poor readers with and without FRD. In most cases good readers outperformed poor readers regardless of family history, but there was an effect of family history on naming and nonword repetition regardless of literacy outcome, suggesting a role for speech production skills as an endophenotype of dyslexia. Phonological processing predicted spelling, while language predicted text reading accuracy and comprehension. FRD was a significant additional predictor of reading and spelling after controlling for speech production, language and phonological processing, suggesting that children with FRD show additional difficulties in literacy that cannot be fully explained in terms of their language and phonological skills. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  10. Verbal fluency in male and female schizophrenia patients: Different patterns of association with processing speed, working memory span, and clinical symptoms.

    PubMed

    Brébion, Gildas; Stephan-Otto, Christian; Ochoa, Susana; Nieto, Lourdes; Contel, Montserrat; Usall, Judith

    2018-01-01

    Decreased processing speed in schizophrenia patients has been identified as a major impairment factor in various neuropsychological domains. Working memory span has been found to be involved in several deep or effortful cognitive processes. We investigated the impact that these 2 cognitive functions may have on phonological and semantic fluency in schizophrenia patients and healthy participants. Fifty-five patients with schizophrenia and 60 healthy participants were administered a neuropsychological battery including phonological and semantic fluency, working memory, and cognitive and motor speed. Regression analyses revealed that motor speed was related to phonological fluency in female patients, whereas cognitive speed was related to semantic fluency in male patients. In addition, working memory span was related to verbal fluency in women from both the patient and the healthy control groups. Decreased processing speed, but not decreased working memory span, accounted for the verbal fluency deficit in patients. Verbal fluency was inversely related to attention deficit in female patients and to negative symptoms in male patients. Decreased processing speed may be the main factor in verbal fluency impairment of patients. Further, the cognitive and clinical predictors of verbal fluency efficiency are different in men and women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

  11. Effect Size in Clinical Phonology

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gierut, Judith A.; Morrisette, Michele L.

    2011-01-01

    The purpose of this article is to motivate the use of effect size (ES) for single-subject research in clinical phonology, with an eye towards meta-analyses of treatment effects for children with phonological disorders. Standard mean difference (SMD) is introduced and illustrated as one ES well suited to the multiple baseline (MBL) design and…

  12. Brain dynamics associated with face-naming and the tip-of-the-tongue state.

    PubMed

    Galdo-Álvarez, Santiago; Lindín, Mónica; Díaz, Fernando

    2011-04-01

    Active brain areas and their temporal sequence of activation during the successful retrieval and naming of famous faces (KNOW) and during the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state were studied by means of low resolution electromagnetic tomographic analysis (LORETA) applied to event-related potentials. The results provide evidence that adequate activation of a neural network during the first 500 ms following presentation of the photograph--mainly involving the posterior temporal region, the insula, lateral and medial prefrontal areas and the medial temporal lobe--is associated with successful retrieval of lexical-phonological information about the person's name. Significant differences between conditions were observed in the 538-698-ms interval; specifically there was greater activation of the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC) towards the supplementary motor area (SMA) in the KNOW than in the TOT condition, possibly in relation to the motor response and as a consequence of the successful retrieval of lexical-phonological information about the person.

  13. Analyzing clinical phonological data using Phon

    PubMed Central

    McAllister Byun, Tara

    2016-01-01

    In this paper, we describe how Phon, a software program for the transcription and analysis of phonological data, can be applied to facilitate clinical phonological analyses. We begin with a summary of the types of analyses that are frequently used in the assessment and management of speech sound disorders. We then discuss challenges inherent to the transcription and analysis of clinical phonological data. For each challenge, we discuss solutions currently available within Phon, and offer an outlook on future methodological and technical developments in the area of clinical phonology. This paper includes a step-by-step introduction to Phon suitable for readers who lack previous experience with the software. We conclude with a discussion of data sharing and its vital role in advancing research and intervention practices in the area of speech development and disorders. PMID:27111269

  14. K-SPAN: A lexical database of Korean surface phonetic forms and phonological neighborhood density statistics.

    PubMed

    Holliday, Jeffrey J; Turnbull, Rory; Eychenne, Julien

    2017-10-01

    This article presents K-SPAN (Korean Surface Phonetics and Neighborhoods), a database of surface phonetic forms and several measures of phonological neighborhood density for 63,836 Korean words. Currently publicly available Korean corpora are limited by the fact that they only provide orthographic representations in Hangeul, which is problematic since phonetic forms in Korean cannot be reliably predicted from orthographic forms. We describe the method used to derive the surface phonetic forms from a publicly available orthographic corpus of Korean, and report on several statistics calculated using this database; namely, segment unigram frequencies, which are compared to previously reported results, along with segment-based and syllable-based neighborhood density statistics for three types of representation: an "orthographic" form, which is a quasi-phonological representation, a "conservative" form, which maintains all known contrasts, and a "modern" form, which represents the pronunciation of contemporary Seoul Korean. These representations are rendered in an ASCII-encoded scheme, which allows users to query the corpus without having to read Korean orthography, and permits the calculation of a wide range of phonological measures.

  15. Phonological Words and Stuttering on Function Words

    PubMed Central

    Au-Yeung, James; Howell, Peter; Pilgrim, Lesley

    2007-01-01

    Stuttering on function words was examined in 51 people who stutter. The people who stutter were subdivided into young (2 to 6 years), middle (6 to 9 years), and older (9 to 12 years) child groups; teenagers (13 to 18 years); and adults (20 to 40 years). As reported by previous researchers, children up to about age 9 stuttered more on function words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs), whereas older people tended to stutter more on content words (nouns, main verbs, adverbs, adjectives). Function words in early positions in utterances, again as reported elsewhere, were more likely to be stuttered than function words at later positions in an utterance. This was most apparent for the younger groups of speakers. For the remaining analyses, utterances were segmented into phonological words on the basis of Selkirk’s work (1984). Stuttering rate was higher when function words occurred in early phonological word positions than other phonological word positions whether the phonological word appeared in initial position in an utterance or not. Stuttering rate was highly dependent on whether the function word occurred before or after the single content word allowed in Selkirk’s (1984) phonological words. This applied, once again, whether the phonological word was utterance-initial or not. It is argued that stuttering of function words before their content word in phonological words in young speakers is used as a delaying tactic when the forthcoming content word is not prepared for articulation. PMID:9771625

  16. Phonological Awareness and Speech Comprehensibility: An Exploratory Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Venkatagiri, H. S.; Levis, John M.

    2007-01-01

    This study examined whether differences in phonological awareness were related to differences in speech comprehensibility. Seventeen adults who learned English as a foreign language (EFL) in academic settings completed 14 tests of phonological awareness that measured their explicit knowledge of English phonological structures, and three tests of…

  17. Cross-linguistic transfer effects after phonologically based cognate therapy in a case of multilingual specific language impairment (SLI).

    PubMed

    Kambanaros, Maria; Michaelides, Michalis; Grohmann, Kleanthes K

    2017-05-01

    Clinicians globally recognize as exceptionally challenging the development of effective intervention practices for bi- or multilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). Therapy in both or all of an impaired child's languages is rarely possible. An alternative is to develop treatment protocols that facilitate the transfer of therapy effects from a treated language to an untreated language. To explore whether cognates, words that share meaning and phonological features across languages, could be used to boost lexical retrieval in the context of multilingual SLI. This is dependent on exploiting the phonological information in the one, trained language as a mechanism for (phonological) language transfer to the other, untrained languages. The participant is an 8.5-year-old girl diagnosed with SLI who showed a severe naming deficit in her three spoken languages (Bulgarian, English and Greek). She received training on cognates (n = 20) using a picture-based naming task in English only, three times a week, over a 4-week period for 20 min each time. Phonological-based naming therapy was carried out using form-based strategies. There was a significant improvement during therapy and immediately after intervention on cognate performance in English which was maintained 1 month after intervention. Cognate production in Bulgarian and Greek also improved during all stages of the intervention. Improvement in the non-treated languages was slightly more than half of the improvement recorded in English. The findings reflected some degree of cross-linguistic transfer effects. Cross-linguistic transfer effects were evident during therapy and after therapy had finished and the effects were maintained 1 month post-treatment. Both the native language (Bulgarian) and the dominant language (Greek) benefitted equally from the treatment of cognates in English. Generalization to non-treatment words was evident, predominantly for English. The results suggest that cognates can

  18. Electrophysiological evidence of sublexical phonological access in character processing by L2 Chinese learners of L1 alphabetic scripts.

    PubMed

    Yum, Yen Na; Law, Sam-Po; Mo, Kwan Nok; Lau, Dustin; Su, I-Fan; Shum, Mark S K

    2016-04-01

    While Chinese character reading relies more on addressed phonology relative to alphabetic scripts, skilled Chinese readers also access sublexical phonological units during recognition of phonograms. However, sublexical orthography-to-phonology mapping has not been found among beginning second language (L2) Chinese learners. This study investigated character reading in more advanced Chinese learners whose native writing system is alphabetic. Phonological regularity and consistency were examined in behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) in lexical decision and delayed naming tasks. Participants were 18 native English speakers who acquired written Chinese after age 5 years and reached grade 4 Chinese reading level. Behaviorally, regular characters were named more accurately than irregular characters, but consistency had no effect. Similar to native Chinese readers, regularity effects emerged early with regular characters eliciting a greater N170 than irregular characters. Regular characters also elicited greater frontal P200 and smaller N400 than irregular characters in phonograms of low consistency. Additionally, regular-consistent characters and irregular-inconsistent characters had more negative amplitudes than irregular-consistent characters in the N400 and LPC time windows. The overall pattern of brain activities revealed distinct regularity and consistency effects in both tasks. Although orthographic neighbors are activated in character processing of L2 Chinese readers, the timing of their impact seems delayed compared with native Chinese readers. The time courses of regularity and consistency effects across ERP components suggest both assimilation and accommodation of the reading network in learning to read a typologically distinct second orthographic system.

  19. Phonological Awareness Training. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    What Works Clearinghouse, 2012

    2012-01-01

    Phonological awareness, or the ability to detect or manipulate the sounds in words independent of meaning, has been identified as a key early literacy skill and precursor to reading. For the purposes of this review, "phonological awareness training" refers to any practice targeting young children's phonological awareness abilities.…

  20. Separating lexical-semantic access from other mnemonic processes in picture-name verification

    PubMed Central

    Smith, Jason F.; Braun, Allen R.; Alexander, Gene E.; Chen, Kewei; Horwitz, Barry

    2013-01-01

    We present a novel paradigm to identify shared and unique brain regions underlying non-semantic, non-phonological, abstract, audio-visual (AV) memory vs. naming using a longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. Participants were trained to associate novel AV stimulus pairs containing hidden linguistic content. Half of the stimulus pairs were distorted images of animals and sine-wave speech versions of the animal's name. Images and sounds were distorted in such a way as to make their linguistic content easily recognizable only after being made aware of its existence. Memory for the pairings was tested by presenting an AV pair and asking participants to verify if the two stimuli formed a learned pairing. After memory testing, the hidden linguistic content was revealed and participants were tested again on their recollection of the pairings in this linguistically informed state. Once informed, the AV verification task could be performed by naming the picture. There was substantial overlap between the regions involved in recognition of non-linguistic sensory memory and naming, suggesting a strong relation between them. Contrasts between sessions identified left angular gyrus and middle temporal gyrus as key additional players in the naming network. Left inferior frontal regions participated in both naming and non-linguistic AV memory suggesting the region is responsible for AV memory independent of phonological content contrary to previous proposals. Functional connectivity between angular gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus and left middle temporal gyrus increased when performing the AV task as naming. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that, at the spatial resolution of fMRI, the regions that facilitate non-linguistic AV associations are a subset of those that facilitate naming though reorganized into distinct networks. PMID:24130539

  1. Paediatric Automatic Phonological Analysis Tools (APAT).

    PubMed

    Saraiva, Daniela; Lousada, Marisa; Hall, Andreia; Jesus, Luis M T

    2017-12-01

    To develop the pediatric Automatic Phonological Analysis Tools (APAT) and to estimate inter and intrajudge reliability, content validity, and concurrent validity. The APAT were constructed using Excel spreadsheets with formulas. The tools were presented to an expert panel for content validation. The corpus used in the Portuguese standardized test Teste Fonético-Fonológico - ALPE produced by 24 children with phonological delay or phonological disorder was recorded, transcribed, and then inserted into the APAT. Reliability and validity of APAT were analyzed. The APAT present strong inter- and intrajudge reliability (>97%). The content validity was also analyzed (ICC = 0.71), and concurrent validity revealed strong correlations between computerized and manual (traditional) methods. The development of these tools contributes to fill existing gaps in clinical practice and research, since previously there were no valid and reliable tools/instruments for automatic phonological analysis, which allowed the analysis of different corpora.

  2. A Probabilistic Model of Phonological Relationships from Contrast to Allophony

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hall, Kathleen Currie

    2009-01-01

    This dissertation proposes a model of phonological relationships, the Probabilistic Phonological Relationship Model (PPRM), that quantifies how predictably distributed two sounds in a relationship are. It builds on a core premise of traditional phonological analysis, that the ability to define phonological relationships such as contrast and…

  3. Naming Speed in Dyslexia and Dyscalculia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Willburger, Edith; Fussenegger, Barbara; Moll, Kristina; Wood, Guilherme; Landerl, Karin

    2008-01-01

    In four carefully selected samples of 8- to 10-year old children with dyslexia (but age adequate arithmetic skills), dyscalculia (but age adequate reading skills), dyslexia/dyscalculia and controls a domain-general deficit in rapid automatized naming (RAN) was found for both dyslexia groups. Dyscalculic children exhibited a domain-specific deficit…

  4. Is phonology bypassed in normal or dyslexic development?

    PubMed

    Pennington, B F; Lefly, D L; Van Orden, G C; Bookman, M O; Smith, S D

    1987-01-01

    A pervasive assumption in most accounts of normal reading and spelling development is that phonological coding is important early in development but is subsequently superseded by faster, orthographic coding which bypasses phonology. We call this assumption, which derives from dual process theory, the developmental bypass hypothesis. The present study tests four specific predictions of the developmental bypass hypothesis by comparing dyslexics and nondyslexics from the same families in a cross-sectional design. The four predictions are: 1) That phonological coding skill develops early in normal readers and soon reaches asymptote, whereas orthographic coding skill has a protracted course of development; 2) that the correlation of adult reading or spelling performance with phonological coding skill is considerably less than the correlation with orthographic coding skill; 3) that dyslexics who are mainly deficient in phonological coding skill should be able to bypass this deficit and eventually close the gap in reading and spelling performance; and 4) that the greatest differences between dyslexics and developmental controls on measures of phonological coding skill should be observed early rather than late in development.None of the four predictions of the developmental bypass hypothesis were upheld. Phonological coding skill continued to develop in nondyslexics until adulthood. It accounted for a substantial (32-53 percent) portion of the variance in reading and spelling performance in adult nondyslexics, whereas orthographic coding skill did not account for a statistically reliable portion of this variance. The dyslexics differed little across age in phonological coding skill, but made linear progress in orthographic coding skill, surpassing spelling-age (SA) controls by adulthood. Nonetheless, they didnot close the gap in reading and spelling performance. Finally, dyslexics were significantly worse than SA (and Reading Age [RA]) controls in phonological coding skill

  5. Phoneme Monitoring in Silent Naming and Perception in Adults Who Stutter

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sasisekaran, Jayanthi; De Nil, Luc F.

    2006-01-01

    The present study investigated phonological encoding skills in persons who stutter (PWS). Participants were 10 PWS (M=31.8 years, S.D.=5.9) matched for age, gender, and handedness with 12 persons who do not stutter (PNS) (M=24.3 years, S.D.=4.3). The groups were compared in a phoneme monitoring task performed during silent picture naming. The…

  6. Phonological Representations in Children with SLI

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Claessen, Mary; Leitao, Suze

    2012-01-01

    It has been hypothesized that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty processing sound-based information, including storing and accessing phonological representations in the lexicon. Tasks are emerging in the literature that provide a measure of the quality of stored phonological representations, without requiring a verbal…

  7. What Models of Verbal Working Memory Can Learn from Phonological Theory: Decomposing the Phonological Similarity Effect

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Schweppe, Judith; Grice, Martine; Rummer, Ralf

    2011-01-01

    Despite developments in phonology over the last few decades, models of verbal working memory make reference to phoneme-sized phonological units, rather than to the features of which they are composed. This study investigates the influence on short-term retention of such features by comparing the serial recall of lists of syllables with varying…

  8. Arabic Digit Naming Speed: Task Context and Redundancy Gain

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Campbell, Jamie I. D.; Metcalfe, Arron W. S.

    2008-01-01

    There is evidence for both semantic and asemantic routes for naming Arabic digits, but neuropsychological dissociations suggest that number-fact retrieval (2x3=6) can inhibit the semantic route for digit naming. Here, we tested the hypothesis that such inhibition should slow digit naming, based on the principle that reduced access to multiple…

  9. Phonological Advance Planning in Sentence Production

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Oppermann, Frank; Jescheniak, Jorg D.; Schriefers, Herbert

    2010-01-01

    Our study addresses the scope of phonological advance planning during sentence production using a novel experimental procedure. The production of German sentences in various syntactic formats (SVO, SOV, and VSO) was cued by presenting pictures of the agents of previously memorized agent-action-patient scenes. To tap the phonological activation of…

  10. Dyslexia and dyscalculia: two learning disorders with different cognitive profiles.

    PubMed

    Landerl, Karin; Fussenegger, Barbara; Moll, Kristina; Willburger, Edith

    2009-07-01

    This study tests the hypothesis that dyslexia and dyscalculia are associated with two largely independent cognitive deficits, namely a phonological deficit in the case of dyslexia and a deficit in the number module in the case of dyscalculia. In four groups of 8- to 10-year-olds (42 control, 21 dyslexic, 20 dyscalculic, and 26 dyslexic/dyscalculic), phonological awareness, phonological and visual-spatial short-term and working memory, naming speed, and basic number processing skills were assessed. A phonological deficit was found for both dyslexic groups, irrespective of additional arithmetic deficits, but not for the dyscalculia-only group. In contrast, deficits in processing of symbolic and nonsymbolic magnitudes were observed in both groups of dyscalculic children, irrespective of additional reading difficulties, but not in the dyslexia-only group. Cognitive deficits in the comorbid dyslexia/dyscalculia group were additive; that is, they resulted from the combination of two learning disorders. These findings suggest that dyslexia and dyscalculia have separable cognitive profiles, namely a phonological deficit in the case of dyslexia and a deficient number module in the case of dyscalculia.

  11. Early Precursor of Reading: Acquisition of Phonological Awareness Skills

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Turan, Figen; Gul, Gozde

    2008-01-01

    Phonological awareness skills begin to develop at preschool ages and support reading skills during school ages. Studies on phonological awareness show great relationship with reading skills development. Since literacy talents such as phonological awareness and vocabulary represent future success in reading, assisting literacy skills during…

  12. Conduction Aphasia, Sensory-Motor Integration, and Phonological Short-Term Memory--An Aggregate Analysis of Lesion and fMRI Data

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Buchsbaum, Bradley R.; Baldo, Juliana; Okada, Kayoko; Berman, Karen F.; Dronkers, Nina; D'Esposito, Mark; Hickok, Gregory

    2011-01-01

    Conduction aphasia is a language disorder characterized by frequent speech errors, impaired verbatim repetition, a deficit in phonological short-term memory, and naming difficulties in the presence of otherwise fluent and grammatical speech output. While traditional models of conduction aphasia have typically implicated white matter pathways,…

  13. Phonology and Language: A Historical Perspective

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Arezzo, Emilia La Pergola

    1978-01-01

    This article first gives the definition of "phonology" most widely accepted today, and then illustrates briefly the role that phonology has had in the works of European and American linguists, such as De Saussure, Trubetckoj, Sapir, Bloomfield, H. Sweet, D. Jones, O. Jesperson, K. Pike, Trager and Smith, and N. Chomsky. (CFM)

  14. Phonological Learning with Output-Driven Maps

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tesar, Bruce

    2017-01-01

    The concept of an output-driven map formally characterizes an intuitive notion about phonology: that disparities between the input and the output are introduced only to the extent necessary to satisfy restrictions on outputs. When all of the grammars definable in a phonological system are output-driven, the implied structure provides significant…

  15. Type-specific proactive interference in patients with semantic and phonological STM deficits.

    PubMed

    Harris, Lara; Olson, Andrew; Humphreys, Glyn

    2014-01-01

    Prior neuropsychological evidence suggests that semantic and phonological components of short-term memory (STM) are functionally and neurologically distinct. The current paper examines proactive interference (PI) from semantic and phonological information in two STM-impaired patients, DS (semantic STM deficit) and AK (phonological STM deficit). In Experiment 1 probe recognition tasks with open and closed sets of stimuli were used. Phonological PI was assessed using nonword items, and semantic and phonological PI was assessed using words. In Experiment 2 phonological and semantic PI was elicited by an item recognition probe test with stimuli that bore phonological and semantic relations to the probes. The data suggested heightened phonological PI for the semantic STM patient, and exaggerated effects of semantic PI in the phonological STM case. The findings are consistent with an account of extremely rapid decay of activated type-specific representations in cases of severely impaired phonological and semantic STM.

  16. On the unity of children’s phonological error patterns: Distinguishing symptoms from the problem

    PubMed Central

    Dinnsen, Daniel A.

    2012-01-01

    This article compares the claims of rule- and constraint-based accounts of three seemingly distinct error patterns, namely, Deaffrication, Consonant Harmony and Assibilation, in the sound system of a child with a phonological delay. It is argued that these error patterns are not separate problems, but rather are symptoms of a larger conspiracy to avoid word-initial coronal stops. The clinical implications of these findings are also considered. PMID:21787147

  17. Native Language Experience Shapes Neural Basis of Addressed and Assembled Phonologies

    PubMed Central

    Mei, Leilei; Xue, Gui; Lu, Zhong-Lin; He, Qinghua; Wei, Miao; Zhang, Mingxia; Dong, Qi; Chen, Chuansheng

    2015-01-01

    Previous studies have suggested differential engagement of addressed and assembled phonologies in reading Chinese and alphabetic languages (e.g., English) and the modulatory role of native language in learning to read a second language. However, it is not clear whether native language experience shapes the neural mechanisms of addressed and assembled phonologies. To address this question, we trained native Chinese and native English speakers to read the same artificial language (based on Korean Hangul) either through addressed (i.e., whole-word mapping) or assembled (i.e., grapheme-to-phoneme mapping) phonology. We found that, for both native Chinese and native English speakers, addressed phonology relied on the regions in the ventral pathway, whereas assembled phonology depended on the regions in the dorsal pathway. More importantly, we found that the neural mechanisms of addressed and assembled phonologies were shaped by native language experience. Specifically, two key regions for addressed phonology (i.e., the left middle temporal gyrus and right inferior temporal gyrus) showed greater activation for addressed phonology in native Chinese speakers, while one key region for assembled phonology (i.e., the left supramarginal gyrus) showed more activation for assembled phonology in native English speakers. These results provide direct neuroimaging evidence for the effect of native language experience on the neural mechanisms of phonological access in a new language and support the assimilation-accommodation hypothesis. PMID:25858447

  18. Phonological awareness and sinusoidal amplitude modulation in phonological dislexia.

    PubMed

    Peñaloza-López, Yolanda; Herrera-Rangel, Aline; Pérez-Ruiz, Santiago J; Poblano, Adrián

    2016-04-01

    Dyslexia is the difficulty of children in learning to read and write as results of neurological deficiencies. The objective was to test the Phonological awareness (PA) and Sinusoidal amplitude modulation (SAM) threshold in children with Phonological dyslexia (PD). We performed a case-control, analytic, cross sectional study. We studied 14 children with PD and 14 control children from 7 to 11 years of age, by means of PA measurement and by SAM test. The mean age of dyslexic children was 8.39 years and in the control group was 8.15. Children with PD exhibited inadequate skills in PA, and SAM. We found significant correlations between PA and SAM at 4 Hertz frequency, and calculated regression equations that predicts between one-fourth and one-third of variance of measurements. Alterations in PA and SAM found can help to explain basis of deficient language processing exhibited by children with PD.

  19. The Contribution of Segmental and Suprasegmental Phonology to Reading Comprehension

    PubMed Central

    Veenendaal, Nathalie J.; Groen, Margriet A.; Verhoeven, Ludo

    2016-01-01

    The aim of the present study was to examine the relation between decoding and segmental and suprasegmental phonology, and their contribution to reading comprehension, in the upper primary grades. Following a longitudinal design, the performance of 99 Dutch primary school children on phonological awareness (segmental phonology) and text reading prosody (suprasegmental phonology) in fourth-grade and fifth-grade, and reading comprehension in sixth-grade were examined. In addition, decoding efficiency as a general assessment of reading was examined. Structural path modeling firstly showed that the relation between decoding efficiency and both measures of phonology from fourth- to fifth grade was unidirectional. Secondly, the relation between decoding in fourth- and fifth-grade and reading comprehension in sixth-grade became indirect when segmental and suprasegmental phonology were added to the model. Both factors independently exerted influence on later reading comprehension. This leads to the conclusion that not only segmental, but also suprasegmental phonology, contributes substantially to children's reading development. PMID:27551159

  20. Morphological processing with deficient phonological short-term memory.

    PubMed

    Kavé, Gitit; Ze'ev, Hagit Bar; Lev, Anita

    2007-07-01

    This paper investigates the processing of Hebrew derivational morphology in an individual (S.E.) with deficient phonological short-term memory. In comparison to 10 age- and education-matched men, S.E. was impaired on digit span tasks and demonstrated no recency effect in word list recall. S.E. had low word retention span, but he exhibited phonological similarity and word length effects. His ability to make lexical decisions was intact. In a paired-associate test S.E. successfully learned semantically and morphologically related pairs but not phonologically related pairs, and his learning of nonwords was facilitated by the presence of Hebrew consonant roots. Semantic and morphological similarity enhanced immediate word recall. Results show that S.E. is capable of conducting morphological decomposition of Hebrew-derived words despite his phonological deficit, suggesting that transient maintenance of morphological constituents is independent of temporary storage and rehearsal of phonological codes, and that each is processed separately within short-term memory.

  1. Auditory Processing Skills and Phonological Representation in Dyslexic Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Richardson, Ulla; Thomson, Jennifer M.; Scott, Sophie K.; Goswami, Usha

    2004-01-01

    It is now well-established that there is a causal connection between children's phonological skills and their acquisition of reading and spelling. Here we study low-level auditory processes that may underpin the development of phonological representations in children. Dyslexic and control children were given a battery of phonological tasks,…

  2. Modeling the Control of Phonological Encoding in Bilingual Speakers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Roelofs, Ardi; Verhoef, Kim

    2006-01-01

    Phonological encoding is the process by which speakers retrieve phonemic segments for morphemes from memory and use the segments to assemble phonological representations of words to be spoken. When conversing in one language, bilingual speakers have to resist the temptation of encoding word forms using the phonological rules and representations of…

  3. Deficits in verbal long-term memory and learning in children with poor phonological short-term memory skills.

    PubMed

    Gathercole, Susan E; Briscoe, Josie; Thorn, Annabel; Tiffany, Claire

    2008-03-01

    Possible links between phonological short-term memory and both longer term memory and learning in 8-year-old children were investigated in this study. Performance on a range of tests of long-term memory and learning was compared for a group of 16 children with poor phonological short-term memory skills and a comparison group of children of the same age with matched nonverbal reasoning abilities but memory scores in the average range. The low-phonological-memory group were impaired on longer term memory and learning tasks that taxed memory for arbitrary verbal material such as names and nonwords. However, the two groups performed at comparable levels on tasks requiring the retention of visuo-spatial information and of meaningful material and at carrying out prospective memory tasks in which the children were asked to carry out actions at a future point in time. The results are consistent with the view that poor short-term memory function impairs the longer-term retention and ease of learning of novel verbal material.

  4. A robust demonstration of the cognate facilitation effect in first-language and second-language naming.

    PubMed

    Sheng, Li; Lam, Boji Pak Wing; Cruz, Diana; Fulton, Aislynn

    2016-01-01

    The cognate facilitation effect refers to the phenomenon that in bilinguals performance on various vocabulary tasks is enhanced for cross-linguistic cognates as opposed to noncognates. However, research investigating the presence of the cognate advantage in bilingual children remains limited. Most studies with children conducted to date has not included a control group or rigorously designed stimuli, which may jeopardize the validity and robustness of the emerging evidence. The current study addressed these methodological problems by examining performance in picture naming tasks in 34 4- to 7-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals and 52 Mandarin-English bilinguals as well as 37 English-speaking monolinguals who served as controls. Stimuli were controlled for phonology, word frequency, and length. The Spanish-English bilinguals performed better for cognates than for noncognates and exhibited a greater number of doublet responses (i.e., providing correct responses in both languages) in naming cognate targets than in naming noncognates. The control groups did not show differences in performance between the two sets of words. These findings provide compelling evidence that cross-linguistic similarities at the phonological level allow bootstrapping of vocabulary learning. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  5. Morphological awareness as a function of semantics, phonology, and orthography and as a predictor of reading comprehension in Chinese.

    PubMed

    Li, Hong; Dronjic, Vedran; Chen, X I; Li, Yixun; Cheng, Yahua; Wu, Xinchun

    2017-09-01

    This study investigates the contributions of semantic, phonological, and orthographic factors to morphological awareness of 413 Chinese-speaking students in Grades 2, 4, and 6, and its relationship with reading comprehension. Participants were orally presented with pairs of bimorphemic compounds and asked to judge whether the first morphemes of the words shared a meaning. Morpheme identity (same or different), whole-word semantic relatedness (high or low), orthography (same or different), and phonology (same or different) were manipulated. By Grade 6, children were able to focus on meaning similarities across morphemes while ignoring the distraction of form, but they remained influenced by whole-word semantic relatedness. Children's ability to overcome the distraction of phonology consistently improved with age, but did not reach ceiling, whereas the parallel ability for orthography reached ceiling at Grade 6. Morphological judgment performance was a significant unique predictor of reading comprehension when character naming and vocabulary knowledge were accounted for.

  6. Oral and Hand Movement Speeds Are Associated with Expressive Language Ability in Children with Speech Sound Disorder

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Peter, Beate

    2012-01-01

    This study tested the hypothesis that children with speech sound disorder have generalized slowed motor speeds. It evaluated associations among oral and hand motor speeds and measures of speech (articulation and phonology) and language (receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence imitation), in 11 children with moderate to severe SSD…

  7. Phonological awareness: one key to the reading proficiency of deaf children.

    PubMed

    Nielsen, Diane Corcoran; Luetke-Stahlman, Barbara

    2002-07-01

    A case is made for the importance of children's development of phonological awareness--whether they are hearing or deaf--if they are to reach their potential as readers. Relevant terms are defined (i.e., phonological awareness, phonological processes, and phonics) to assist the reader with the research review, which covers (a) the typical stages in the acquisition of phonological awareness and (b) phonological awareness and deafness. Suggestions for phonological awareness assessment are offered, along with the recommendation that the use of recently developed formal and informal measures of phonological awareness might facilitate the setting of goals and objectives when deaf educators or speech-language pathologists are evaluating the skills of deaf students and planning instruction for these students. Such tools yield information about skills that have been shown to correlate with literacy attainment and that are not commonly addressed by deaf educators or speech-language pathologists serving deaf students. Finally, research concerning the facilitation of phonological awareness and its application is explained.

  8. Phonological short-term store impairment after cerebellar lesion: a single case study.

    PubMed

    Chiricozzi, Francesca R; Clausi, Silvia; Molinari, Marco; Leggio, Maria G

    2008-01-01

    The cerebellum is a recent addition to the growing list of cerebral areas involved in the multifaceted structural system that sustains verbal working memory (vWM), but its contribution is still a matter of debate. Here, we present a patient with a selective deficit of vWM resulting from a bilateral cerebellar ischemic lesion. After this acute event, the patient had impaired immediate and delayed word-serial recall and auditory-verbal delayed recognition. The digit span, however, was completely preserved. To investigate the cerebellar contribution to vWM, four experiments addressing the function of different vWM phonological loop components were performed 18 months after the lesion, and results were compared with normative data or, when needed, with a small group of matched controls. In Experiment 1, digit span was assessed with different presentation and response modalities using lists of digits of varying lengths. In Experiment 2, the articulatory rehearsal system was analyzed by measurement of word length and articulatory suppression effects. Experiment 3 was devoted to analyzing the phonological short-term store (ph-STS) by the recency effect, the phonological similarity effect, short-term forgetting, and unattended speech. Data suggested a possible key role of the semantic component of the processed material, which was tested in Experiment 4, in which word and nonword-serial recall with or without interpolating activity were analyzed. The patient showed noticeably reduced scores in the tasks that primarily or exclusively engaged activity of the ph-STS, namely those of Experiment 3, and good performance in the tests that investigated the recirculation of verbal information. This pattern of results implicates the ph-STS as the cognitive locus of the patient's deficit. This report demonstrates a cerebellar role in encoding and/or strengthening the phonological traces in vWM.

  9. Understanding phonological memory deficits in boys with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): dissociation of short-term storage and articulatory rehearsal processes.

    PubMed

    Bolden, Jennifer; Rapport, Mark D; Raiker, Joseph S; Sarver, Dustin E; Kofler, Michael J

    2012-08-01

    The current study dissociated and examined the two primary components of the phonological working memory subsystem--the short-term store and articulatory rehearsal mechanism--in boys with ADHD (n = 18) relative to typically developing boys (n = 15). Word lists of increasing length (2, 4, and 6 words per trial) were presented to and recalled by children following a brief (3 s) interval to assess their phonological short-term storage capacity. Children's ability to utilize the articulatory rehearsal mechanism to actively maintain information in the phonological short-term store was assessed using word lists at their established memory span but with extended rehearsal times (12 s and 21 s delays). Results indicate that both phonological shortterm storage capacity and articulatory rehearsal are impaired or underdeveloped to a significant extent in boys with ADHD relative to typically developing boys, even after controlling for age, SES, IQ, and reading speed. Larger magnitude deficits, however, were apparent in short-term storage capacity (ES = 1.15 to 1.98) relative to articulatory rehearsal (ES = 0.47 to 1.02). These findings are consistent with previous reports of deficient phonological short-term memory in boys with ADHD, and suggest that future attempts to develop remedial cognitive interventions for children with ADHD will need to include active components that require children to hold increasingly more information over longer time intervals.

  10. Delivering phonological and phonics training within whole-class teaching.

    PubMed

    Shapiro, Laura R; Solity, Jonathan

    2008-12-01

    Early, intensive phonological awareness and phonics training is widely held to be beneficial for children with poor phonological awareness. However, most studies have delivered this training separately from children's normal whole-class reading lessons. We examined whether integrating this training into whole class, mixed-ability reading lessons could impact on children with poor phonological awareness, whilst also benefiting normally developing readers. Teachers delivered the training within a broad reading programme to whole classes of children from Reception to the end of Year 1 (N=251). A comparison group of children received standard teaching methods (N=213). Children's literacy was assessed at the beginning of Reception, and then at the end of each year until 1 year post-intervention. The strategy significantly impacted on reading performance for normally developing readers and those with poor phonological awareness, vastly reducing the incidence of reading difficulties from 20% in comparison schools to 5% in intervention schools. Phonological and phonics training is highly effective for children with poor phonological awareness, even when incorporated into whole-class teaching.

  11. Examining the relationship between immediate serial recall and immediate free recall: common effects of phonological loop variables but only limited evidence for the phonological loop.

    PubMed

    Spurgeon, Jessica; Ward, Geoff; Matthews, William J

    2014-07-01

    We examined the contribution of the phonological loop to immediate free recall (IFR) and immediate serial recall (ISR) of lists of between one and 15 words. Following Baddeley (1986, 2000, 2007, 2012), we assumed that visual words could be recoded into the phonological store when presented silently but that recoding would be prevented by concurrent articulation (CA; Experiment 1). We further assumed that the use of the phonological loop would be evidenced by greater serial recall for lists of phonologically dissimilar words relative to lists of phonologically similar words (Experiments 2A and 2B). We found that in both tasks, (a) CA reduced recall; (b) participants recalled short lists from the start of the list, leading to enhanced forward-ordered recall; (c) participants were increasingly likely to recall longer lists from the end of the list, leading to extended recency effects; (d) there were significant phonological similarity effects in ISR and IFR when both were analyzed using serial recall scoring; (e) these were reduced by free recall scoring and eliminated by CA; and (f) CA but not phonological similarity affected the tendency to initiate recall with the first list item. We conclude that similar mechanisms underpin ISR and IFR. Critically, the phonological loop is not strictly necessary for the forward-ordered recall of short lists on both tasks but may augment recall by increasing the accessibility of the list items (relative to CA), and in so doing, the order of later items is preserved better in phonologically dissimilar than in phonologically similar lists. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

  12. Phonological awareness and mathematical difficulty: a longitudinal perspective.

    PubMed

    Jordan, Julie-Ann; Wylie, Judith; Mulhern, Gerry

    2010-03-01

    The present longitudinal study sought to investigate the impact of poor phonology on children's mathematical status. From a screening sample of 256 five-year-olds, 82 children were identified as either typically achieving (TA; N = 31), having comorbid poor phonology and mathematical difficulties (PDMD; N = 31), or having only poor phonology (phonological difficulty, PD; N = 20). Children were assessed on eight components of informal and formal mathematics achievement at ages 5-7 years. PD children were found to have significant impairments in some, mainly formal, components of mathematics by age 7 compared to TA children. Analysis also revealed that, by age 7, approximately half of the PD children met the criteria for PDMD, while the remainder exhibited less severe deficits in some components of formal mathematics. Children's mathematical performance at age 5, however, did not predict which PD children were more likely to become PDMD at age 7, nor did they differ in terms of phonological awareness at age 5. However, those PD children who later became PDMD had lower scores on verbal and non-verbal tests of general ability.

  13. Early Phonological Development: Creating an Assessment Test

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Stoel-Gammon, Carol; Williams, A. Lynn

    2013-01-01

    This paper describes a new protocol for assessing the phonological systems of two-year-olds with typical development and older children with delays in vocabulary acquisition. The test (Profiles of Early Expressive Phonological Skills ("PEEPS"), Williams & Stoel-Gammon, in preparation) differs from currently available assessments in…

  14. Primary phonological planning units in spoken word production are language-specific: Evidence from an ERP study.

    PubMed

    Wang, Jie; Wong, Andus Wing-Kuen; Wang, Suiping; Chen, Hsuan-Chih

    2017-07-19

    It is widely acknowledged in Germanic languages that segments are the primary planning units at the phonological encoding stage of spoken word production. Mixed results, however, have been found in Chinese, and it is still unclear what roles syllables and segments play in planning Chinese spoken word production. In the current study, participants were asked to first prepare and later produce disyllabic Mandarin words upon picture prompts and a response cue while electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded. Each two consecutive pictures implicitly formed a pair of prime and target, whose names shared the same word-initial atonal syllable or the same word-initial segments, or were unrelated in the control conditions. Only syllable repetition induced significant effects on event-related brain potentials (ERPs) after target onset: a widely distributed positivity in the 200- to 400-ms interval and an anterior positivity in the 400- to 600-ms interval. We interpret these to reflect syllable-size representations at the phonological encoding and phonetic encoding stages. Our results provide the first electrophysiological evidence for the distinct role of syllables in producing Mandarin spoken words, supporting a language specificity hypothesis about the primary phonological units in spoken word production.

  15. The Effects of Phonological Skills and Vocabulary on Morphophonological Processing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Boersma, Tiffany; Baker, Anne; Rispens, Judith; Weerman, Fred

    2018-01-01

    Morphophonological processing involves the phonological analysis of morphemes. Item-specific phonological characteristics have been shown to influence morphophonological skills in children. This study investigates the relative contributions of broad phonological skills and vocabulary to production and judgement accuracies of the Dutch past tense…

  16. [Phonological awareness, working memory, reading and writing performances in familial dyslexia].

    PubMed

    Capellini, Simone Aparecida; Padula, Niura Aparecida de Mouro Ribeiro; Santos, Lara Cristina Antunes Dos; Lourenceti, Maria Dalva; Carrenho, Erika Hasse; Ribeiro, Lucilene Arilho

    2007-01-01

    familial dyslexia. to characterize and compare the phonological awareness, working memory, reading and writing abilities of individuals whose family members are also affected. in this study 10 familial nuclei of natural family relationship of individuals with dyslexia were analyzed. Families of natural individuals living in the west region of the state of São Paulo were selected. Inclusion criteria were: to be a native speaker of the Brazilian Portuguese language, to have 8 years of age or more, to present positive familial history for learning disabilities, that is, to present at least one relative with difficulties in learning. Exclusion criteria were: to present any neurological disorder genetically caused or not, in any of the family members, such as dystonia, extra pyramidal diseases, mental disorder, epilepsy, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHA); psychiatric symptoms or conditions; or any other pertinent conditions that could cause errors in the diagnosis. As for the diagnosis of developmental dyslexia, information about the familial history of the adolescents and children was gathered with the parents, so that a detailed pedigree could be delineated. Neurological, psychological, speech-language, and school performance evaluations were made with the individuals and their families. the results of this study suggest that the dyslexic individuals and their respective relatives, also with dyslexia, presented lower performances than the control group in terms of rapid automatic naming, reading, writing and phonological awareness. deficits in phonological awareness, working memory, reading and writing seem to have genetic susceptibility that possibly determine, when in interaction with the environment, the manifestation of dyslexia.

  17. Speech monitoring and phonologically-mediated eye gaze in language perception and production: a comparison using printed word eye-tracking

    PubMed Central

    Gauvin, Hanna S.; Hartsuiker, Robert J.; Huettig, Falk

    2013-01-01

    The Perceptual Loop Theory of speech monitoring assumes that speakers routinely inspect their inner speech. In contrast, Huettig and Hartsuiker (2010) observed that listening to one's own speech during language production drives eye-movements to phonologically related printed words with a similar time-course as listening to someone else's speech does in speech perception experiments. This suggests that speakers use their speech perception system to listen to their own overt speech, but not to their inner speech. However, a direct comparison between production and perception with the same stimuli and participants is lacking so far. The current printed word eye-tracking experiment therefore used a within-subjects design, combining production and perception. Displays showed four words, of which one, the target, either had to be named or was presented auditorily. Accompanying words were phonologically related, semantically related, or unrelated to the target. There were small increases in looks to phonological competitors with a similar time-course in both production and perception. Phonological effects in perception however lasted longer and had a much larger magnitude. We conjecture that this difference is related to a difference in predictability of one's own and someone else's speech, which in turn has consequences for lexical competition in other-perception and possibly suppression of activation in self-perception. PMID:24339809

  18. Relations among Socioeconomic Status, Age, and Predictors of Phonological Awareness

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McDowell, Kimberly D.; Lonigan, Christopher J.; Goldstein, Howard

    2007-01-01

    Purpose: This study simultaneously examined predictors of phonological awareness within the framework of 2 theories: the phonological distinctness hypothesis and the lexical restructuring model. Additionally, age as a moderator of the relations between predictor variables and phonological awareness was examined. Method: This cross-sectional…

  19. Phonologically Driven Variability: The Case of Determiners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bürki, Audrey; Laganaro, Marina; Alario, F.-Xavier

    2014-01-01

    Speakers usually produce words in connected speech. In such contexts, the form in which many words are uttered is influenced by the phonological properties of neighboring words. The current article examines the representations and processes underlying the production of phonologically constrained word form variations. For this purpose, we consider…

  20. Phonological Activation in Multi-Syllabic Sord Recognition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lee, Chang H.

    2007-01-01

    Three experiments were conducted to test the phonological recoding hypothesis in visual word recognition. Most studies on this issue have been conducted using mono-syllabic words, eventually constructing various models of phonological processing. Yet in many languages including English, the majority of words are multi-syllabic words. English…

  1. Adult Developmental Dyslexia in a Shallow Orthography: Are There Subgroups?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Laasonen, Marja; Service, Elisabet; Lipsanen, Jari; Virsu, Veijo

    2012-01-01

    The existence and stability of subgroups among adult dyslexic readers of a shallow orthography was explored by comparing three different cluster analyses based on previously suggested combinations of two variables. These were oral reading speed versus accuracy, word versus pseudoword reading speed, and phonological awareness versus rapid naming.…

  2. Musical plus phonological input for young foreign language readers

    PubMed Central

    Fonseca-Mora, M. C.; Jara-Jiménez, Pilar; Gómez-Domínguez, María

    2015-01-01

    Based on previous studies showing that phonological awareness is related to reading abilities and that music training improves phonological processing, the aim of the present study was to test for the efficiency of a new method for teaching to read in a foreign language. Specifically, we tested the efficacy of a phonological training program, with and without musical support that aimed at improving early reading skills in 7–8-year-old Spanish children (n = 63) learning English as a foreign language. Of interest was also to explore the impact of this training program on working memory and decoding skills. To achieve these goals we tested three groups of children before and after training: a control group, an experimental group with phonological non-musical intervention (active control), and an experimental group with musical intervention. Results clearly point to the beneficial effects of the phonological teaching approach but the further impact of the music support was not demonstrated. Moreover, while children in the music group showed low musical aptitudes before training, they nevertheless performed better than the control group. Therefore, the phonological training program with and without music support seem to have significant effects on early reading skills. PMID:25852604

  3. Musical plus phonological input for young foreign language readers.

    PubMed

    Fonseca-Mora, M C; Jara-Jiménez, Pilar; Gómez-Domínguez, María

    2015-01-01

    Based on previous studies showing that phonological awareness is related to reading abilities and that music training improves phonological processing, the aim of the present study was to test for the efficiency of a new method for teaching to read in a foreign language. Specifically, we tested the efficacy of a phonological training program, with and without musical support that aimed at improving early reading skills in 7-8-year-old Spanish children (n = 63) learning English as a foreign language. Of interest was also to explore the impact of this training program on working memory and decoding skills. To achieve these goals we tested three groups of children before and after training: a control group, an experimental group with phonological non-musical intervention (active control), and an experimental group with musical intervention. Results clearly point to the beneficial effects of the phonological teaching approach but the further impact of the music support was not demonstrated. Moreover, while children in the music group showed low musical aptitudes before training, they nevertheless performed better than the control group. Therefore, the phonological training program with and without music support seem to have significant effects on early reading skills.

  4. Phonological Priming and Orthographic Analogies in Reading.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Goswami, Usha

    1990-01-01

    Findings of two experiments involving young children at a reading level of six years to six years, nine months suggest that phonological priming is an insufficient explanation of the analogy effect at the single word level. Phonological priming plays no role in the use of analogies in story reading. (RH)

  5. The "No Crossing Constraint" in Autosegmental Phonology.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Coleman, John; Local, John

    A discussion of autosegmental phonology (AP), a theory of phonological representation that uses graphs rather than strings as the central data structure, considers its principal constraint, the "No Crossing Constraint" (NCC). The NCC is the statement that in a well-formed autosegmental diagram, lines of association may not cross. After…

  6. Phonological Priming and Cohort Effects in Toddlers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mani, Nivedita; Plunkett, Kim

    2011-01-01

    Adult word recognition is influenced by prior exposure to phonologically or semantically related words ("cup" primes "cat" or "plate") compared to unrelated words ("door"), suggesting that words are organised in the adult lexicon based on their phonological and semantic properties and that word recognition implicates not just the heard word, but…

  7. Lexical and metaphonological abilities in preschoolers with phonological disorders.

    PubMed

    Costa, Ranilde Cristiane Cavalcante; Avila, Clara Regina Brandão de

    2010-01-01

    lexical and metaphonological abilities of phonologically disordered preschoolers. to investigate the influence of Phonological Disorder on the lexical and metaphonological abilities of a group of preschoolers and the correlation between them. participants were 56 preschoolers - 32 boys and 24 girls - with ages between 4 years and 6 months and 6 years and 11 months, divided into two different groups: the Research Group, composed of 28 preschoolers with Phonological Disorder, and the Control Group, composed of 28 preschoolers with normal speech and no oral speech-related complaints, paired to the research group by gender and age. All of the participants were initially assessed by the ABFW Test - Phonology. After that, they were assessed on their lexical and metaphonological abilities by the ABFW Test - Vocabulary and phonological awareness test: sequential assessment instrument, CONFIAS - identification tasks and, rhyme and alliteration production, respectively. regarding lexical ability, the preschoolers from both groups presented similar behavior. The disordered preschoolers presented the worst performance on the overall analysis of the metaphonological ability. Age had an influence on the performance of lexical ability for both groups and the metaphonological abilities only for the Control Group. Correlations were identified, mostly positive, good to moderate between lexical and metaphonological abilities. the influence of Phonological Disorder may only be observed on the metaphonological performance. Phonological Disorder did not interfere with the development of the lexical ability of this group of preschoolers. Positive correlations were identified between both abilities in the studied age group.

  8. Articulation of Phonologically Similar Items Disrupts Free Recall of Nonwords

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nishiyama, Ryoji; Ukita, Jun

    2013-01-01

    The present study sought to clarify whether phonological similarity of encoded information impairs free recall performance (the phonological similarity effect: PSE) for nonwords. Five experiments examined the influence of the encoding process on the PSE in a step-by-step fashion, by using lists that consisted of phonologically similar (decoy)…

  9. Learning General Phonological Rules from Distributional Information: A Computational Model

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Calamaro, Shira; Jarosz, Gaja

    2015-01-01

    Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony…

  10. Phonological decisions require both the left and right supramarginal gyri.

    PubMed

    Hartwigsen, Gesa; Baumgaertner, Annette; Price, Cathy J; Koehnke, Maria; Ulmer, Stephan; Siebner, Hartwig R

    2010-09-21

    Recent functional imaging studies demonstrated that both the left and right supramarginal gyri (SMG) are activated when healthy right-handed subjects make phonological word decisions. However, lesion studies typically report difficulties with phonological processing after left rather than right hemisphere damage. Here, we used a unique dual-site transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) approach to test whether the SMG in the right hemisphere contributes to modality-independent (i.e., auditory and visual) phonological decisions. To test task-specificity, we compared the effect of real or sham TMS during phonological, semantic, and perceptual decisions. To test laterality and anatomical specificity, we compared the effect of TMS over the left, right, or bilateral SMG and angular gyri. The accuracy and reaction times of phonological decisions were selectively disrupted relative to semantic and perceptual decisions when real TMS was applied over the left, right, or bilateral SMG. These effects were not observed for TMS over the angular gyri. A follow-up experiment indicated that the threshold-intensity for inducing a disruptive effect on phonological decisions was identical for unilateral TMS over the right or left SMG. Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence that the right SMG contributes to accurate and efficient phonological decisions in the healthy brain, with no evidence that the left and right SMG can compensate for one another during TMS. Our findings motivate detailed studies of phonological processing in patients with acute or long-term damage of the right SMG.

  11. From sound to syntax: phonological constraints on children's lexical categorization of new words.

    PubMed

    Fitneva, Stanka A; Christiansen, Morten H; Monaghan, Padraic

    2009-11-01

    Two studies examined the role of phonological cues in the lexical categorization of new words when children could also rely on learning by exclusion and whether the role of phonology depends on extensive experience with a language. Phonological cues were assessed via phonological typicality - an aggregate measure of the relationship between the phonology of a word and the phonology of words in the same lexical class. Experiment 1 showed that when monolingual English-speaking seven-year-olds could rely on learning by exclusion, phonological typicality only affected their initial inferences about the words. Consistent with recent computational analyses, phonological cues had stronger impact on the processing of verb-like than noun-like items. Experiment 2 revealed an impact of French on the performance of seven-year-olds in French immersion when tested in a French language environment. Thus, phonological knowledge may affect lexical categorization even in the absence of extensive experience.

  12. Orthographic vs. Phonologic Syllables in Handwriting Production

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kandel, Sonia; Herault, Lucie; Grosjacques, Geraldine; Lambert, Eric; Fayol, Michel

    2009-01-01

    French children program the words they write syllable by syllable. We examined whether the syllable the children use to segment words is determined phonologically (i.e., is derived from speech production processes) or orthographically. Third, 4th and 5th graders wrote on a digitiser words that were mono-syllables phonologically (e.g.…

  13. Generative Phonology in the Clinic. CLCS Occasional Paper No. 10.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kallen, Jeffrey L.

    A discussion of the use of generative phonology in the speech clinic, especially with children, begins with an outline of some constructs of generative phonology. First, some notes on phonetic notation and definitions of terms used in nongenerative phonology that have special meanings in this field are presented. Then a discussion of distinctive…

  14. Orthographically Influenced Abstract Phonological Representation: Evidence from Non-Rhotic Speakers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Taft, Marcus

    2006-01-01

    It is typically assumed that when orthography is translated silently into phonology (i.e., when reading silently), the phonological representation is equivalent to the spoken form or, at least, the surface phonemic form. The research presented here demonstrates that the phonological representation is likely to be more abstract than this, and is…

  15. Phonological and Semantic Cues to Learning from Word-Types

    PubMed Central

    Richtsmeier, Peter

    2017-01-01

    Word-types represent the primary form of data for many models of phonological learning, and they often predict performance in psycholinguistic tasks. Word-types are often tacitly defined as phonologically unique words. Yet, an explicit test of this definition is lacking, and natural language patterning suggests that word meaning could also act as a cue to word-type status. This possibility was tested in a statistical phonotactic learning experiment in which phonological and semantic properties of word-types varied. During familiarization, the learning targets—word-medial consonant sequences—were instantiated either by four related word-types or by just one word-type (the experimental frequency factor). The expectation was that more word-types would lead participants to generalize the target sequences. Regarding semantic cues, related word-types were either associated with different referents or all with a single referent. Regarding phonological cues, related word-types differed from each other by one, two, or more phonemes. At test, participants rated novel wordforms for their similarity to the familiarization words. When participants heard four related word-types, they gave higher ratings to test words with the same consonant sequences, irrespective of the phonological and semantic manipulations. The results support the existing phonological definition of word-types. PMID:29187914

  16. The differential role of phonological and distributional cues in grammatical categorisation.

    PubMed

    Monaghan, Padraic; Chater, Nick; Christiansen, Morten H

    2005-06-01

    Recognising the grammatical categories of words is a necessary skill for the acquisition of syntax and for on-line sentence processing. The syntactic and semantic context of the word contribute as cues for grammatical category assignment, but phonological cues, too, have been implicated as important sources of information. The value of phonological and distributional cues has not, with very few exceptions, been empirically assessed. This paper presents a series of analyses of phonological cues and distributional cues and their potential for distinguishing grammatical categories of words in corpus analyses. The corpus analyses indicated that phonological cues were more reliable for less frequent words, whereas distributional information was most valuable for high frequency words. We tested this prediction in an artificial language learning experiment, where the distributional and phonological cues of categories of nonsense words were varied. The results corroborated the corpus analyses. For high-frequency nonwords, distributional information was more useful, whereas for low-frequency words there was more reliance on phonological cues. The results indicate that phonological and distributional cues contribute differentially towards grammatical categorisation.

  17. Visual temporal processing in dyslexia and the magnocellular deficit theory: the need for speed?

    PubMed

    McLean, Gregor M T; Stuart, Geoffrey W; Coltheart, Veronika; Castles, Anne

    2011-12-01

    A controversial question in reading research is whether dyslexia is associated with impairments in the magnocellular system and, if so, how these low-level visual impairments might affect reading acquisition. This study used a novel chromatic flicker perception task to specifically explore temporal aspects of magnocellular functioning in 40 children with dyslexia and 42 age-matched controls (aged 7-11). The relationship between magnocellular temporal resolution and higher-level aspects of visual temporal processing including inspection time, single and dual-target (attentional blink) RSVP performance, go/no-go reaction time, and rapid naming was also assessed. The Dyslexia group exhibited significant deficits in magnocellular temporal resolution compared with controls, but the two groups did not differ in parvocellular temporal resolution. Despite the significant group differences, associations between magnocellular temporal resolution and reading ability were relatively weak, and links between low-level temporal resolution and reading ability did not appear specific to the magnocellular system. Factor analyses revealed that a collective Perceptual Speed factor, involving both low-level and higher-level visual temporal processing measures, accounted for unique variance in reading ability independently of phonological processing, rapid naming, and general ability.

  18. [Working memory abilities and the severity of phonological disorders].

    PubMed

    Linassi, Lisiane Zorzella; Keske-Soares, Marcia; Mota, Helena Bolli

    2005-01-01

    Working memory. To verify the performance of working memory abilities and their relation with the severity of phonological disorders. 45 children, with ages between 5.0 and 7.11 years, with evolutional phonological disorders (EFD), 17 female and 18 male, were evaluated. All subjects were assessed using the Child Phonological Evaluation proposed by Yavas et al. (1991). The severity of the disorder was determined by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC) proposed by Shriberg and Kwiatkowski (1982), classifying the phonological disorder as severe, moderate-severe, average-moderate and average. After that, subtest 5 of the Psycholinguistic Abilities Test (ITPA--Bogossian & Santos, 1977) and the non-word repetition test (Kessler, 1997) were applied. After analyzing the data according the statistical tests of Kruskal Wallis and Duncan, it was verified that the performance of moderate-severe and severe individuals in the non-word repetition test was inferior to that of average-moderate and average individuals. However, performance results in the digit repetition test did not present a positive correlation with severity. The performance of phonological memory has a relation with the severity of phonological disorders. This allows us to accept the idea that the phonologic memory is related to speech production. Regarding the central executor, the results indicate that the performance in digit repetition, used to assess the central executor, did not present a correlation with the severity of the disorder. This can be justified by the fact that the central executor is more directly related to vocabulary acquisition and is responsible for processing and storing information.

  19. Objective age of acquisition for 223 Italian words: norms and effects on picture naming speed.

    PubMed

    Lotto, Lorella; Surian, Luca; Job, Remo

    2010-02-01

    The present study provides a set of objective age of acquisition (AoA) norms for 223 Italian words that may be useful for conducting cross-linguistic studies or experiments on Italian language processing. The data were collected by presenting children from the ages of 2 to 11 with a normed picture set (Lotto, Dell'Acqua, & Job, 2001). Following the study of Morrison, Chappell, and Ellis (1997), we report two measures of objective AoA. Both measures strongly correlated with each other, and they also showed a good correlation with the rated AoA provided by adult participants. Furthermore, we assessed the relationship between the AoA measures and other variables used in psycholinguistic experiments. Regression analyses showed that familiarity, typicality, and word frequency were significant predictors of AoA. AoA, but not word frequency, was found to determine naming latencies. Finally, we present a path model in which AoA is a mediator in predicting speed in picture naming. The norms and the picture set can also be downloaded from http://dpss.psy.unipd.it/files/strumenti.php and from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

  20. The minimal unit of phonological encoding: prosodic or lexical word.

    PubMed

    Wheeldon, Linda R; Lahiri, Aditi

    2002-09-01

    Wheeldon and Lahiri (Journal of Memory and Language 37 (1997) 356) used a prepared speech production task (Sternberg, S., Monsell, S., Knoll, R. L., & Wright, C. E. (1978). The latency and duration of rapid movement sequences: comparisons of speech and typewriting. In G. E. Stelmach (Ed.), Information processing in motor control and learning (pp. 117-152). New York: Academic Press; Sternberg, S., Wright, C. E., Knoll, R. L., & Monsell, S. (1980). Motor programs in rapid speech: additional evidence. In R. A. Cole (Ed.), The perception and production of fluent speech (pp. 507-534). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum) to demonstrate that the latency to articulate a sentence is a function of the number of phonological words it comprises. Latencies for the sentence [Ik zoek het] [water] 'I seek the water' were shorter than latencies for sentences like [Ik zoek] [vers] [water] 'I seek fresh water'. We extend this research by examining the prepared production of utterances containing phonological words that are less than a lexical word in length. Dutch compounds (e.g. ooglid 'eyelid') form a single morphosyntactic word and a phonological word, which in turn includes two phonological words. We compare their prepared production latencies to those syntactic phrases consisting of an adjective and a noun (e.g. oud lid 'old member') which comprise two morphosyntactic and two phonological words, and to morphologically simple words (e.g. orgel 'organ') which comprise one morphosyntactic and one phonological word. Our findings demonstrate that the effect is limited to phrasal level phonological words, suggesting that production models need to make a distinction between lexical and phrasal phonology.

  1. Electrophysiological signatures of phonological and semantic maintenance in sentence repetition.

    PubMed

    Meltzer, Jed A; Kielar, Aneta; Panamsky, Lilia; Links, Kira A; Deschamps, Tiffany; Leigh, Rosie C

    2017-08-01

    Verbal short-term memory comprises resources for phonological rehearsal, which have been characterized anatomically, and for maintenance of semantic information, which are less understood. Sentence repetition tasks tap both processes interactively. To distinguish brain activity involved in phonological vs. semantic maintenance, we recorded magnetoencephalography during a sentence repetition task, incorporating three manipulations emphasizing one mechanism over the other. Participants heard sentences or word lists and attempted to repeat them verbatim after a 5-second delay. After MEG, participants completed a cued recall task testing how much they remembered of each sentence. Greater semantic engagement relative to phonological rehearsal was hypothesized for 1) sentences vs. word lists, 2) concrete vs. abstract sentences, and 3) well recalled vs. poorly recalled sentences. During auditory perception and the memory delay period, we found highly left-lateralized activation in the form of 8-30 Hz event-related desynchronization. Compared to abstract sentences, concrete sentences recruited posterior temporal cortex bilaterally, demonstrating a neural signature for the engagement of visual imagery in sentence maintenance. Maintenance of arbitrary word lists recruited right hemisphere dorsal regions, reflecting increased demands on phonological rehearsal. Sentences that were ultimately poorly recalled in the post-test also elicited extra right hemisphere activation when they were held in short-term memory, suggesting increased demands on phonological resources. Frontal midline theta oscillations also reflected phonological rather than semantic demand, being increased for word lists and poorly recalled sentences. These findings highlight distinct neural resources for phonological and semantic maintenance, with phonological maintenance associated with stronger oscillatory modulations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  2. Phonological skills and disfluency levels in preschool children who stutter.

    PubMed

    Gregg, Brent Andrew; Yairi, Ehud

    2007-01-01

    The relation between stuttering and aspects of language, including phonology, has been investigated for many years. Whereas past literature reported that the incidence of phonological difficulties is higher for children who stutter when compared to normally fluent children, the suggestion of association between the two disorders also drew several critical evaluations. Nevertheless, only a limited amount of information exists concerning the manner and extent to which the speech sound errors exhibited by young children who stutter, close to stuttering onset, is related to the characteristics of their stuttering, such as its severity. Conversely, information is limited regarding the effects a child's phonological skills may have on his/her stuttering severity. The current study investigated the mutual relations between these two factors in 28 carefully selected preschool children near the onset of their stuttering. The children, 20 boys and 8 girls, ranged in age from 25 to 38 months, with a mean of 32.2 months. The phonological skills of two groups with different ratings of stuttering were compared. Similarly, the stuttering severities of two groups with different levels of phonological skills (minimal deviations-moderate deviations) were compared. No statistically significant differences were found for either of the two factors. Inspection of the data revealed interesting individual differences. The reader will be able to list: (1) differences in the phonological skills of preschool children whose stuttering is severe as compared to children whose stuttering is mild and (2) differences in stuttering severity in preschool children with minimal phonological deviations as compared to children with moderate phonological deviations.

  3. Nonword Repetition: The Relative Contributions of Phonological Short-Term Memory and Phonological Representations in Children with Language and Reading Impairment

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rispens, Judith; Baker, Anne

    2012-01-01

    Purpose: This study investigates the relative contributions of phonological short-term memory and phonological representations to nonword repetition (NWR). This was evaluated in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and/or reading impairment (RI); it was also studied from a developmental perspective by comparing 2 groups of typically…

  4. Performance of School Age Reading Disabled Students on the Phonological Awareness Subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP)

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marshall, Dorothy; Christo, Catherine; Davis, John

    2013-01-01

    This study examined the performance of reading disabled children on the two Phonological Awareness Subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP). Participants performed significantly different on these two subtests with a poorer performance on the Elision subtest than Blending Words. In addition, the two subtests were not…

  5. The Role of Selected Lexical Factors on Confrontation Naming Accuracy, Speed, and Fluency in Adults Who Do and Do Not Stutter

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Newman, Rochelle S.; Ratner, Nan Bernstein

    2007-01-01

    Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether lexical access in adults who stutter (AWS) differs from that in people who do not stutter. Specifically, the authors examined the role of 3 lexical factors on naming speed, accuracy, and fluency: word frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency. If stuttering results…

  6. Cognitive Mechanism Underlying the Relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming and Reading: A Longitudinal Study on Bilingual Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Yeung, Susanna S.

    2016-01-01

    Rapid automatized naming has been demonstrated as an important correlate of various reading outcomes. However, the cognitive mechanism underlying the RAN-reading relationship is not well understood. The primary goal of this study is to evaluate three major theoretical accounts for the RAN--reading relationship: phonological processing account,…

  7. Phonemic Awareness Is a More Important Predictor of Orthographic Processing than Rapid Serial Naming: Evidence from Russian

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rakhlin, Natalia; Cardoso-Martins, Cláudia; Grigorenko, Elena L.

    2014-01-01

    We studied the relationship between rapid serial naming (RSN) and orthographic processing in Russian, an asymmetrically transparent orthography. Ninety-six students (M age = 13.73) completed tests of word and pseudoword reading fluency, spelling, orthographic choice, phonological choice, phoneme awareness (PA), and RSN. PA was a better predictor…

  8. Phonological and Orthographic Overlap Effects in Fast and Masked Priming

    PubMed Central

    Frisson, Steven; Bélanger, Nathalie N.; Rayner, Keith

    2014-01-01

    We investigated how orthographic and phonological information is activated during reading, using a fast priming task, and during single word recognition, using masked priming. Specifically, different types of overlap between prime and target were contrasted: high orthographic and high phonological overlap (track-crack), high orthographic and low phonological overlap (bear-gear), or low orthographic and high phonological overlap (fruit-chute). In addition, we examined whether (orthographic) beginning overlap (swoop-swoon) yielded the same priming pattern as end (rhyme) overlap (track-crack). Prime durations were 32 and 50ms in the fast priming version, and 50ms in the masked priming version, and mode of presentation (prime and target in lower case) was identical. The fast priming experiment showed facilitatory priming effects when both orthography and phonology overlapped, with no apparent differences between beginning and end overlap pairs. Facilitation was also found when prime and target only overlapped orthographically. In contrast, the masked priming experiment showed inhibition for both types of end overlap pairs (with and without phonological overlap), and no difference for begin overlap items. When prime and target only shared principally phonological information, facilitation was only found with a long prime duration in the fast priming experiment, while no differences were found in the masked priming version. These contrasting results suggest that fast priming and masked priming do not necessarily tap into the same type of processing. PMID:24365065

  9. Altered brain activity for phonological manipulation in dyslexic Japanese children

    PubMed Central

    Yamamoto, Hisako; Oba, Kentaro; Terasawa, Yuri; Moriguchi, Yoshiya; Uchiyama, Hitoshi; Seki, Ayumi; Koeda, Tatsuya; Inagaki, Masumi

    2013-01-01

    Because of unique linguistic characteristics, the prevalence rate of developmental dyslexia is relatively low in the Japanese language. Paradoxically, Japanese children have serious difficulty analysing phonological processes when they have dyslexia. Neurobiological deficits in Japanese dyslexia remain unclear and need to be identified, and may lead to better understanding of the commonality and diversity in the disorder among different linguistic systems. The present study investigated brain activity that underlies deficits in phonological awareness in Japanese dyslexic children using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We developed and conducted a phonological manipulation task to extract phonological processing skills and to minimize the influence of auditory working memory on healthy adults, typically developing children, and dyslexic children. Current experiments revealed that several brain regions participated in manipulating the phonological information including left inferior and middle frontal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, and bilateral basal ganglia. Moreover, dyslexic children showed altered activity in two brain regions. They showed hyperactivity in the basal ganglia compared with the two other groups, which reflects inefficient phonological processing. Hypoactivity in the left superior temporal gyrus was also found, suggesting difficulty in composing and processing phonological information. The altered brain activity shares similarity with those of dyslexic children in countries speaking alphabetical languages, but disparity also occurs between these two populations. These are initial findings concerning the neurobiological impairments in dyslexic Japanese children. PMID:24052613

  10. Altered brain activity for phonological manipulation in dyslexic Japanese children.

    PubMed

    Kita, Yosuke; Yamamoto, Hisako; Oba, Kentaro; Terasawa, Yuri; Moriguchi, Yoshiya; Uchiyama, Hitoshi; Seki, Ayumi; Koeda, Tatsuya; Inagaki, Masumi

    2013-12-01

    Because of unique linguistic characteristics, the prevalence rate of developmental dyslexia is relatively low in the Japanese language. Paradoxically, Japanese children have serious difficulty analysing phonological processes when they have dyslexia. Neurobiological deficits in Japanese dyslexia remain unclear and need to be identified, and may lead to better understanding of the commonality and diversity in the disorder among different linguistic systems. The present study investigated brain activity that underlies deficits in phonological awareness in Japanese dyslexic children using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We developed and conducted a phonological manipulation task to extract phonological processing skills and to minimize the influence of auditory working memory on healthy adults, typically developing children, and dyslexic children. Current experiments revealed that several brain regions participated in manipulating the phonological information including left inferior and middle frontal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, and bilateral basal ganglia. Moreover, dyslexic children showed altered activity in two brain regions. They showed hyperactivity in the basal ganglia compared with the two other groups, which reflects inefficient phonological processing. Hypoactivity in the left superior temporal gyrus was also found, suggesting difficulty in composing and processing phonological information. The altered brain activity shares similarity with those of dyslexic children in countries speaking alphabetical languages, but disparity also occurs between these two populations. These are initial findings concerning the neurobiological impairments in dyslexic Japanese children.

  11. Prediction of Word Recognition in the First Half of Grade 1

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Snel, M. J.; Aarnoutse, C. A. J.; Terwel, J.; van Leeuwe, J. F. J.; van der Veld, W. M.

    2016-01-01

    Early detection of reading problems is important to prevent an enduring lag in reading skills. We studied the relationship between speed of word recognition (after six months of grade 1 education) and four kindergarten pre-literacy skills: letter knowledge, phonological awareness and naming speed for both digits and letters. Our sample consisted…

  12. Slowing in reading and picture naming: the effects of aging and developmental dyslexia.

    PubMed

    De Luca, Maria; Marinelli, Chiara Valeria; Spinelli, Donatella; Zoccolotti, Pierluigi

    2017-10-01

    We examined the slowing in vocal reaction times shown by dyslexic (compared to control) children with that of older (compared to younger) adults using an approach focusing on the detection of global, non-task-specific components. To address this aim, data were analyzed with reference to the difference engine (DEM) and rate and amount (RAM) models. In Experiment 1, typically developing children, children with dyslexia (both attending sixth grade), younger adults and older adults read words and non-words and named pictures. In Experiment 2, word and picture conditions were presented to dyslexic and control children attending eighth grade. In both experiments, dyslexic children were delayed in reading conditions, while they were unimpaired in naming pictures (a finding which indicates spared access to the phonological lexicon). The reading difficulty was well accounted for by a single multiplicative factor while only the residual effect of length (but not frequency and lexicality) was present after controlling for over-additivity using a linear mixed effects model with random slopes on critical variables. Older adults were slower than younger adults across reading and naming conditions. This deficit was well described by a single multiplicative factor. Thus, while slowing of information processing is limited to orthographic stimuli in dyslexic children, it cuts across verbal tasks in older adults. Overall, speed differences in groups such as dyslexic children and older adults can be effectively described with reference to deficits in domains encompassing a variety of experimental conditions rather than deficits in single specific task/conditions. The DEM and RAM prove effective in teasing out global vs. specific components of performance.

  13. Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Representations: Time Matters

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Chen, Qi; Mirman, Daniel

    2015-01-01

    Computational modeling and eye-tracking were used to investigate how phonological and semantic information interact to influence the time course of spoken word recognition. We extended our recent models (Chen & Mirman, 2012; Mirman, Britt, & Chen, 2013) to account for new evidence that competition among phonological neighbors influences…

  14. The Phonetics and Phonology of the Polish Calling Melodies.

    PubMed

    Arvaniti, Amalia; Żygis, Marzena; Jaskuła, Marek

    2016-01-01

    Two calling melodies of Polish were investigated, the routine call, used to call someone for an everyday reason, and the urgent call, which conveys disapproval of the addressee's actions. A Discourse Completion Task was used to elicit the two melodies from Polish speakers using twelve names from one to four syllables long; there were three names per syllable count, and speakers produced three tokens of each name with each melody. The results, based on eleven speakers, show that the routine calling melody consists of a low F0 stretch followed by a rise-fall-rise; the urgent calling melody, on the other hand, is a simple rise-fall. Systematic differences were found in the scaling and alignment of tonal targets: the routine call showed late alignment of the accentual pitch peak, and in most instances lower scaling of targets. The accented vowel was also affected, being overall louder in the urgent call. Based on the data and comparisons with other Polish melodies, we analyze the routine call as LH* !H-H% and the urgent call as H* L-L%. We discuss the results and our analysis in light of recent findings on calling melodies in other languages, and explore their repercussions for intonational phonology and the modeling of intonation. © 2017 S. Karger AG, Basel.

  15. A Nonword Repetition Task to Assess Bilingual Children's Phonology

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    dos Santos, Christophe; Ferré, Sandrine

    2018-01-01

    Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are particularly sensitive to phonological complexity in their language. Their performance drops when there are specific phonological structures or when complexity increases. A nonword repetition (NWR) test, which aims to assess the phonology of bilingual speakers with and without SLI, should…

  16. Phonological Working Memory for Words and Nonwords in Cerebral Cortex.

    PubMed

    Perrachione, Tyler K; Ghosh, Satrajit S; Ostrovskaya, Irina; Gabrieli, John D E; Kovelman, Ioulia

    2017-07-12

    The primary purpose of this study was to identify the brain bases of phonological working memory (the short-term maintenance of speech sounds) using behavioral tasks analogous to clinically sensitive assessments of nonword repetition. The secondary purpose of the study was to identify how individual differences in brain activation were related to participants' nonword repetition abilities. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neurophysiological response during a nonword discrimination task derived from standard clinical assessments of phonological working memory. Healthy adult control participants (N = 16) discriminated pairs of real words or nonwords under varying phonological working memory load, which we manipulated by parametrically varying the number of syllables in target (non)words. Participants' cognitive and phonological abilities were also measured using standardized assessments. Neurophysiological responses in bilateral superior temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and supplementary motor area increased with greater phonological working memory load. Activation in left superior temporal gyrus during nonword discrimination correlated with participants' performance on standard clinical nonword repetition tests. These results suggest that phonological working memory is related to the function of cortical structures that canonically underlie speech perception and production.

  17. Phonological Working Memory for Words and Nonwords in Cerebral Cortex

    PubMed Central

    Ghosh, Satrajit S.; Ostrovskaya, Irina; Gabrieli, John D. E.; Kovelman, Ioulia

    2017-01-01

    Purpose The primary purpose of this study was to identify the brain bases of phonological working memory (the short-term maintenance of speech sounds) using behavioral tasks analogous to clinically sensitive assessments of nonword repetition. The secondary purpose of the study was to identify how individual differences in brain activation were related to participants' nonword repetition abilities. Method We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neurophysiological response during a nonword discrimination task derived from standard clinical assessments of phonological working memory. Healthy adult control participants (N = 16) discriminated pairs of real words or nonwords under varying phonological working memory load, which we manipulated by parametrically varying the number of syllables in target (non)words. Participants' cognitive and phonological abilities were also measured using standardized assessments. Results Neurophysiological responses in bilateral superior temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and supplementary motor area increased with greater phonological working memory load. Activation in left superior temporal gyrus during nonword discrimination correlated with participants' performance on standard clinical nonword repetition tests. Conclusion These results suggest that phonological working memory is related to the function of cortical structures that canonically underlie speech perception and production. PMID:28631005

  18. The phonological abilities of Cantonese-speaking children with hearing loss.

    PubMed

    Dodd, B J; So, L K

    1994-06-01

    Little is known about the acquisition of phonology by children with hearing loss who learn languages other than English. In this study, the phonological abilities of 12 Cantonese-speaking children (ages 4:2 to 6:11) with prelingual hearing impairment are described. All but 3 children had almost complete syllable-initial consonant repertoires; all but 2 had complete syllable-final consonant and vowel repertoires; and only 1 child failed to produce all nine tones. Children's perception of single words was assessed using sets of words that included tone, consonant, and semantic distractors. Although the performance of the subjects was not age appropriate, they nevertheless most often chose the target, with most errors observed for the tone distractor. The phonological rules used included those that characterize the speech of younger hearing children acquiring Cantonese (e.g., cluster reduction, stopping, and deaspiration). However, most children also used at least one unusual phonological rule (e.g., frication, addition, initial consonant deletion, and/or backing). These rules are common in the speech of Cantonese-speaking children diagnosed as phonologically disordered. The influence of the ambient language on children's patterns of phonological errors is discussed.

  19. Phonological Deficits in French Speaking Children with SLI

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Maillart, Christelle; Parisse, Christophe

    2006-01-01

    Background: This study investigated the phonological disorders of French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in production. Aims: The main goal was to confirm whether children with SLI have limitations in phonological ability as compared with normally developing children matched by mean length of utterance (MLU) and phonemic…

  20. Neural evidence for phonologically based language production deficits in older adults: An fMRI investigation of age-related differences in picture-word interference.

    PubMed

    Rizio, Avery A; Moyer, Karlee J; Diaz, Michele T

    2017-04-01

    Older adults often show declines in phonological aspects of language production, particularly for low-frequency words, but maintain strong semantic systems. However, there are different theories about the mechanism that may underlie such age-related differences in language (e.g., age-related declines in transmission of activation or inhibition). This study used fMRI to investigate whether age-related differences in language production are associated with transmission deficits or inhibition deficits. We used the picture-word interference paradigm to examine age-related differences in picture naming as a function of both target frequency and the relationship between the target picture and distractor word. We found that the presence of a categorically related distractor led to greater semantic elaboration by older adults compared to younger adults, as evidenced by older adults' increased recruitment of regions including the left middle frontal gyrus and bilateral precuneus. When presented with a phonologically related distractor, patterns of neural activation are consistent with previously observed age deficits in phonological processing, including age-related reductions in the recruitment of regions such as the left middle temporal gyrus and right supramarginal gyrus. Lastly, older, but not younger, adults show increased brain activation of the pre- and postcentral gyri as a function of decreasing target frequency when target pictures are paired with a phonological distractor, suggesting that cuing the phonology of the target disproportionately aids production of low-frequency items. Overall, this pattern of results is generally consistent with the transmission deficit hypothesis, illustrating that links within the phonological system, but not the semantic system, are weakened with age.

  1. Implicit phonological priming during visual word recognition.

    PubMed

    Wilson, Lisa B; Tregellas, Jason R; Slason, Erin; Pasko, Bryce E; Rojas, Donald C

    2011-03-15

    Phonology is a lower-level structural aspect of language involving the sounds of a language and their organization in that language. Numerous behavioral studies utilizing priming, which refers to an increased sensitivity to a stimulus following prior experience with that or a related stimulus, have provided evidence for the role of phonology in visual word recognition. However, most language studies utilizing priming in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have focused on lexical-semantic aspects of language processing. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neurobiological substrates of the automatic, implicit stages of phonological processing. While undergoing fMRI, eighteen individuals performed a lexical decision task (LDT) on prime-target pairs including word-word homophone and pseudoword-word pseudohomophone pairs with a prime presentation below perceptual threshold. Whole-brain analyses revealed several cortical regions exhibiting hemodynamic response suppression due to phonological priming including bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG), middle temporal gyri (MTG), and angular gyri (AG) with additional region of interest (ROI) analyses revealing response suppression in the left lateralized supramarginal gyrus (SMG). Homophone and pseudohomophone priming also resulted in different patterns of hemodynamic responses relative to one another. These results suggest that phonological processing plays a key role in visual word recognition. Furthermore, enhanced hemodynamic responses for unrelated stimuli relative to primed stimuli were observed in midline cortical regions corresponding to the default-mode network (DMN) suggesting that DMN activity can be modulated by task requirements within the context of an implicit task. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  2. Visual sign phonology: insights into human reading and language from a natural soundless phonology.

    PubMed

    Petitto, L A; Langdon, C; Stone, A; Andriola, D; Kartheiser, G; Cochran, C

    2016-11-01

    Among the most prevailing assumptions in science and society about the human reading process is that sound and sound-based phonology are critical to young readers. The child's sound-to-letter decoding is viewed as universal and vital to deriving meaning from print. We offer a different view. The crucial link for early reading success is not between segmental sounds and print. Instead the human brain's capacity to segment, categorize, and discern linguistic patterning makes possible the capacity to segment all languages. This biological process includes the segmentation of languages on the hands in signed languages. Exposure to natural sign language in early life equally affords the child's discovery of silent segmental units in visual sign phonology (VSP) that can also facilitate segmental decoding of print. We consider powerful biological evidence about the brain, how it builds sound and sign phonology, and why sound and sign phonology are equally important in language learning and reading. We offer a testable theoretical account, reading model, and predictions about how VSP can facilitate segmentation and mapping between print and meaning. We explain how VSP can be a powerful facilitator of all children's reading success (deaf and hearing)-an account with profound transformative impact on learning to read in deaf children with different language backgrounds. The existence of VSP has important implications for understanding core properties of all human language and reading, challenges assumptions about language and reading as being tied to sound, and provides novel insight into a remarkable biological equivalence in signed and spoken languages. WIREs Cogn Sci 2016, 7:366-381. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1404 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  3. Explaining lexical-semantic deficits in specific language impairment: the role of phonological similarity, phonological working memory, and lexical competition.

    PubMed

    Mainela-Arnold, Elina; Evans, Julia L; Coady, Jeffry A

    2010-12-01

    In this study, the authors investigated potential explanations for sparse lexical-semantic representations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing peers. The role of auditory perception, phonological working memory, and lexical competition were investigated. Participants included 32 children (ages 8;5-12;3 [years;months]): Sixteen children with SLI and 16 typically developing age- and nonverbal IQ-matched peers (CA). Children's word definitions were investigated. The words to be defined were manipulated for phonological neighborhood density. Nonword repetition and two lexical competition measures were tested as predictors of word definition abilities. Children with SLI gave word definitions with fewer content details than children in the CA group. Compared with the CA group, the definitions of children in the SLI group were not disproportionately impacted by phonological neighborhood density. Lexical competition was a significant unique predictor of children's word definitions, but nonword repetition was not. Individual differences in richness of lexical semantic representations as well as differences between children with SLI and typically developing peers may-at least, in part-be explained by processes of competition. However, difficulty with auditory perception or phonological working memory does not fully explain difficulties in lexical semantics.

  4. The Relationship between Phonological Awareness and Music Aptitude

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Culp, Mara E.

    2017-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between phonological awareness and music aptitude. I administered the Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation (IMMA) to second-grade students in a rural school in Pennsylvania (N = 17). Speech-language specialists administered a hearing screening and The Phonological Awareness Test 2…

  5. Revealing and quantifying the impaired phonological analysis underpinning impaired comprehension in Wernicke's aphasia.

    PubMed

    Robson, Holly; Keidel, James L; Ralph, Matthew A Lambon; Sage, Karen

    2012-01-01

    Wernicke's aphasia is a condition which results in severely disrupted language comprehension following a lesion to the left temporo-parietal region. A phonological analysis deficit has traditionally been held to be at the root of the comprehension impairment in Wernicke's aphasia, a view consistent with current functional neuroimaging which finds areas in the superior temporal cortex responsive to phonological stimuli. However behavioural evidence to support the link between a phonological analysis deficit and auditory comprehension has not been yet shown. This study extends seminal work by Blumstein, Baker, and Goodglass (1977) to investigate the relationship between acoustic-phonological perception, measured through phonological discrimination, and auditory comprehension in a case series of Wernicke's aphasia participants. A novel adaptive phonological discrimination task was used to obtain reliable thresholds of the phonological perceptual distance required between nonwords before they could be discriminated. Wernicke's aphasia participants showed significantly elevated thresholds compared to age and hearing matched control participants. Acoustic-phonological thresholds correlated strongly with auditory comprehension abilities in Wernicke's aphasia. In contrast, nonverbal semantic skills showed no relationship with auditory comprehension. The results are evaluated in the context of recent neurobiological models of language and suggest that impaired acoustic-phonological perception underlies the comprehension impairment in Wernicke's aphasia and favour models of language which propose a leftward asymmetry in phonological analysis. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  6. Beyond decoding: phonological processing during silent reading in beginning readers.

    PubMed

    Blythe, Hazel I; Pagán, Ascensión; Dodd, Megan

    2015-07-01

    In this experiment, the extent to which beginning readers process phonology during lexical identification in silent sentence reading was investigated. The eye movements of children aged seven to nine years and adults were recorded as they read sentences containing either a correctly spelled target word (e.g., girl), a pseudohomophone (e.g., gerl), or a spelling control (e.g., garl). Both children and adults showed a benefit from the valid phonology of the pseudohomophone, compared to the spelling control during reading. This indicates that children as young as seven years old exhibit relatively skilled phonological processing during reading, despite having moved past the use of overt phonological decoding strategies. In addition, in comparison to adults, children's lexical processing was more disrupted by the presence of spelling errors, suggesting a developmental change in the relative dependence upon phonological and orthographic processing in lexical identification during silent sentence reading. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

  7. Acoustic-Emergent Phonology in the Amplitude Envelope of Child-Directed Speech

    PubMed Central

    Leong, Victoria; Goswami, Usha

    2015-01-01

    When acquiring language, young children may use acoustic spectro-temporal patterns in speech to derive phonological units in spoken language (e.g., prosodic stress patterns, syllables, phonemes). Children appear to learn acoustic-phonological mappings rapidly, without direct instruction, yet the underlying developmental mechanisms remain unclear. Across different languages, a relationship between amplitude envelope sensitivity and phonological development has been found, suggesting that children may make use of amplitude modulation (AM) patterns within the envelope to develop a phonological system. Here we present the Spectral Amplitude Modulation Phase Hierarchy (S-AMPH) model, a set of algorithms for deriving the dominant AM patterns in child-directed speech (CDS). Using Principal Components Analysis, we show that rhythmic CDS contains an AM hierarchy comprising 3 core modulation timescales. These timescales correspond to key phonological units: prosodic stress (Stress AM, ~2 Hz), syllables (Syllable AM, ~5 Hz) and onset-rime units (Phoneme AM, ~20 Hz). We argue that these AM patterns could in principle be used by naïve listeners to compute acoustic-phonological mappings without lexical knowledge. We then demonstrate that the modulation statistics within this AM hierarchy indeed parse the speech signal into a primitive hierarchically-organised phonological system comprising stress feet (proto-words), syllables and onset-rime units. We apply the S-AMPH model to two other CDS corpora, one spontaneous and one deliberately-timed. The model accurately identified 72–82% (freely-read CDS) and 90–98% (rhythmically-regular CDS) stress patterns, syllables and onset-rime units. This in-principle demonstration that primitive phonology can be extracted from speech AMs is termed Acoustic-Emergent Phonology (AEP) theory. AEP theory provides a set of methods for examining how early phonological development is shaped by the temporal modulation structure of speech across

  8. Acoustic-Emergent Phonology in the Amplitude Envelope of Child-Directed Speech.

    PubMed

    Leong, Victoria; Goswami, Usha

    2015-01-01

    When acquiring language, young children may use acoustic spectro-temporal patterns in speech to derive phonological units in spoken language (e.g., prosodic stress patterns, syllables, phonemes). Children appear to learn acoustic-phonological mappings rapidly, without direct instruction, yet the underlying developmental mechanisms remain unclear. Across different languages, a relationship between amplitude envelope sensitivity and phonological development has been found, suggesting that children may make use of amplitude modulation (AM) patterns within the envelope to develop a phonological system. Here we present the Spectral Amplitude Modulation Phase Hierarchy (S-AMPH) model, a set of algorithms for deriving the dominant AM patterns in child-directed speech (CDS). Using Principal Components Analysis, we show that rhythmic CDS contains an AM hierarchy comprising 3 core modulation timescales. These timescales correspond to key phonological units: prosodic stress (Stress AM, ~2 Hz), syllables (Syllable AM, ~5 Hz) and onset-rime units (Phoneme AM, ~20 Hz). We argue that these AM patterns could in principle be used by naïve listeners to compute acoustic-phonological mappings without lexical knowledge. We then demonstrate that the modulation statistics within this AM hierarchy indeed parse the speech signal into a primitive hierarchically-organised phonological system comprising stress feet (proto-words), syllables and onset-rime units. We apply the S-AMPH model to two other CDS corpora, one spontaneous and one deliberately-timed. The model accurately identified 72-82% (freely-read CDS) and 90-98% (rhythmically-regular CDS) stress patterns, syllables and onset-rime units. This in-principle demonstration that primitive phonology can be extracted from speech AMs is termed Acoustic-Emergent Phonology (AEP) theory. AEP theory provides a set of methods for examining how early phonological development is shaped by the temporal modulation structure of speech across

  9. Differential Phonological and Semantic Modulation of Neurophysiological Responses to Visual Word Recognition.

    PubMed

    Drakesmith, Mark; El-Deredy, Wael; Welbourne, Stephen

    2015-01-01

    Reading words for meaning relies on orthographic, phonological and semantic processing. The triangle model implicates a direct orthography-to-semantics pathway and a phonologically mediated orthography-to-semantics pathway, which interact with each other. The temporal evolution of processing in these routes is not well understood, although theoretical evidence predicts early phonological processing followed by interactive phonological and semantic processing. This study used electroencephalography-event-related potential (ERP) analysis and magnetoencephalography (MEG) source localisation to identify temporal markers and the corresponding neural generators of these processes in early (∼200 ms) and late (∼400 ms) neurophysiological responses to visual words, pseudowords and consonant strings. ERP showed an effect of phonology but not semantics in both time windows, although at ∼400 ms there was an effect of stimulus familiarity. Phonological processing at ~200 ms was localised to the left occipitotemporal cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus. At 400 ms, there was continued phonological processing in the inferior frontal gyrus and additional semantic processing in the anterior temporal cortex. There was also an area in the left temporoparietal junction which was implicated in both phonological and semantic processing. In ERP, the semantic response at ∼400 ms appeared to be masked by concurrent processes relating to familiarity, while MEG successfully differentiated these processes. The results support the prediction of early phonological processing followed by an interaction of phonological and semantic processing during word recognition. Neuroanatomical loci of these processes are consistent with previous neuropsychological and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies. The results also have implications for the classical interpretation of N400-like responses as markers for semantic processing.

  10. Executive and Phonological Processes in Second-Language Acquisition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Engel de Abreu, Pascale M. J.; Gathercole, Susan E.

    2012-01-01

    This article reports a latent variable study exploring the specific links among executive processes of working memory, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, and proficiency in first (L1), second (L2), and third (L3) languages in 8- to 9-year-olds experiencing multilingual education. Children completed multiple L1-measures of…

  11. Gestural Characterization of a Phonological Class: The Liquids

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Proctor, Michael Ian

    2009-01-01

    Rhotics and laterals pattern together in a variety of ways that suggest that they form a phonological class (Walsh-Dickey 1997), yet capturing the relevant set of consonants and describing the behavior of its members has proven difficult under feature-based phonological theory (Wiese 2001). In this dissertation, I argue that an articulatory…

  12. Is Phonology Bypassed in Normal or Dyslexic Development?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Pennington, Bruce F.; And Others

    1987-01-01

    Two studies involving 215 subjects tested the hypothesis that orthographic coding bypasses phonological coding after the early stages of reading or spelling. It was found that nondyslexics continue to develop phonological coding skill until adulthood and rely on it for reading and spelling to a significantly greater extent than do dyslexics.…

  13. Disfluency Patterns and Phonological Skills Near Stuttering Onset

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gregg, Brent Andrew; Yairi, Ehud

    2012-01-01

    There is a substantial amount of literature reporting the incidence of phonological difficulties to be higher for children who stutter when compared to normally fluent children, suggesting a link between stuttering and phonology. In view of this, the purpose of the investigation was to determine whether, among children who stutter, there are…

  14. Rapid Naming in Brazilian Students with Dyslexia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

    PubMed Central

    Alves, Luciana Mendonça; Siqueira, Cláudia M.; Ferreira, Maria do Carmo Mangelli; Alves, Juliana Flores Mendonça; Lodi, Débora F.; Bicalho, Lorena; Celeste, Letícia C.

    2016-01-01

    Introduction: The effective development of reading and writing skills requires the concerted action of several abilities, one of which is phonological processing. One of the main components of phonological processing is rapid automatized naming (RAN)—the ability to identify and recognize a given item by the activation and concomitant articulation of its name. Objective: To assess the RAN performance of schoolchildren with dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared with their peers. Methods: In total, 70 schoolchildren aged between 8 and 11 years participated in the study. Of these, 16 children had a multiprofessional diagnosis of ADHD while 14 were diagnosed with dyslexia. Matched with these groups, 40 schoolchildren with no history of developmental impairments were also evaluated. The RAN test was administered to assess the length of time required to name a series of familiar visual stimuli. The statistical analysis was conducted using measures of descriptive statistics and the 2-sample t-test at the 5% significance level. Results: The performance of the group with dyslexia was inferior to that of the control group in all tasks and the ADHD group had inferior performance for color and letters-naming tasks. The schoolchildren with dyslexia and those with ADHD showed very similar response times. Age was an important variable to be analyzed separately. As they aged, children with typical language development had fast answers on colors and digits tasks while children with dyslexia or ADHD did not show improvement with age. Conclusions: The schoolchildren with dyslexia took longer to complete all tasks and ADHD took longer to complete digits and objects tasks in comparison to their peers with typical development. This ability tended to improve with age, which was not the case, however, with schoolchildren who had ADHD or dyslexia. PMID:26858672

  15. Examining the relationship between rapid automatized naming and arithmetic fluency in Chinese kindergarten children.

    PubMed

    Cui, Jiaxin; Georgiou, George K; Zhang, Yiyun; Li, Yixun; Shu, Hua; Zhou, Xinlin

    2017-02-01

    Rapid automatized naming (RAN) has been found to predict mathematics. However, the nature of their relationship remains unclear. Thus, the purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to examine how RAN (numeric and non-numeric) predicts a subdomain of mathematics (arithmetic fluency) and (b) to examine what processing skills may account for the RAN-arithmetic fluency relationship. A total of 160 third-year kindergarten Chinese children (83 boys and 77 girls, mean age=5.11years) were assessed on RAN (colors, objects, digits, and dice), nonverbal IQ, visual-verbal paired associate learning, phonological awareness, short-term memory, speed of processing, approximate number system acuity, and arithmetic fluency (addition and subtraction). The results indicated first that RAN was a significant correlate of arithmetic fluency and the correlations did not vary as a function of type of RAN or arithmetic fluency tasks. In addition, RAN continued to predict addition and subtraction fluency even after controlling for all other processing skills. Taken together, these findings challenge the existing theoretical accounts of the RAN-arithmetic fluency relationship and suggest that, similar to reading fluency, multiple processes underlie the RAN-arithmetic fluency relationship. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  16. Phonological Concept Learning

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Moreton, Elliott; Pater, Joe; Pertsova, Katya

    2017-01-01

    Linguistic and non-linguistic pattern learning have been studied separately, but we argue for a comparative approach. Analogous inductive problems arise in phonological and visual pattern learning. Evidence from three experiments shows that human learners can solve them in analogous ways, and that human performance in both cases can be captured by…

  17. Conduction aphasia, sensory-motor integration, and phonological short-term memory - an aggregate analysis of lesion and fMRI data.

    PubMed

    Buchsbaum, Bradley R; Baldo, Juliana; Okada, Kayoko; Berman, Karen F; Dronkers, Nina; D'Esposito, Mark; Hickok, Gregory

    2011-12-01

    Conduction aphasia is a language disorder characterized by frequent speech errors, impaired verbatim repetition, a deficit in phonological short-term memory, and naming difficulties in the presence of otherwise fluent and grammatical speech output. While traditional models of conduction aphasia have typically implicated white matter pathways, recent advances in lesions reconstruction methodology applied to groups of patients have implicated left temporoparietal zones. Parallel work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has pinpointed a region in the posterior most portion of the left planum temporale, area Spt, which is critical for phonological working memory. Here we show that the region of maximal lesion overlap in a sample of 14 patients with conduction aphasia perfectly circumscribes area Spt, as defined in an aggregate fMRI analysis of 105 subjects performing a phonological working memory task. We provide a review of the evidence supporting the idea that Spt is an interface site for the integration of sensory and vocal tract-related motor representations of complex sound sequences, such as speech and music and show how the symptoms of conduction aphasia can be explained by damage to this system. 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  18. Working Memory Compensates for Hearing Related Phonological Processing Deficit

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Classon, Elisabet; Rudner, Mary; Ronnberg, Jerker

    2013-01-01

    Acquired hearing impairment is associated with gradually declining phonological representations. According to the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model, poorly defined representations lead to mismatch in phonologically challenging tasks. To resolve the mismatch, reliance on working memory capacity (WMC) increases. This study investigated…

  19. Children with Down Syndrome Use Phonological Knowledge in Reading.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gombert, Jean-Emile

    2002-01-01

    Discusses an experiment that links phonological awareness and reading performance in children with Down syndrome. Examines the results within the framework of the author's metalinguistic development theory in which alphabet reading is a pacemaker for the development of explicit phonological awareness. (PM)

  20. Phonological awareness of English by Chinese and Korean bilinguals

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Chung, Hyunjoo; Schmidt, Anna; Cheng, Tse-Hsuan

    2002-05-01

    This study examined non-native speakers phonological awareness of spoken English. Chinese speaking adults, Korean speaking adults, and English speaking adults were tested. The L2 speakers had been in the US for less than 6 months. Chinese and Korean allow no consonant clusters and have limited numbers of consonants allowable in syllable final position, whereas English allows a variety of clusters and various consonants in syllable final position. Subjects participated in eight phonological awareness tasks (4 replacement tasks and 4 deletion tasks) based on English phonology. In addition, digit span was measured. Preliminary analysis indicates that Chinese and Korean speaker errors appear to reflect L1 influences (such as orthography, phonotactic constraints, and phonology). All three groups of speakers showed more difficulty with manipulation of rime than onset, especially with postvocalic nasals. Results will be discussed in terms of syllable structure, L1 influence, and association with short term memory.

  1. Phonological effects in handwriting production: evidence from the implicit priming paradigm.

    PubMed

    Afonso, Olivia; Álvarez, Carlos J

    2011-11-01

    In the present article, we report 3 experiments using the odd-man-out variant of the implicit priming paradigm, aimed at determining the role played by phonological information during the handwriting process. Participants were asked to write a small set of words learned in response to prompts. Within each block, response words could share initial segments (constant homogeneous) or not (heterogeneous). Also, 2 variable homogeneous blocks were created by including a response word that did not share orthographic onset with the other response (odd-man-out). This odd-man-out could be phonologically related to the targets or not. Experiment 1 showed a preparation effect in the constant homogeneous condition, which disappeared (spoil effect) in the variable condition not phonologically related. However, no spoil effect was found when the odd-man-out shared the phonological initial segment with the targets. In Experiment 2, we obtained a spoil effect in the variable phonologically related condition, but it was significantly smaller than in the variable not phonologically related condition. The effects observed in Experiment 2 vanished in Experiment 3 under articulatory suppression, suggesting that they originated at a sublexical level. These findings suggest that phonological sublexical information is used during handwriting and provide evidence that the implicit priming paradigm (and the odd-man-out version of this) is a suitable tool for handwriting production research.

  2. Visual attention shift to printed words during spoken word recognition in Chinese: The role of phonological information.

    PubMed

    Shen, Wei; Qu, Qingqing; Tong, Xiuhong

    2018-05-01

    The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which phonological information mediates the visual attention shift to printed Chinese words in spoken word recognition by using an eye-movement technique with a printed-word paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are visually presented with four printed words on a computer screen, which include a target word, a phonological competitor, and two distractors. Participants are then required to select the target word using a computer mouse, and the eye movements are recorded. In Experiment 1, phonological information was manipulated at the full-phonological overlap; in Experiment 2, phonological information at the partial-phonological overlap was manipulated; and in Experiment 3, the phonological competitors were manipulated to share either fulloverlap or partial-overlap with targets directly. Results of the three experiments showed that the phonological competitor effects were observed at both the full-phonological overlap and partial-phonological overlap conditions. That is, phonological competitors attracted more fixations than distractors, which suggested that phonological information mediates the visual attention shift during spoken word recognition. More importantly, we found that the mediating role of phonological information varies as a function of the phonological similarity between target words and phonological competitors.

  3. Rapid Extraction of Lexical Tone Phonology in Chinese Characters: A Visual Mismatch Negativity Study

    PubMed Central

    Wang, Xiao-Dong; Liu, A-Ping; Wu, Yin-Yuan; Wang, Peng

    2013-01-01

    Background In alphabetic languages, emerging evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies shows the rapid and automatic activation of phonological information in visual word recognition. In the mapping from orthography to phonology, unlike most alphabetic languages in which there is a natural correspondence between the visual and phonological forms, in logographic Chinese, the mapping between visual and phonological forms is rather arbitrary and depends on learning and experience. The issue of whether the phonological information is rapidly and automatically extracted in Chinese characters by the brain has not yet been thoroughly addressed. Methodology/Principal Findings We continuously presented Chinese characters differing in orthography and meaning to adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers to construct a constant varying visual stream. In the stream, most stimuli were homophones of Chinese characters: The phonological features embedded in these visual characters were the same, including consonants, vowels and the lexical tone. Occasionally, the rule of phonology was randomly violated by characters whose phonological features differed in the lexical tone. Conclusions/Significance We showed that the violation of the lexical tone phonology evoked an early, robust visual response, as revealed by whole-head electrical recordings of the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), indicating the rapid extraction of phonological information embedded in Chinese characters. Source analysis revealed that the vMMN was involved in neural activations of the visual cortex, suggesting that the visual sensory memory is sensitive to phonological information embedded in visual words at an early processing stage. PMID:23437235

  4. Reading for sound with dyslexia: evidence for early orthographic and late phonological integration deficits.

    PubMed

    Savill, Nicola J; Thierry, Guillaume

    2011-04-18

    Deteriorated phonological representations are widely assumed to be the underlying cause of reading difficulties in developmental dyslexia; however, existing evidence also implicates degraded orthographic processing. Here, we used event-related potentials whilst dyslexic and control adults performed a pseudoword-word priming task requiring deep phonological analysis to examine phonological and orthographic priming, respectively. Pseudowords were manipulated to be homophonic or non-homophonic to a target word and more or less orthographically similar. Since previous ERP research with normal readers has established phonologically driven differences as early as 250 ms from word presentation, degraded phonological representations were expected to reveal reduced phonological priming in dyslexic readers from 250 ms after target word onset. However, phonological priming main effects in both the N2 and P3 ranges were indistinguishable in amplitude between groups. Critically, we found group differences in the N1 range, such that orthographic modulations observed in controls were absent in the dyslexic group. Furthermore, early group differences in phonological priming transpired as interactions with orthographic priming (in P2, N2 and P3 ranges). A group difference in phonological priming did not emerge until the P600 range, in which the dyslexic group showed significantly attenuated priming. As the P600 is classically associated with online monitoring and reanalysis, this pattern of results suggest that during deliberate phonological processing, the phonological deficit in reading may relate more to inefficient monitoring rather than deficient detection. Meanwhile, early differences in perceptual processing of phonological information may be driven by the strength of engagement with orthographic information. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  5. The Contribution of Segmental and Suprasegmental Phonology to Reading Comprehension

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Veenendaal, Nathalie J.; Groen, Margriet A.; Verhoeven, Ludo

    2016-01-01

    The aim of the present study was to examine the relation between decoding and segmental and suprasegmental phonology, and their contribution to reading comprehension, in the upper primary grades. Following a longitudinal design, the performance of 99 Dutch primary school students on phonological awareness (segmental phonology) and text-reading…

  6. Otitis Media and Disordered Phonologies: Some Concerns and Cautions.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Paden, Elaine Pagel

    1994-01-01

    This article reviews problems faced by researchers in the association between otitis media with effusion and phonological impairment and then summarizes currently established findings concerning otitis media and its effects on phonological acquisition. Professionals are cautioned to neither ignore nor exaggerate the possible influence of otitis…

  7. Mixed-List Phonological Similarity Effects in Delayed Serial Recall

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Farrell, Simon

    2006-01-01

    Recent experiments have shown that placing dissimilar items on lists of phonologically similar items enhances accuracy of ordered recall of the dissimilar items [Farrell, S., & Lewandowsky, S. (2003). Dissimilar items benefit from phonological similarity in serial recall. "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," 29,…

  8. Auditory processing, speech perception and phonological ability in pre-school children at high-risk for dyslexia: a longitudinal study of the auditory temporal processing theory.

    PubMed

    Boets, Bart; Wouters, Jan; van Wieringen, Astrid; Ghesquière, Pol

    2007-04-09

    This study investigates whether the core bottleneck of literacy-impairment should be situated at the phonological level or at a more basic sensory level, as postulated by supporters of the auditory temporal processing theory. Phonological ability, speech perception and low-level auditory processing were assessed in a group of 5-year-old pre-school children at high-family risk for dyslexia, compared to a group of well-matched low-risk control children. Based on family risk status and first grade literacy achievement children were categorized in groups and pre-school data were retrospectively reanalyzed. On average, children showing both increased family risk and literacy-impairment at the end of first grade, presented significant pre-school deficits in phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, speech-in-noise perception and frequency modulation detection. The concurrent presence of these deficits before receiving any formal reading instruction, might suggest a causal relation with problematic literacy development. However, a closer inspection of the individual data indicates that the core of the literacy problem is situated at the level of higher-order phonological processing. Although auditory and speech perception problems are relatively over-represented in literacy-impaired subjects and might possibly aggravate the phonological and literacy problem, it is unlikely that they would be at the basis of these problems. At a neurobiological level, results are interpreted as evidence for dysfunctional processing along the auditory-to-articulation stream that is implied in phonological processing, in combination with a relatively intact or inconsistently impaired functioning of the auditory-to-meaning stream that subserves auditory processing and speech perception.

  9. N400 Event-Related Potential and Standardized Measures of Reading in Late Elementary School Children: Correlated or Independent?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Coch, Donna; Benoit, Clarisse

    2015-01-01

    We investigated whether and how standardized behavioral measures of reading and electrophysiological measures of reading were related in 72 typically developing, late elementary school children. Behavioral measures included standardized tests of spelling, phonological processing, vocabulary, comprehension, naming speed, and memory.…

  10. Nursery Rhyme Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Harper, Laurie J.

    2011-01-01

    Phonological awareness is an important precursor in learning to read. This awareness of phonemes fosters a child's ability to hear and blend sounds, encode and decode words, and to spell phonetically. This quantitative study assessed pre-K children's existing Euro-American nursery rhyme knowledge and phonological awareness literacy, provided…

  11. School-Aged Children's Phonological Production of Derived English Words

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jarmulowicz, Linda

    2006-01-01

    Purpose: Little is known about the phonological aspects of derivational processes. Neutral suffixes (e.g., "-ness") that do not change stress and rhythmic or nonneutral suffixes (e.g., "-ity") that alter stem stress were used in a production task that explored developmental changes in phonological accuracy of derived English…

  12. Phonology, Reading Development, and Dyslexia: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Goswami, Usha

    2002-01-01

    This article presents a theoretical overview at the cognitive level of the role of phonological awareness in reading development and developmental dyslexia across languages. It is argued that the primary deficit in developmental dyslexia in all languages lies in representing speech sounds: a deficit in phonological representation. (Contains…

  13. Semantic and Phonological Coding in Poor and Normal Readers.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Vellutino, Frank R.; And Others

    1995-01-01

    Using poor and normal readers, three studies evaluated semantic coding and phonological coding deficits as explanations for reading disability. It was concluded that semantic coding deficits are unlikely causes of difficulties in poor readers in early stages but accrue with prolonged reading difficulties in older readers. Phonological coding…

  14. Phonological Development of Monolingual Haitian Creole-Speaking Preschool Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Archer, Justine; Champion, Tempii; Tyrone, Martha E.; Walters, Sylvia

    2018-01-01

    This study provides preliminary data on the phonological development of Haitian Creole-Speaking children. The purpose of this study is to determine phonological acquisition in the speech of normally developing monolingual Haitian Creole-Speaking preschoolers, ages 2 to 4. Speech samples were collected cross-sectionally from 12 Haitian children…

  15. The role of phonological alternation in speech production: evidence from Mandarin tone sandhi

    PubMed Central

    Politzer-Ahles, Stephen; Zhang, Jie

    2014-01-01

    We investigate the role of phonological alternation during speech production in Mandarin using implicit priming, a paradigm in which participants respond faster to words in sets that are phonologically homogeneous than in sets that are phonologically heterogeneous. We test whether priming is obtained when words in a set share the same tones at the underlying level but have different tones at the surface level-i.e., when the set includes a word that undergoes a phonological alternation which changes the tone. Sets that are heterogeneous at the surface level (in which the heterogeneity is due to a phonological operation) failed to elicit priming, as did sets that are heterogeneous at the underlying and surface levels (in which the heterogeneity is due to the lexical representations). This finding suggests that the phonological alternation was computed before the initiation of articulation, offering evidence that the progression from underlying phonological representations to articulatory execution may be mediated online by phonological input-to-output mapping. Furthermore, sets of words that are heterogeneous only at the surface level showed a different trend than sets of words that are heterogeneous at both levels, suggesting that both the surface and underlying levels of representation play a role during speech production. PMID:24967001

  16. Gamma phase locking modulated by phonological contrast during auditory comprehension in reading disability.

    PubMed

    Han, Jooman; Mody, Maria; Ahlfors, Seppo P

    2012-10-03

    Children with specific reading impairment may have subtle deficits in speech perception related to difficulties in phonological processing. The aim of this study was to examine brain oscillatory activity related to phonological processing in the context of auditory sentence comprehension using magnetoencephalography to better understand these deficits. Good and poor readers, 16-18 years of age, were tested on speech perception of sentence-terminal incongruent words that were phonologically manipulated to be similar or dissimilar to corresponding congruent target words. Functional coupling between regions was measured using phase-locking values (PLVs). Gamma-band (30-45 Hz) PLV between auditory cortex and superior temporal sulcus in the right hemisphere was differentially modulated in the two groups by the degree of phonological contrast between the congruent and the incongruent target words in the latency range associated with semantic processing. Specifically, the PLV was larger in the phonologically similar than in the phonologically dissimilar condition in the good readers. This pattern was reversed in the poor readers, whose lower PLV in the phonologically similar condition may be indicative of the impaired phonological coding abilities of the group, and consequent vulnerability under perceptually demanding conditions. Overall, the results support the role of gamma oscillations in spoken language processing.

  17. Phonological working memory in German children with poor reading and spelling abilities.

    PubMed

    Steinbrink, Claudia; Klatte, Maria

    2008-11-01

    Deficits in verbal short-term memory have been identified as one factor underlying reading and spelling disorders. However, the nature of this deficit is still unclear. It has been proposed that poor readers make less use of phonological coding, especially if the task can be solved through visual strategies. In the framework of Baddeley's phonological loop model, this study examined serial recall performance in German second-grade children with poor vs good reading and spelling abilities. Children were presented with four-item lists of common nouns for immediate serial recall. Word length and phonological similarity as well as presentation modality (visual vs auditory) and type of recall (visual vs verbal) were varied as within-subject factors in a mixed design. Word length and phonological similarity effects did not differ between groups, thus indicating equal use of phonological coding and rehearsal in poor and good readers. However, in all conditions, except the one that combined visual presentation and visual recall, overall performance was significantly lower in poor readers. The results suggest that the poor readers' difficulties do not arise from an avoidance of the phonological loop, but from its inefficient use. An alternative account referring to unstable phonological representations in long-term memory is discussed. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  18. Phonological Memory and the Acquisition of Grammar in Child L2 Learners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Verhagen, Josje; Leseman, Paul; Messer, Marielle

    2015-01-01

    Previous studies show that second language (L2) learners with large phonological memory spans outperform learners with smaller memory spans on tests of L2 grammar. The current study investigated the relationship between phonological memory and L2 grammar in more detail than has been done earlier. Specifically, we asked how phonological memory…

  19. Conduction Aphasia, Sensory-Motor Integration, and Phonological Short-term Memory – an Aggregate analysis of Lesion and fMRI data

    PubMed Central

    Buchsbaum, Bradley R.; Baldo, Juliana; Okada, Kayoko; Berman, Karen F.; Dronkers, Nina; D’Esposito, Mark; Hickok, Gregory

    2011-01-01

    Conduction aphasia is a language disorder characterized by frequent speech errors, impaired verbatim repetition, a deficit in phonological short-term memory, and naming difficulties in the presence of otherwise fluent and grammatical speech output. While traditional models of conduction aphasia have typically implicated white matter pathways, recent advances in lesions reconstruction methodology applied to groups of patients have implicated left temporoparietal zones. Parallel work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has pinpointed a region in the posterior most portion of the left planum temporale, area Spt, which is critical for phonological working memory. Here we show that the region of maximal lesion overlap in a sample of 14 patients with conduction aphasia perfectly circumscribes area Spt, as defined in an aggregate fMRI analysis of 105 subjects performing a phonological working memory task. We provide a review of the evidence supporting the idea that Spt is an interface site for the integration of sensory and vocal tract-related motor representations of complex sound sequences, such as speech and music and show how the symptoms of conduction aphasia can be explained by damage to this system. PMID:21256582

  20. The phonological-distributional coherence hypothesis: cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition.

    PubMed

    Monaghan, Padraic; Christiansen, Morten H; Chater, Nick

    2007-12-01

    Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child's language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child's knowledge about grammatical categories. We term this the Phonological-Distributional Coherence Hypothesis (PDCH). We tested the PDCH by analysing phonological and distributional information in distinguishing open from closed class words and nouns from verbs in four languages: English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. We found an interaction between phonological and distributional cues for all four languages indicating that when distributional cues were less reliable, phonological cues were stronger. This provides converging evidence that language is structured such that language learning benefits from the integration of information about category from contextual and sound-based sources, and that the child's language environment is less impoverished than we might suspect.

  1. Perceptual organization, phonological awareness, and reading comprehension in adults with and without learning disabilities.

    PubMed

    Stothers, Margot; Klein, Perry D

    2010-12-01

    It is not clear from research whether, or to what extent, reading comprehension is impaired in adults who have learning disabilities (LD). The influence of perceptual organization (PO) and phonological awareness (PA) on reading comprehension was investigated. PO and PA are cognitive functions that have been examined in previous research for their roles in nonverbal LD and phonological dyslexia, respectively. Nonverbal tests of PO and non-reading tests of PA were administered to a sample of adults with postsecondary education. Approximately two thirds of the sample had previously been diagnosed as having LD. In a multiple regression analysis, tests of PO and PA were used to predict scores for tests of reading comprehension and mechanics. Despite the nonverbal nature of the perceptual organizational test stimuli, PO strongly predicted reading comprehension. Tests of PA predicted decoding and reading speed. Results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that integrative processes usually characterized as nonverbal were nonetheless used by readers with and without disabilities to understand text. The study's findings have implications for understanding the reading of adults with learning disabilities, and the nature of reading comprehension in general.

  2. Implicit Sublexical Phonological Processing in an Acquired Dyslexic Patient.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hildebrandt, Nancy; Sokol, Scott M.

    1993-01-01

    Reports a case study of an acquired dyslexic subject who showed no evidence of having any access to sublexical phonological information. Notes, however, that the subject showed normal effects of spelling regularity for low-frequency words, suggesting sublexical phonological processing. Suggests that the types of explicit tasks previously used are…

  3. Multidimensional Assessment of Phonological Similarity within and between Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ingram, David; Dubasik, Virginia L.

    2011-01-01

    Multidimensional analysis involves moving away from one-dimensional analyses such as most articulation tests to comprehensive analyses involving levels of phonological information from the word level down to segments. This article outlines one such approach that looks at four levels from words to segments, using nine phonological measures. It also…

  4. Phonological and Visuospatial Working Memory in Autism Spectrum Disorders

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Macizo, P.; Soriano, M. F.; Paredes, N.

    2016-01-01

    We evaluated phonological and visuospatial working memory (WM) in autism spectrum disorders. Autistic children and typically developing children were compared. We used WM tasks that measured phonological and visuospatial WM up to the capacity limit of each children. Overall measures of WM did not show differences between autistic children and…

  5. The Phonological Awareness Handbook for Kindergarten and Primary Teachers.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ericson, Lita; Juliebo, Moira Fraser

    This handbook offers a practical and comprehensive means of teaching and monitoring children's development of phonological awareness in the classroom. The handbook points out that studies have shown clearly that even informal phonological awareness activities, such as the natural and spontaneous word play found in stories, songs, and games, can…

  6. Phonetics, Phonology, and Applied Linguistics.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nadasdy, Adam

    1995-01-01

    Examines recent trends in phonetics and phonology and their influence on second language instruction, specifically grammar and lexicography. An annotated bibliography discusses nine important works in the field. (99 references) (MDM)

  7. The development of phonological skills in late and early talkers

    PubMed Central

    KEHOE, Margaret; CHAPLIN, Elisa; MUDRY, Pauline; FRIEND, Margaret

    2016-01-01

    This study examined the relationship between phonological and lexical development in a group of French-speaking children (n=30), aged 29 months. The participants were divided into three sub-groups based on the number of words in their expressive vocabulary : low vocabulary (below the 15th percentile) (<< late-talkers >>) ; average-sized vocabulary (40-60th percentile) (<< middle group >>) and advanced vocabulary (above the 90th percentile) (<< precocious >> or “early talkers”). The phonological abilities (e.g., phonemic inventory, percentage of correct consonants, and phonological processes) of the three groups were compared. The comparison was based on analyses of spontaneous language samples. Most findings were consistent with previous results found in English-speaking children, indicating that the phonological abilities of late talkers are less well developed than those of children with average-sized vocabularies which in turn are less well-developed than those of children with advanced vocabularies. Nevertheless, several phonological measures were not related to vocabulary size, in particular those concerning syllable-final position. These findings differ from those obtained in English. The article finally discusses the clinical implications of the findings for children with delayed language development. PMID:26924855

  8. Short-term phonological memory in preschool children.

    PubMed

    Rodrigues, Amalia; Befi-Lopes, Debora Maria

    2013-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to design a short-term memory test, to describe quantitative performance in typically language developing children and to verify the relationship between the non-words repetition and oral phonological measure. The participants included 136 typically language developing children aged from 3 years to 6 years and 11 months old in this study, who were evaluated. The test consisted of 40 non-words of one, two, three, and four syllables. The subjects' repetitions were transcribed and the number of right answers was calculated for each age range. The effect of age was observed in the test, as well as the effect of length, only for disyllabic non-words. The performance in the non-word repetition task showed correlation with the oral phonology measure. The test designed in this research was able to verify the short-term memory in typically language developing children and the results showed correlation between this memory and phonological performance.

  9. Acoustic evidence for phonologically mismatched speech errors.

    PubMed

    Gormley, Andrea

    2015-04-01

    Speech errors are generally said to accommodate to their new phonological context. This accommodation has been validated by several transcription studies. The transcription methodology is not the best choice for detecting errors at this level, however, as this type of error can be difficult to perceive. This paper presents an acoustic analysis of speech errors that uncovers non-accommodated or mismatch errors. A mismatch error is a sub-phonemic error that results in an incorrect surface phonology. This type of error could arise during the processing of phonological rules or they could be made at the motor level of implementation. The results of this work have important implications for both experimental and theoretical research. For experimentalists, it validates the tools used for error induction and the acoustic determination of errors free of the perceptual bias. For theorists, this methodology can be used to test the nature of the processes proposed in language production.

  10. Phonology, reading, and Chomsky and Halle's optimal orthography.

    PubMed

    Steinberg, D D

    1973-09-01

    Chomsky and Halle claim that an orthography based on their underlying phonological representations (UPR) of lexical items would be optimal for English. This paper challenges three of C & H's basic phonological assumptions, that their vowel shift rule is valid, that the UPR is the only sound representation to be listed in the lexicon, and that derived words do not appear as wholes in the lexicon. A less abstract phonological representation level based on the conscious perceptions of speakers, the surface phonemic (SPR), is proposed. An SPR-based orthography has advantages which a UPR-based orthography would not: it is easy to learn and teach, it can be learned at an early age, and it permits rapid detection of rhyme. It is concluded that an orthography based on SPRs, and not UPRs, would be optimal.

  11. Phonological Awareness and Print Knowledge of Preschool Children with Cochlear Implants

    PubMed Central

    Ambrose, Sophie E.; Fey, Marc E.; Eisenberg, Laurie S.

    2012-01-01

    Purpose To determine whether preschool-age children with cochlear implants have age-appropriate phonological awareness and print knowledge and to examine the relationships of these skills with related speech and language abilities. Method 24 children with cochlear implants (CIs) and 23 peers with normal hearing (NH), ages 36 to 60 months, participated. Children’s print knowledge, phonological awareness, language, speech production, and speech perception abilities were assessed. Results For phonological awareness, the CI group’s mean score fell within 1 standard deviation of the TOPEL’s normative sample mean but was more than 1 standard deviation below our NH group mean. The CI group’s performance did not differ significantly from that of the NH group for print knowledge. For the CI group, phonological awareness and print knowledge were significantly correlated with language, speech production, and speech perception. Together, these predictor variables accounted for 34% of variance in the CI group’s phonological awareness but no significant variance in their print knowledge. Conclusions Children with CIs have the potential to develop age-appropriate early literacy skills by preschool-age but are likely to lag behind their NH peers in phonological awareness. Intervention programs serving these children should target these skills with instruction and by facilitating speech and language development. PMID:22223887

  12. Phonological complexity in school-aged children who stutter and exhibit a language disorder.

    PubMed

    Wolk, Lesley; LaSalle, Lisa R

    2015-03-01

    The Index of Phonological Complexity and the Word Complexity Measure are two measures of the phonological complexity of a word. Other phonological measures such as phonological neighborhood density have been used to compare stuttered versus fluent words. It appears that in preschoolers who stutter, the length and complexity of the utterance is more influential than the phonetic features of the stuttered word. The present hypothesis was that in school-age children who stutter, stuttered words would be more phonologically complex than fluent words, when the length and complexity of the utterance containing them is comparable. School-age speakers who stutter were hypothesized to differ from those with a concomitant language disorder. Sixteen speakers, six females and ten males (M age=12;3; Range=7;7 to 19;5) available from an online database, were divided into eight who had a concomitant language disorder (S+LD) and eight age- and sex-matched speakers who did not (S-Only). When all stuttered content words were identified, S+LD speakers produced more repetitions, and S-Only speakers produced more inaudible sound prolongations. When stuttered content words were matched to fluent content words and when talker groups were combined, stuttered words were significantly (p≤0.01) higher in both the Index of Phonological Complexity and the Word Complexity Measure and lower in density ("sparser") than fluent words. Results corroborate those of previous researchers. Future research directions are suggested, such as cross-sectional designs to evaluate developmental patterns of phonological complexity and stuttering plus language disordered connections. The reader will be able to: (a) Define and describe phonological complexity; (b) Define phonological neighborhood density and summarize the literature on the topic; (c) Describe the Index of Phonological Complexity (IPC) for a given word; (d) Describe the Word Complexity Measure (WCM) for a given word; (e) Summarize two findings

  13. Evidence-Based Practice: A Matrix for Predicting Phonological Generalization

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gierut, Judith A.; Hulse, Lauren E.

    2010-01-01

    This paper describes a matrix for clinical use in the selection of phonological treatment targets to induce generalization, and in the identification of probe sounds to monitor during the course of intervention. The matrix appeals to a set of factors that have been shown to promote phonological generalization in the research literature, including…

  14. Executive Functions Contribute Uniquely to Reading Competence in Minority Youth

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jacobson, Lisa A.; Koriakin, Taylor; Lipkin, Paul; Boada, Richard; Frijters, Jan C.; Lovett, Maureen W.; Hill, Dina; Willcutt, Erik; Gottwald, Stephanie; Wolf, Maryanne; Bosson-Heenan, Joan; Gruen, Jeffrey R.; Mahone, E. Mark

    2017-01-01

    Competent reading requires various skills beyond those for basic word reading (i.e., core language skills, rapid naming, phonological processing). Contributing "higher-level" or domain-general processes include information processing speed and executive functions (working memory, strategic problem solving, attentional switching).…

  15. Semantic and Phonological Encoding Times in Adults Who Stutter: Brain Electrophysiological Evidence.

    PubMed

    Maxfield, Nathan D

    2017-10-17

    Some psycholinguistic theories of stuttering propose that language production operates along a different time course in adults who stutter (AWS) versus typically fluent adults (TFA). However, behavioral evidence for such a difference has been mixed. Here, the time course of semantic and phonological encoding in picture naming was compared in AWS (n = 16) versus TFA (n = 16) by measuring 2 event-related potential (ERP) components: NoGo N200, an ERP index of response inhibition, and lateralized readiness potential, an ERP index of response preparation. Each trial required a semantic judgment about a picture in addition to a phonemic judgment about the target label of the picture. Judgments were mapped onto a dual-choice (Go-NoGo/left-right) push-button response paradigm. On each trial, ERP activity time-locked to picture onset was recorded at 32 scalp electrodes. NoGo N200 was detected earlier to semantic NoGo trials than to phonemic NoGo trials in both groups, replicating previous evidence that semantic encoding generally precedes phonological encoding in language production. Moreover, N200 onset was earlier to semantic NoGo trials in TFA than in AWS, indicating that semantic information triggering response inhibition became available earlier in TFA versus AWS. In contrast, the time course of N200 activity to phonemic NoGo trials did not differ between groups. Lateralized readiness potential activity was influenced by strategic response preparation and, thus, could not be used to index real-time semantic and phonological encoding. NoGo N200 results point to slowed semantic encoding in AWS versus TFA. Discussion considers possible factors in slowed semantic encoding in AWS and how fluency might be impacted by slowed semantic encoding.

  16. Semantic and Phonological Encoding Times in Adults Who Stutter: Brain Electrophysiological Evidence

    PubMed Central

    2017-01-01

    Purpose Some psycholinguistic theories of stuttering propose that language production operates along a different time course in adults who stutter (AWS) versus typically fluent adults (TFA). However, behavioral evidence for such a difference has been mixed. Here, the time course of semantic and phonological encoding in picture naming was compared in AWS (n = 16) versus TFA (n = 16) by measuring 2 event-related potential (ERP) components: NoGo N200, an ERP index of response inhibition, and lateralized readiness potential, an ERP index of response preparation. Method Each trial required a semantic judgment about a picture in addition to a phonemic judgment about the target label of the picture. Judgments were mapped onto a dual-choice (Go–NoGo/left–right) push-button response paradigm. On each trial, ERP activity time-locked to picture onset was recorded at 32 scalp electrodes. Results NoGo N200 was detected earlier to semantic NoGo trials than to phonemic NoGo trials in both groups, replicating previous evidence that semantic encoding generally precedes phonological encoding in language production. Moreover, N200 onset was earlier to semantic NoGo trials in TFA than in AWS, indicating that semantic information triggering response inhibition became available earlier in TFA versus AWS. In contrast, the time course of N200 activity to phonemic NoGo trials did not differ between groups. Lateralized readiness potential activity was influenced by strategic response preparation and, thus, could not be used to index real-time semantic and phonological encoding. Conclusion NoGo N200 results point to slowed semantic encoding in AWS versus TFA. Discussion considers possible factors in slowed semantic encoding in AWS and how fluency might be impacted by slowed semantic encoding. PMID:28973156

  17. Brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children and its disruption in dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Kovelman, Ioulia; Norton, Elizabeth S; Christodoulou, Joanna A; Gaab, Nadine; Lieberman, Daniel A; Triantafyllou, Christina; Wolf, Maryanne; Whitfield-Gabrieli, Susan; Gabrieli, John D E

    2012-04-01

    Phonological awareness, knowledge that speech is composed of syllables and phonemes, is critical for learning to read. Phonological awareness precedes and predicts successful transition from language to literacy, and weakness in phonological awareness is a leading cause of dyslexia, but the brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children is unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of phonological awareness using an auditory word-rhyming task in children who were typical readers or who had dyslexia (ages 7-13) and a younger group of kindergarteners (ages 5-6). Typically developing children, but not children with dyslexia, recruited left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) when making explicit phonological judgments. Kindergarteners, who were matched to the older children with dyslexia on standardized tests of phonological awareness, also recruited left DLPFC. Left DLPFC may play a critical role in the development of phonological awareness for spoken language critical for reading and in the etiology of dyslexia.

  18. On Rejecting Emotional Lures Created by Phonological Neighborhood Activation

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Starns, Jeffrey J.; Cook, Gabriel I.; Hicks, Jason L.; Marsh, Richard L.

    2006-01-01

    The authors conducted 2 experiments to assess how phonologically related lures are rejected in a false memory paradigm. Some phonological lures were emotional (i.e., taboo) words, and others were not. The authors manipulated the presence of taboo items on the study list and reduced the ability to use controlled rejection strategies by dividing…

  19. The neural substrates of improved phonological processing following successful treatment in a case of phonological alexia and agraphia

    PubMed Central

    DeMarco, Andrew T.; Wilson, Stephen M.; Rising, Kindle; Rapcsak, Steven Z.; Beeson, Pélagie M.

    2018-01-01

    Deficits in phonology are among the most common and persistent impairments in aphasia after left hemisphere stroke, and can have significant functional consequences for spoken and written language. While many individuals make considerable gains in response to treatment, the neural substrates supporting these improvements are poorly understood. To address this issue, we used BOLD fMRI to measure regional brain activation in an individual during pseudoword reading before and after treatment targeting phonological skills. After the first phase of treatment, significant improvement in pseudoword reading was associated with greater activation in residual regions of the left dorsal language network, as well as bilateral regions that support attention and cognitive effort outside of canonical language areas. Following a second treatment phase, behavioral gains were maintained, while brain activation returned to pre-treatment levels. In addition to revealing the neural support for improved phonological skills in the face of damage to critical brain regions, this case demonstrated that behavioral advances may ultimately be maintained without the need to sustain a marked increase in cognitive effort. PMID:29350575

  20. Phonological, visual, and semantic coding strategies and children's short-term picture memory span.

    PubMed

    Henry, Lucy A; Messer, David; Luger-Klein, Scarlett; Crane, Laura

    2012-01-01

    Three experiments addressed controversies in the previous literature on the development of phonological and other forms of short-term memory coding in children, using assessments of picture memory span that ruled out potentially confounding effects of verbal input and output. Picture materials were varied in terms of phonological similarity, visual similarity, semantic similarity, and word length. Older children (6/8-year-olds), but not younger children (4/5-year-olds), demonstrated robust and consistent phonological similarity and word length effects, indicating that they were using phonological coding strategies. This confirmed findings initially reported by Conrad (1971), but subsequently questioned by other authors. However, in contrast to some previous research, little evidence was found for a distinct visual coding stage at 4 years, casting doubt on assumptions that this is a developmental stage that consistently precedes phonological coding. There was some evidence for a dual visual and phonological coding stage prior to exclusive use of phonological coding at around 5-6 years. Evidence for semantic similarity effects was limited, suggesting that semantic coding is not a key method by which young children recall lists of pictures.

  1. Programmed Course in Modern Literary Arabic Phonology and Script.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McCarus, Ernest; Rammuny, Raji

    Three sets of instructional materials for the teaching of Arabic phonology and script have been prepared on the basis of studies of (1) the phonologies of American English and Modern Literary Arabic (MLA), (2) the MLA writing system, and (3) the vocabularies of 11 Arabic textbooks used in the United States. The effectiveness of these materials was…

  2. Development of phonological awareness in bilingual chinese children.

    PubMed

    Chen, Xi; Ku, Yu-Min; Koyama, Emiko; Anderson, Richard C; Li, Wenling

    2008-11-01

    This study investigated the phonological awareness of 219 first, second, and fourth grade Cantonese-speaking children from the south of China, who received immersion Mandarin instruction beginning in the first grade. Children received onset, rime and tone awareness tasks in Cantonese and Mandarin. Children performed better on the Cantonese onset awareness task in grade one, but the difference disappeared in higher grades. However, their performance on the rime and tone awareness tasks was better in Mandarin. These results reflect the phonological structure of the two languages: Mandarin has a more complex onset system, whereas Cantonese has more complex tone and rime systems. Moreover, children's phonological awareness increased faster in Mandarin, which likely resulted from Mandarin instruction. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that onset-rime awareness is a universal construct, whereas tone awareness is a language-specific construct.

  3. Bidirectional Relations of Phonological Sensitivity and Prereading Abilities: Evidence from a Preschool Sample.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Burgess, Stephen R.; Lonigan, Christopher J.

    1998-01-01

    Examined the relationship between phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge in 4- and 5-year-olds in a one-year longitudinal study. Found that phonological sensitivity predicted letter knowledge growth, and letter knowledge predicted phonological sensitivity growth, when controlling for age and oral language abilities. Also found that the…

  4. Semantic and phonological information in sentence recall: converging psycholinguistic and neuropsychological evidence.

    PubMed

    Schweppe, Judith; Rummer, Ralf; Bormann, Tobias; Martin, Randi C

    2011-12-01

    We present one experiment and a neuropsychological case study to investigate to what extent phonological and semantic representations contribute to short-term sentence recall. We modified Potter and Lombardi's (1990) intrusion paradigm, in which retention of a list interferes with sentence recall such that on the list a semantically related lure is presented, which is expected to intrude into sentence recall. In our version, lure words are either semantically related to target words in the sentence or semantically plus phonologically related. With healthy participants, intrusions are more frequent when lure and target overlap phonologically in addition to semantically than when they solely overlap semantically. When this paradigm is applied to a patient with a phonological short-term memory impairment, both lure types induce the same amount of intrusions. These findings indicate that usually phonological information is retained in sentence recall in addition to semantic information.

  5. An Evaluation of Universal Grammar and the Phonological Mind1

    PubMed Central

    Everett, Daniel L.

    2016-01-01

    This paper argues against the hypothesis of a “phonological mind” advanced by Berent. It establishes that there is no evidence that phonology is innate and that, in fact, the simplest hypothesis seems to be that phonology is learned like other human abilities. Moreover, the paper fleshes out the original claim of Philip Lieberman that Universal Grammar predicts that not everyone should be able to learn every language, i.e., the opposite of what UG is normally thought to predict. The paper also underscores the problem that the absence of recursion in Pirahã represents for Universal Grammar proposals. PMID:26903889

  6. Complexity and Hemispheric Abilities: Evidence for a Differential Impact on Semantics and Phonology

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tremblay, Tania; Monetta, Laura; Joanette, Yves

    2009-01-01

    The main goal of this study was to determine whether the phonological and semantic processing of words are similarly influenced by an increase in processing complexity. Thirty-six French-speaking young adults performed both semantic and phonological word judgment tasks, using a divided visual field procedure. The phonological complexity of words…

  7. The roles of long-term phonotactic and lexical prosodic knowledge in phonological short-term memory.

    PubMed

    Tanida, Yuki; Ueno, Taiji; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Saito, Satoru

    2015-04-01

    Many previous studies have explored and confirmed the influence of long-term phonological representations on phonological short-term memory. In most investigations, phonological effects have been explored with respect to phonotactic constraints or frequency. If interaction between long-term memory and phonological short-term memory is a generalized principle, then other phonological characteristics-that is, suprasegmental aspects of phonology-should also exert similar effects on phonological short-term memory. We explored this hypothesis through three immediate serial-recall experiments that manipulated Japanese nonwords with respect to lexical prosody (pitch-accent type, reflecting suprasegmental characteristics) as well as phonotactic frequency (reflecting segmental characteristics). The results showed that phonotactic frequency affected the retention not only of the phonemic sequences, but also of pitch-accent patterns, when participants were instructed to recall both the phoneme sequence and accent pattern of nonwords. In addition, accent pattern typicality influenced the retention of the accent pattern: Typical accent patterns were recalled more accurately than atypical ones. These results indicate that both long-term phonotactic and lexical prosodic knowledge contribute to phonological short-term memory performance.

  8. Dynamics of Phonological Cognition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gafos, Adamantios I.; Benus, Stefan

    2006-01-01

    A fundamental problem in spoken language is the duality between the continuous aspects of phonetic performance and the discrete aspects of phonological competence. We study 2 instances of this problem from the phenomenon of voicing neutralization and vowel harmony. In each case, we present a model where the experimentally observed continuous…

  9. Exceptional Lexical Skills but Executive Language Deficits in School Starters and Young Adults with Turners Syndrome: Implications for X Chromosome Effects on Brain Function

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Temple, Christine M.; Shephard, Elizabeth E.

    2012-01-01

    TS school starters had enhanced receptive and expressive language on standardised assessment (CELF-P) and enhanced rhyme judgements, spoonerisms, and lexical decision, indicating enhanced phonological skills and word representations. There was marginal but consistent advantage across lexico-semantic tasks. On executive tasks, speeded naming of…

  10. Cross-Language Phonological Activation of Meaning: Evidence from Category Verification

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Friesen, Deanna C.; Jared, Debra

    2012-01-01

    The study investigated phonological processing in bilingual reading for meaning. English-French and French-English bilinguals performed a category verification task in either their first or second language. Interlingual homophones (words that share phonology across languages but not orthography or meaning) and single language control words served…

  11. Processing voiceless vowels in Japanese: Effects of language-specific phonological knowledge

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Ogasawara, Naomi

    2005-04-01

    There has been little research on processing allophonic variation in the field of psycholinguistics. This study focuses on processing the voiced/voiceless allophonic alternation of high vowels in Japanese. Three perception experiments were conducted to explore how listeners parse out vowels with the voicing alternation from other segments in the speech stream and how the different voicing statuses of the vowel affect listeners' word recognition process. The results from the three experiments show that listeners use phonological knowledge of their native language for phoneme processing and for word recognition. However, interactions of the phonological and acoustic effects are observed to be different in each process. The facilitatory phonological effect and the inhibitory acoustic effect cancel out one another in phoneme processing; while in word recognition, the facilitatory phonological effect overrides the inhibitory acoustic effect.

  12. Prefrontal cortical response to conflict during semantic and phonological tasks.

    PubMed

    Snyder, Hannah R; Feigenson, Keith; Thompson-Schill, Sharon L

    2007-05-01

    Debates about the function of the prefrontal cortex are as old as the field of neuropsychology--often dated to Paul Broca's seminal work. Theories of the functional organization of the prefrontal cortex can be roughly divided into those that describe organization by process and those that describe organization by material. Recent studies of the function of the posterior, left inferior frontal gyrus (pLIFG) have yielded two quite different interpretations: One hypothesis holds that the pLIFG plays a domain-specific role in phonological processing, whereas another hypothesis describes a more general function of the pLIFG in cognitive control. In the current study, we distinguish effects of increasing cognitive control demands from effects of phonological processing. The results support the hypothesized role for the pLIFG in cognitive control, and more task-specific roles for posterior areas in phonology and semantics. Thus, these results suggest an alternative explanation of previously reported phonology-specific effects in the pLIFG.

  13. Learning general phonological rules from distributional information: a computational model.

    PubMed

    Calamaro, Shira; Jarosz, Gaja

    2015-04-01

    Phonological rules create alternations in the phonetic realizations of related words. These rules must be learned by infants in order to identify the phonological inventory, the morphological structure, and the lexicon of a language. Recent work proposes a computational model for the learning of one kind of phonological alternation, allophony (Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, & Dupoux, 2006). This paper extends the model to account for learning of a broader set of phonological alternations and the formalization of these alternations as general rules. In Experiment 1, we apply the original model to new data in Dutch and demonstrate its limitations in learning nonallophonic rules. In Experiment 2, we extend the model to allow it to learn general rules for alternations that apply to a class of segments. In Experiment 3, the model is further extended to allow for generalization by context; we argue that this generalization must be constrained by linguistic principles. Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  14. The phonological short-term store-rehearsal system: patterns of impairment and neural correlates.

    PubMed

    Vallar, G; Di Betta, A M; Silveri, M C

    1997-06-01

    Two left brain-damaged patients (L.A. and T.O.) with a selective impairment of auditory-verbal span are reported. Patient L.A. was unable to hold auditory-verbal material in the phonological store component of short-term memory. His performance was however normal on tasks requiring phonological judgements, which specifically involve the phonological output buffer component of the rehearsal process. He also showed some evidence that rehearsal contributed to the immediate retention of auditory-verbal material. Patient T.O. never made use of the rehearsal process in tasks assessing both immediate retention and the ability to make phonological judgements, but the memory capacity of the phonological short-term store was comparatively preserved. These contrasting patterns of impairment suggest that the phonological store component of verbal short-term memory was severely impaired in patient L.A., and spared, at least in part, in patient T.O. The rehearsal process was preserved in L.A., and primarily defective in T.O. The localisation of the lesions in the left hemisphere (L.A.: inferior parietal lobule, superior and middle temporal gyri; T.O.: sub-cortical premotor and rolandic regions, anterior insula) suggests that these two sub-components of phonological short-term memory have discrete anatomical correlates.

  15. Interrelationships between Working Memory, Processing Speed, and Language Development in the Age Range 2-4 Years

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Newbury, Jayne; Klee, Thomas; Stokes, Stephanie F.; Moran, Catherine

    2016-01-01

    Purpose: This study explored associations between working memory and language in children aged 2-4 years. Method: Seventy-seven children aged 24-30 months were assessed on tests measuring language, visual cognition, verbal working memory (VWM), phonological short-term memory (PSTM), and processing speed. A standardized test of receptive and…

  16. Semantic and Phonological Activation in First and Second Language Reading

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cheng, Hui-Wen

    2012-01-01

    No consensus has been reached on whether phonological information is activated in reading Chinese. Further, semantic activation has not been well-studied in the context of orthographic depth. To contribute to these issues, this dissertation investigated semantic and phonological activation in reading Chinese and English. This dissertation also…

  17. Visual versus Phonological Abilities in Spanish Dyslexic Boys and Girls

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bednarek, Dorota; Saldana, David; Garcia, Isabel

    2009-01-01

    Phonological and visual theories propose different primary deficits as part of the explanation for dyslexia. Both theories were put to test in a sample of Spanish dyslexic readers. Twenty-one dyslexic and 22 typically-developing children matched on chronological age were administered phonological discrimination and awareness tasks and coherent…

  18. The Role of Inhibitory Control in Second Language Phonological Processing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Darcy, Isabelle; Mora, Joan C.; Daidone, Danielle

    2016-01-01

    This study investigated the role of inhibition in second language (L2) learners' phonological processing. Participants were Spanish learners of L2 English and American learners of L2 Spanish. We measured inhibition through a retrieval-induced inhibition task. Accuracy of phonological representations (perception and production) was assessed through…

  19. Evidence for Right Hemisphere Phonology in a Backward Masking Task

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Halderman, Laura K.

    2011-01-01

    The extent to which orthographic and phonological processes are available during the initial moments of word recognition within each hemisphere is under specified, particularly for the right hemisphere. Few studies have investigated whether each hemisphere uses orthography and phonology under constraints that restrict the viewing time of words and…

  20. Are phonological influences on lexical (mis)selection the result of a monitoring bias?

    PubMed Central

    Ratinckx, Elie; Ferreira, Victor S.; Hartsuiker, Robert J.

    2009-01-01

    A monitoring bias account is often used to explain speech error patterns that seem to be the result of an interactive language production system, like phonological influences on lexical selection errors. A biased monitor is suggested to detect and covertly correct certain errors more often than others. For instance, this account predicts that errors which are phonologically similar to intended words are harder to detect than ones that are phonologically dissimilar. To test this, we tried to elicit phonological errors under the same conditions that show other kinds of lexical selection errors. In five experiments, we presented participants with high cloze probability sentence fragments followed by a picture that was either semantically related, a homophone of a semantically related word, or phonologically related to the (implicit) last word of the sentence. All experiments elicited semantic completions or homophones of semantic completions, but none elicited phonological completions. This finding is hard to reconcile with a monitoring bias account and is better explained with an interactive production system. Additionally, this finding constrains the amount of bottom-up information flow in interactive models. PMID:18942035

  1. The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language

    PubMed Central

    Aronoff, Mark; Meir, Irit; Padden, Carol

    2011-01-01

    The division of linguistic structure into a meaningless (phonological) level and a meaningful level of morphemes and words is considered a basic design feature of human language. Although established sign languages, like spoken languages, have been shown to be characterized by this bifurcation, no information has been available about the way in which such structure arises. We report here on a newly emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which functions as a full language but in which a phonological level of structure has not yet emerged. Early indications of formal regularities provide clues to the way in which phonological structure may develop over time. PMID:22223927

  2. Phonetic Pause Unites Phonology and Semantics against Morphology and Syntax

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sakarna, Ahmad Khalaf; Mobaideen, Adnan

    2012-01-01

    The present study investigates the phonological effect triggered by the different types of phonetic pause used in Quran on morphology, syntax, and semantics. It argues that Quranic pause provides interesting evidence about the close relation between phonology and semantics, from one side, and semantics, morphology, and syntax, from the other…

  3. Online learning from input versus offline memory evolution in adult word learning: effects of neighborhood density and phonologically related practice.

    PubMed

    Storkel, Holly L; Bontempo, Daniel E; Pak, Natalie S

    2014-10-01

    In this study, the authors investigated adult word learning to determine how neighborhood density and practice across phonologically related training sets influence online learning from input during training versus offline memory evolution during no-training gaps. Sixty-one adults were randomly assigned to learn low- or high-density nonwords. Within each density condition, participants were trained on one set of words and then were trained on a second set of words, consisting of phonological neighbors of the first set. Learning was measured in a picture-naming test. Data were analyzed using multilevel modeling and spline regression. Steep learning during input was observed, with new words from dense neighborhoods and new words that were neighbors of recently learned words (i.e., second-set words) being learned better than other words. In terms of memory evolution, large and significant forgetting was observed during 1-week gaps in training. Effects of density and practice during memory evolution were opposite of those during input. Specifically, forgetting was greater for high-density and second-set words than for low-density and first-set words. High phonological similarity, regardless of source (i.e., known words or recent training), appears to facilitate online learning from input but seems to impede offline memory evolution.

  4. Impaired letter-string processing in developmental dyslexia: what visual-to-phonology code mapping disorder?

    PubMed

    Valdois, Sylviane; Lassus-Sangosse, Delphine; Lobier, Muriel

    2012-05-01

    Poor parallel letter-string processing in developmental dyslexia was taken as evidence of poor visual attention (VA) span, that is, a limitation of visual attentional resources that affects multi-character processing. However, the use of letter stimuli in oral report tasks was challenged on its capacity to highlight a VA span disorder. In particular, report of poor letter/digit-string processing but preserved symbol-string processing was viewed as evidence of poor visual-to-phonology code mapping, in line with the phonological theory of developmental dyslexia. We assessed here the visual-to-phonological-code mapping disorder hypothesis. In Experiment 1, letter-string, digit-string and colour-string processing was assessed to disentangle a phonological versus visual familiarity account of the letter/digit versus symbol dissociation. Against a visual-to-phonological-code mapping disorder but in support of a familiarity account, results showed poor letter/digit-string processing but preserved colour-string processing in dyslexic children. In Experiment 2, two tasks of letter-string report were used, one of which was performed simultaneously to a high-taxing phonological task. Results show that dyslexic children are similarly impaired in letter-string report whether a concurrent phonological task is simultaneously performed or not. Taken together, these results provide strong evidence against a phonological account of poor letter-string processing in developmental dyslexia. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  5. A normal' category-specific advantage for naming living things.

    PubMed

    Laws, K R; Neve, C

    1999-10-01

    'Artefactual' accounts of category-specific disorders for living things have highlighted that compared to nonliving things, living things have lower name frequency, lower concept familiarity and greater visual complexity and greater within-category structural similarity or 'visual crowding' [7]. These hypotheses imply that deficits for living things are an exaggeration of some 'normal tendency'. Contrary to these notions, we found that normal subjects were consistently worse at naming nonliving than living things in a speeded presentation paradigm. Moreover, their naming was not predicted by concept familiarity, name frequency or visual complexity; however, a novel measure of visual familiarity (i.e. for the appearance of things) did significantly predict naming. We propose that under speeded conditions, normal subjects find nonliving things harder to name because their representations are less visually predictable than for living things (i.e. nonliving things show greater within-item structural variability). Finally, because nonliving things have multiple representations in the real world, this may lower the probability of finding impaired naming and recognition in this category.

  6. Cognitive Processes that Underlie Mathematical Precociousness in Young Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Swanson, H. Lee

    2006-01-01

    The working memory (WM) processes that underlie young children's (ages 6-8 years) mathematical precociousness were examined. A battery of tests that assessed components of WM (phonological loop, visual-spatial sketchpad, and central executive), naming speed, random generation, and fluency was administered to mathematically precocious and…

  7. Phonological awareness and the working memory of children with and without literacy difficulties.

    PubMed

    Cardoso, Andreia Martins de Souza; Silva, Mônica Marins da; Pereira, Mônica Medeiros de Britto

    2013-01-01

    To investigate phonological awareness and working memory skills as well as their influence on the literacy process in a group of intellectually normal children. Forty intellectually normal children (7.6-8.0 years) from the second and third grades of elementary school participated. Children were organized in two groups (20 children each): one with and another without literacy difficulties. These participants underwent RAVEN's intelligence quotient test, audiometric assessment, CONFIAS test of phonological awareness, written spelling task, and working memory test. Children in the alphabetic phase presented a good development of phonological awareness, and 85% of them showed a high-performance working memory. Children in the syllabic-alphabetic phase had changes in phonological awareness, and 91.6% of them showed an average working memory performance. The subjects at pre-syllabic and syllabic phases demonstrated more difficulties in phonological awareness than those at syllabic-alphabetic and had a poor working memory performance. Between-group differences were observed for CONFIAS and working memory tests (p<0.0001). There was also a significant correlation (r=0.78, p=0.01) between the skills of phonological awareness and working memory for the total sample of individuals. Based on these results, it was found that as phonological awareness and working memory levels increased, the literacy phase also advanced, therefore showing that these are directly proportional measures.

  8. Phonological deficits in specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia: towards a multidimensional model

    PubMed Central

    Ramus, Franck; Marshall, Chloe R.; Rosen, Stuart

    2013-01-01

    An on-going debate surrounds the relationship between specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia, in particular with respect to their phonological abilities. Are these distinct disorders? To what extent do they overlap? Which cognitive and linguistic profiles correspond to specific language impairment, dyslexia and comorbid cases? At least three different models have been proposed: the severity model, the additional deficit model and the component model. We address this issue by comparing children with specific language impairment only, those with dyslexia-only, those with specific language impairment and dyslexia and those with no impairment, using a broad test battery of language skills. We find that specific language impairment and dyslexia do not always co-occur, and that some children with specific language impairment do not have a phonological deficit. Using factor analysis, we find that language abilities across the four groups of children have at least three independent sources of variance: one for non-phonological language skills and two for distinct sets of phonological abilities (which we term phonological skills versus phonological representations). Furthermore, children with specific language impairment and dyslexia show partly distinct profiles of phonological deficit along these two dimensions. We conclude that a multiple-component model of language abilities best explains the relationship between specific language impairment and dyslexia and the different profiles of impairment that are observed. PMID:23413264

  9. Event-Related Potentials Reflecting the Processing of Phonological Constraint Violations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Domahs, Ulrike; Kehrein, Wolfgang; Knaus, Johannes; Wiese, Richard; Schlesewsky, Matthias

    2009-01-01

    How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC[subscript i]VC[subscript i]). We examined three types of monosyllabic CCVC words:…

  10. Phonological Processing and Reading in Children with Speech Sound Disorders

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rvachew, Susan

    2007-01-01

    Purpose: To examine the relationship between phonological processing skills prior to kindergarten entry and reading skills at the end of 1st grade, in children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Method: The participants were 17 children with SSD and poor phonological processing skills (SSD-low PP), 16 children with SSD and good phonological…

  11. Phonology and arithmetic in the language-calculation network.

    PubMed

    Andin, Josefine; Fransson, Peter; Rönnberg, Jerker; Rudner, Mary

    2015-04-01

    Arithmetic and language processing involve similar neural networks, but the relative engagement remains unclear. In the present study we used fMRI to compare activation for phonological, multiplication and subtraction tasks, keeping the stimulus material constant, within a predefined language-calculation network including left inferior frontal gyrus and angular gyrus (AG) as well as superior parietal lobule and the intraparietal sulcus bilaterally. Results revealed a generally left lateralized activation pattern within the language-calculation network for phonology and a bilateral activation pattern for arithmetic, and suggested regional differences between tasks. In particular, we found a more prominent role for phonology than arithmetic in pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus but domain generality in pars triangularis. Parietal activation patterns demonstrated greater engagement of the visual and quantity systems for calculation than language. This set of findings supports the notion of a common, but regionally differentiated, language-calculation network. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  12. Lexical and Phonological Development in Children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech--A Commentary on Stoel-Gammon's "Relationships between Lexical and Phonological Development in Young Children"

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Velleman, Shelley L.

    2011-01-01

    Although not the focus of her article, phonological development in young children with speech sound disorders of various types is highly germane to Stoel-Gammon's discussion (this issue) for at least two primary reasons. Most obvious is that typical processes and milestones of phonological development are the standards and benchmarks against which…

  13. Automatic activation of word phonology from print in deep dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Katz, R B; Lanzoni, S M

    1992-11-01

    The performance of deep dyslexics in oral reading and other tasks suggests that they are poor at activating the phonology of words and non-words from printed stimuli. As the tasks ordinarily used to test deep dyslexics require controlled processing, it is possible that the phonology of printed words can be better activated on an automatic basis. This study investigated this possibility by testing a deep dyslexic patient on a lexical decision task with pairs of stimuli presented simultaneously. In Experiment 1, which used content words as stimuli, the deep dyslexic, like normal subjects, showed faster reaction times on trials with rhyming, similarly spelled stimuli (e.g. bribe-tribe) than on control trials (consisting of non-rhyming, dissimilarly spelled words), but slower reaction times on trials with non-rhyming, similarly spelled stimuli (e.g. couch-touch). When the experiment was repeated using function words as stimuli, the patient no longer showed a phonological effect. Therefore, the phonological activation of printed content words by deep dyslexics may be better than would be expected on the basis of their oral reading performance.

  14. Processing of acoustic and phonological information of lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese revealed by mismatch negativity.

    PubMed

    Yu, Keke; Wang, Ruiming; Li, Li; Li, Ping

    2014-01-01

    The accurate perception of lexical tones in tonal languages involves the processing of both acoustic information and phonological information carried by the tonal signal. In this study we evaluated the relative role of the two types of information in native Chinese speaker's processing of tones at a preattentive stage with event-related potentials (ERPs), particularly the mismatch negativity (MNN). Specifically, we distinguished the acoustic from the phonological information by manipulating phonological category and acoustic interval of the stimulus materials. We found a significant main effect of phonological category for the peak latency of MMN, but a main effect of both phonological category and acoustic interval for the mean amplitude of MMN. The results indicated that the two types of information, acoustic and phonological, play different roles in the processing of Chinese lexical tones: acoustic information only impacts the extent of tonal processing, while phonological information affects both the extent and the time course of tonal processing. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of neurocognitive processes of phonological processing.

  15. Phonological Awareness, Reading Skills, and Vocabulary Knowledge in Children Who Use Cochlear Implants

    PubMed Central

    Dillon, Caitlin M.; de Jong, Kenneth; Pisoni, David B.

    2012-01-01

    In hearing children, reading skills have been found to be closely related to phonological awareness. We used several standardized tests to investigate the reading and phonological awareness skills of 27 deaf school-age children who were experienced cochlear implant users. Approximately two-thirds of the children performed at or above the level of their hearing peers on the phonological awareness and reading tasks. Reading scores were found to be strongly correlated with measures of phonological awareness. These correlations remained the same when we statistically controlled for potentially confounding demographic variables such as age at testing and speech perception skills. However, these correlations decreased even after we statistically controlled for vocabulary size. This finding suggests that lexicon size is a mediating factor in the relationship between the children’s phonological awareness and reading skills, a finding that has also been reported for typically developing hearing children. PMID:22057983

  16. Deficit in phonological processes: a characteristic of the neuropsychological profile of children with NF1.

    PubMed

    Chaix, Yves; Lauwers-Cancès, Valérie; Faure-Marie, Nathalie; Gentil, Catherine; Lelong, Sandrine; Schweitzer, Elisabeth; Rodriguez, Diana; Iannuzzi, Stéphanie; Kemlin, Isabelle; Dorison, Nathalie; Rivier, François; Carniero, Maryline; Preclaire, Elodie; Barbarot, Sébastien; Lion-François, Laurence; Castelnau, Pierre

    2018-05-01

    Learning disabilities are one of the most frequent complications of neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) in children. Studies of the effects of the neurocognitive deficit on academic performance are relatively rare, owing to the small size of the populations concerned. However, research is needed to develop effective rehabilitation programs. In the present study, we explored the impact of a possible phonological deficit on the reading abilities of children with NF1. A multicenter, cross-sectional study was conducted in France on two groups of 75 children with or without NF1 aged 8-12 years, matched for age, sex, handedness, and reading level. All participants underwent a neuropsychological evaluation to assess their general cognitive level, reading skills, phonological processes, visuoperceptual abilities, and attentional capacity. Phonological skills were assessed by means of two phonological awareness tasks and one short-term memory task. In the group of children with NF1, 41% had reading difficulties. Phonological processes were impaired in this group, compared with the children without NF1. Similar differences were found for a phoneme deletion task after adjustment for reading difficulties, IQ level, and visuoperceptual abilities. Phonological awareness, but not phonological short-term memory, was impaired in children with NF1, and not just those whose reading was impaired. Results suggest that children with NF1 have a phonological awareness deficit, whatever their reading level. Identification of reduced phonological skills may warrant the implementation of a specific rehabilitation program before early reading difficulties emerge.

  17. Operationalization of Sign Language Phonological Similarity and its Effects on Lexical Access.

    PubMed

    Williams, Joshua T; Stone, Adam; Newman, Sharlene D

    2017-07-01

    Cognitive mechanisms for sign language lexical access are fairly unknown. This study investigated whether phonological similarity facilitates lexical retrieval in sign languages using measures from a new lexical database for American Sign Language. Additionally, it aimed to determine which similarity metric best fits the present data in order to inform theories of how phonological similarity is constructed within the lexicon and to aid in the operationalization of phonological similarity in sign language. Sign repetition latencies and accuracy were obtained when native signers were asked to reproduce a sign displayed on a computer screen. Results indicated that, as predicted, phonological similarity facilitated repetition latencies and accuracy as long as there were no strict constraints on the type of sublexical features that overlapped. The data converged to suggest that one similarity measure, MaxD, defined as the overlap of any 4 sublexical features, likely best represents mechanisms of phonological similarity in the mental lexicon. Together, these data suggest that lexical access in sign language is facilitated by phonologically similar lexical representations in memory and the optimal operationalization is defined as liberal constraints on overlap of 4 out of 5 sublexical features-similar to the majority of extant definitions in the literature. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  18. Examining the Relationship between Immediate Serial Recall and Immediate Free Recall: Common Effects of Phonological Loop Variables but Only Limited Evidence for the Phonological Loop

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Spurgeon, Jessica; Ward, Geoff; Matthews, William J.

    2014-01-01

    We examined the contribution of the phonological loop to immediate free recall (IFR) and immediate serial recall (ISR) of lists of between one and 15 words. Following Baddeley (1986, 2000, 2007, 2012), we assumed that visual words could be recoded into the phonological store when presented silently but that recoding would be prevented by…

  19. The Treatment Efficacy of Multiple Opposition Phonological Approach via Telepractice for Two Children with Severe Phonological Disorders in Rural Areas of West Texas in the USA

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lee, Sue Ann S.

    2018-01-01

    The goals of the present study were to (1) examine the effects of the multiple opposition phonological approach on improving phoneme production accuracy in children with severe phonological disorders and (2) explore whether the multiple opposition approach is feasible for the telepractice service delivery model. A multiple-baseline,…

  20. When Does Between-Sequence Phonological Similarity Promote Irrelevant Sound Disruption?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marsh, John E.; Vachon, Francois; Jones, Dylan M.

    2008-01-01

    Typically, the phonological similarity between to-be-recalled items and TBI auditory stimuli has no impact if recall in serial order is required. However, in the present study, the authors have shown that the free recall, but not serial recall, of lists of phonologically related to-be-remembered items was disrupted by an irrelevant sound stream…

  1. The Role of Phonology in Children's Acquisition of the Plural

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ettlinger, Marc; Zapf, Jennifer

    2011-01-01

    The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural suffix, may reflect mastery of a morphological process, but it may also depend on children's syntactic, semantic, and phonological abilities. The present article reports a set of experiments in support of this latter view, specifically focusing on the importance of the phonological make-up of…

  2. The Role of Phonological Working Memory in Children with SLI

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Torrens, Vicenç; Yagüe, Esther

    2018-01-01

    This article studies three measures of phonological working memory as tools to identify SLI children: word repetition, nonce word repetition, and digit memory. We propose that a deficit in the phonological loop causes a delay in the acquisition of lexicon, morphosyntax, and discourse. In this research we try to find out whether the scores in these…

  3. Phonological Typicality Does Not Influence Fixation Durations in Normal Reading

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Staub, Adrian; Grant, Margaret; Clifton, Charles, Jr.; Rayner, Keith

    2009-01-01

    Using a word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm, T. A. Farmer, M. H. Christiansen, and P. Monaghan (2006) reported faster reading times for words that are phonologically typical for their syntactic category (i.e., noun or verb) than for words that are phonologically atypical. This result has been taken to suggest that language users are sensitive…

  4. Phonological similarity effect in complex span task.

    PubMed

    Camos, Valérie; Mora, Gérôme; Barrouillet, Pierre

    2013-01-01

    The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that two systems are involved in verbal working memory; one is specifically dedicated to the maintenance of phonological representations through verbal rehearsal while the other would maintain multimodal representations through attentional refreshing. This theoretical framework predicts that phonologically related phenomena such as the phonological similarity effect (PSE) should occur when the domain-specific system is involved in maintenance, but should disappear when concurrent articulation hinders its use. Impeding maintenance in the domain-general system by a concurrent attentional demand should impair recall performance without affecting PSE. In three experiments, we manipulated the concurrent articulation and the attentional demand induced by the processing component of complex span tasks in which participants had to maintain lists of either similar or dissimilar words. Confirming our predictions, PSE affected recall performance in complex span tasks. Although both the attentional demand and the articulatory requirement of the concurrent task impaired recall, only the induction of an articulatory suppression during maintenance made the PSE disappear. These results suggest a duality in the systems devoted to verbal maintenance in the short term, constraining models of working memory.

  5. Phonological reduplication in sign language: Rules rule

    PubMed Central

    Berent, Iris; Dupuis, Amanda; Brentari, Diane

    2014-01-01

    Productivity—the hallmark of linguistic competence—is typically attributed to algebraic rules that support broad generalizations. Past research on spoken language has documented such generalizations in both adults and infants. But whether algebraic rules form part of the linguistic competence of signers remains unknown. To address this question, here we gauge the generalization afforded by American Sign Language (ASL). As a case study, we examine reduplication (X→XX)—a rule that, inter alia, generates ASL nouns from verbs. If signers encode this rule, then they should freely extend it to novel syllables, including ones with features that are unattested in ASL. And since reduplicated disyllables are preferred in ASL, such a rule should favor novel reduplicated signs. Novel reduplicated signs should thus be preferred to nonreduplicative controls (in rating), and consequently, such stimuli should also be harder to classify as nonsigns (in the lexical decision task). The results of four experiments support this prediction. These findings suggest that the phonological knowledge of signers includes powerful algebraic rules. The convergence between these conclusions and previous evidence for phonological rules in spoken language suggests that the architecture of the phonological mind is partly amodal. PMID:24959158

  6. Training Early Literacy Related Skills: To Which Degree Does a Musical Training Contribute to Phonological Awareness Development?

    PubMed Central

    Kempert, Sebastian; Götz, Regina; Blatter, Kristine; Tibken, Catharina; Artelt, Cordula; Schneider, Wolfgang; Stanat, Petra

    2016-01-01

    Well-developed phonological awareness skills are a core prerequisite for early literacy development. Although effective phonological awareness training programs exist, children at risk often do not reach similar levels of phonological awareness after the intervention as children with normally developed skills. Based on theoretical considerations and first promising results the present study explores effects of an early musical training in combination with a conventional phonological training in children with weak phonological awareness skills. Using a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design and measurements across a period of 2 years, we tested the effects of two interventions: a consecutive combination of a musical and a phonological training and a phonological training alone. The design made it possible to disentangle effects of the musical training alone as well the effects of its combination with the phonological training. The outcome measures of these groups were compared with the control group with multivariate analyses, controlling for a number of background variables. The sample included N = 424 German-speaking children aged 4–5 years at the beginning of the study. We found a positive relationship between musical abilities and phonological awareness. Yet, whereas the well-established phonological training produced the expected effects, adding a musical training did not contribute significantly to phonological awareness development. Training effects were partly dependent on the initial level of phonological awareness. Possible reasons for the lack of training effects in the musical part of the combination condition as well as practical implications for early literacy education are discussed. PMID:27899906

  7. Early phonology revealed by international adoptees' birth language retention.

    PubMed

    Choi, Jiyoun; Broersma, Mirjam; Cutler, Anne

    2017-07-11

    Until at least 6 mo of age, infants show good discrimination for familiar phonetic contrasts (i.e., those heard in the environmental language) and contrasts that are unfamiliar. Adult-like discrimination (significantly worse for nonnative than for native contrasts) appears only later, by 9-10 mo. This has been interpreted as indicating that infants have no knowledge of phonology until vocabulary development begins, after 6 mo of age. Recently, however, word recognition has been observed before age 6 mo, apparently decoupling the vocabulary and phonology acquisition processes. Here we show that phonological acquisition is also in progress before 6 mo of age. The evidence comes from retention of birth-language knowledge in international adoptees. In the largest ever such study, we recruited 29 adult Dutch speakers who had been adopted from Korea when young and had no conscious knowledge of Korean language at all. Half were adopted at age 3-5 mo (before native-specific discrimination develops) and half at 17 mo or older (after word learning has begun). In a short intensive training program, we observe that adoptees (compared with 29 matched controls) more rapidly learn tripartite Korean consonant distinctions without counterparts in their later-acquired Dutch, suggesting that the adoptees retained phonological knowledge about the Korean distinction. The advantage is equivalent for the younger-adopted and the older-adopted groups, and both groups not only acquire the tripartite distinction for the trained consonants but also generalize it to untrained consonants. Although infants younger than 6 mo can still discriminate unfamiliar phonetic distinctions, this finding indicates that native-language phonological knowledge is nonetheless being acquired at that age.

  8. Phonology and reading: a response to Wang, Trezek, Luckner, and Paul.

    PubMed

    Allen, Thomas E; Clark, M Diane; del Giudice, Alex; Koo, Daniel; Lieberman, Amy; Mayberry, Rachel; Miller, Paul

    2009-01-01

    Four critical responses to an article, "The Role of Phonology and Phonologically Related Skills in Reading Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing" (Wang, Trezek, Luckner, & Paul, 2008), are presented. Issue is taken with the conclusions of the article by Wang and colleagues regarding the "necessary" condition of phonological awareness for the development of reading skills among deaf readers. Research findings (not cited by Wang and colleagues) are pointed out that reveal weak correlations between phonemic awareness and reading comprehension, and stronger correlations between other variables such as overall language skill and early exposure to a visual language.

  9. Cross-linguistic transfer of phonological skills: a Malaysian perspective.

    PubMed

    Gomez, Caroline; Reason, Rea

    2002-01-01

    This study examined the phonological and reading performance in English of Malaysian children whose home language was Bahasa Malaysia (BM). A sample of 69 Malaysian Standard Two pupils (aged 7-8 years) was selected for the study. Since commencing school at the age of 6 years, the children had been learning to read in BM and had subsequently also been learning to read in English for some 12 months. The study was part of a larger scale research programme that fully recognized the limitations of tests that had not been developed and standardized in Malaysia. Nevertheless, as a first step to developing such tests, a comparison with existing norms for the Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB) and the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimension (WORD) was undertaken in relation to information about the children's L1 and L2 language competencies. Results showed that the children's performance on PhAB was at least comparable to the UK norms while, not surprisingly, they fared less well on WORD. The results are discussed in terms of L1 and L2 transfer, whereby the transparency of written BM and the structured way in which reading is taught in BM facilitates performance on phonological tasks in English. This has implications for identifying children with phonologically based reading difficulties.

  10. Learner-generated drawing for phonological and orthographic dyslexic readers.

    PubMed

    Wang, Li-Chih; Yang, Hsien-Ming; Tasi, Hung-Ju; Chan, Shih-Yi

    2013-01-01

    This study presents an examination of learner-generated drawing for different reading comprehension subtypes of dyslexic students and control students. The participants were 22 phonological dyslexic students, 20 orthographic dyslexic students, 21 double-deficit dyslexic students, and 45 age-, gender-, and IQ-matched control students. The major evaluation tools included word recognition task, orthographic task, phonological awareness task, and scenery texts and questions. Comparisons of the four groups of students showed differences among phonological dyslexia, orthographic dyslexia, double-deficit dyslexia, and the chronological age control groups in pre- and posttest performance of scenery texts. Differences also existed in relevant questions and the effect of the learner-generated drawing method. The pretest performance showed problems in the dyslexic samples in reading the scenery texts and answering relevant questions. The posttest performance revealed certain differences among phonological dyslexia, orthographic dyslexia, double-deficit dyslexia, and the chronological age control group. Finally, all dyslexic groups obtained a great effect from using the learner-generated drawing, particularly orthographic dyslexia. These results suggest that the learner-generated drawing was also useful for dyslexic students, with the potential for use in the classroom for teaching text reading to dyslexic students. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  11. Are Auditory and Visual Processing Deficits Related to Developmental Dyslexia?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Georgiou, George K.; Papadopoulos, Timothy C.; Zarouna, Elena; Parrila, Rauno

    2012-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to examine if children with dyslexia learning to read a consistent orthography (Greek) experience auditory and visual processing deficits and if these deficits are associated with phonological awareness, rapid naming speed and orthographic processing. We administered measures of general cognitive ability, phonological…

  12. Reading-Related Causal Attributions for Success and Failure: Dynamic Links with Reading Skill

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Frijters, Jan C.; Tsujimoto, Kimberley C.; Boada, Richard; Gottwald, Stephanie; Hill, Dina; Jacobson, Lisa A.; Lovett, Maureen W.; Mahone, E. Mark; Willcutt, Erik G.; Wolf, Maryanne; Bosson-Heenan, Joan; Gruen, Jeffrey R.

    2018-01-01

    The present study investigated the relation among reading skills and attributions, naming speed, and phonological awareness across a wide range of reading skill. Participants were 1,105 school-age children and youths from two understudied populations: African Americans and Hispanic Americans. Individual assessments of children ranging in age from…

  13. Examining an Extended Home Literacy Model: The Mediating Roles of Emergent Literacy Skills and Reading Fluency

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Inoue, Tomohiro; Georgiou, George K.; Parrila, Rauno; Kirby, John R.

    2018-01-01

    We examined the developmental relationships between home literacy environment (parent teaching, shared book reading) and emergent literacy skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, rapid naming speed) in kindergarten, reading accuracy and fluency in Grade 1, and reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3 in a sample of Canadian…

  14. Successful Phonological Awareness Instruction with Preschool Children: Lessons from the Classroom

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Phillips, Beth M.; Clancy-Menchetti, Jeanine; Lonigan, Christopher J.

    2008-01-01

    Phonological awareness is one of several key precursor skills to conventional literacy that develop during the preschool period. Significant amounts of research support the causal and predictive relation between phonological awareness and children's ease of learning to decode and spell. However, many preschool curricula and early childhood…

  15. The Interaction of Concreteness and Phonological Similarity in Verbal Working Memory

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Acheson, Daniel J.; Postle, Bradley R.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.

    2010-01-01

    Although phonological representations have been a primary focus of verbal working memory research, lexical-semantic manipulations also influence performance. In the present study, the authors investigated whether a classic phenomenon in verbal working memory, the phonological similarity effect (PSE), is modulated by a lexical-semantic variable,…

  16. Phonological experience modulates voice discrimination: Evidence from functional brain networks analysis.

    PubMed

    Hu, Xueping; Wang, Xiangpeng; Gu, Yan; Luo, Pei; Yin, Shouhang; Wang, Lijun; Fu, Chao; Qiao, Lei; Du, Yi; Chen, Antao

    2017-10-01

    Numerous behavioral studies have found a modulation effect of phonological experience on voice discrimination. However, the neural substrates underpinning this phenomenon are poorly understood. Here we manipulated language familiarity to test the hypothesis that phonological experience affects voice discrimination via mediating the engagement of multiple perceptual and cognitive resources. The results showed that during voice discrimination, the activation of several prefrontal regions was modulated by language familiarity. More importantly, the same effect was observed concerning the functional connectivity from the fronto-parietal network to the voice-identity network (VIN), and from the default mode network to the VIN. Our findings indicate that phonological experience could bias the recruitment of cognitive control and information retrieval/comparison processes during voice discrimination. Therefore, the study unravels the neural substrates subserving the modulation effect of phonological experience on voice discrimination, and provides new insights into studying voice discrimination from the perspective of network interactions. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier Inc.

  17. Selective attention to phonology dynamically modulates initial encoding of auditory words within the left hemisphere.

    PubMed

    Yoncheva, Yuliya; Maurer, Urs; Zevin, Jason D; McCandliss, Bruce D

    2014-08-15

    Selective attention to phonology, i.e., the ability to attend to sub-syllabic units within spoken words, is a critical precursor to literacy acquisition. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence has demonstrated that a left-lateralized network of frontal, temporal, and posterior language regions, including the visual word form area, supports this skill. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated the temporal dynamics of selective attention to phonology during spoken word perception. We tested the hypothesis that selective attention to phonology dynamically modulates stimulus encoding by recruiting left-lateralized processes specifically while the information critical for performance is unfolding. Selective attention to phonology was captured by manipulating listening goals: skilled adult readers attended to either rhyme or melody within auditory stimulus pairs. Each pair superimposed rhyming and melodic information ensuring identical sensory stimulation. Selective attention to phonology produced distinct early and late topographic ERP effects during stimulus encoding. Data-driven source localization analyses revealed that selective attention to phonology led to significantly greater recruitment of left-lateralized posterior and extensive temporal regions, which was notably concurrent with the rhyme-relevant information within the word. Furthermore, selective attention effects were specific to auditory stimulus encoding and not observed in response to cues, arguing against the notion that they reflect sustained task setting. Collectively, these results demonstrate that selective attention to phonology dynamically engages a left-lateralized network during the critical time-period of perception for achieving phonological analysis goals. These findings suggest a key role for selective attention in on-line phonological computations. Furthermore, these findings motivate future research on the role that neural mechanisms of attention may

  18. Selective attention to phonology dynamically modulates initial encoding of auditory words within the left hemisphere

    PubMed Central

    Yoncheva; Maurer, Urs; Zevin, Jason; McCandliss, Bruce

    2015-01-01

    Selective attention to phonology, i.e., the ability to attend to sub-syllabic units within spoken words, is a critical precursor to literacy acquisition. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence has demonstrated that a left-lateralized network of frontal, temporal, and posterior language regions, including the visual word form area, supports this skill. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated the temporal dynamics of selective attention to phonology during spoken word perception. We tested the hypothesis that selective atten tion to phonology dynamically modulates stimulus encoding by recruiting left-lateralized processes specifically while the information critical for performance is unfolding. Selective attention to phonology was captured by ma nipulating listening goals: skilled adult readers attended to either rhyme or melody within auditory stimulus pairs. Each pair superimposed rhyming and melodic information ensuring identical sensory stimulation. Selective attention to phonology produced distinct early and late topographic ERP effects during stimulus encoding. Data- driven source localization analyses revealed that selective attention to phonology led to significantly greater re cruitment of left-lateralized posterior and extensive temporal regions, which was notably concurrent with the rhyme-relevant information within the word. Furthermore, selective attention effects were specific to auditory stimulus encoding and not observed in response to cues, arguing against the notion that they reflect sustained task setting. Collectively, these results demonstrate that selective attention to phonology dynamically engages a left-lateralized network during the critical time-period of perception for achieving phonological analysis goals. These findings support the key role of selective attention to phonology in the development of literacy and motivate future research on the neural bases of the interaction between phonological

  19. Multi-language naming game

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Zhou, Jianfeng; Lou, Yang; Chen, Guanrong; Tang, Wallace K. S.

    2018-04-01

    Naming game is a simulation-based experiment used to study the evolution of languages. The conventional naming game focuses on a single language. In this paper, a novel naming game model named multi-language naming game (MLNG) is proposed, where the agents are different-language speakers who cannot communicate with each other without a translator (interpreter) in between. The MLNG model is general, capable of managing k different languages with k ≥ 2. For illustration, the paper only discusses the MLNG with two different languages, and studies five representative network topologies, namely random-graph, WS small-world, NW small-world, scale-free, and random-triangle topologies. Simulation and analysis results both show that: 1) using the network features and based on the proportion of translators the probability of establishing a conversation between two or three agents can be theoretically estimated; 2) the relationship between the convergence speed and the proportion of translators has a power-law-like relation; 3) different agents require different memory sizes, thus a local memory allocation rule is recommended for saving memory resources. The new model and new findings should be useful for further studies of naming games and for better understanding of languages evolution from a dynamical network perspective.

  20. Cognitive Attributes of Adequate and Inadequate Responders to Reading Intervention in Middle School

    PubMed Central

    Miciak, Jeremy; Stuebing, Karla K.; Vaughn, Sharon; Roberts, Greg; Barth, Amy Elizabeth; Fletcher, Jack M.

    2016-01-01

    No studies have investigated the cognitive attributes of middle school students who are adequate and inadequate responders to Tier 2 reading intervention. We compared students in Grades 6 and 7 representing groups of adequate responders (n = 77) and inadequate responders who fell below criteria in (a) comprehension (n = 54); (b) fluency (n = 45); and (c) decoding, fluency, and comprehension (DFC; n = 45). These students received measures of phonological awareness, listening comprehension, rapid naming, processing speed, verbal knowledge, and nonverbal reasoning. Multivariate comparisons showed a significant Group-by-Task interaction: the comprehension-impaired group demonstrated primary difficulties with verbal knowledge and listening comprehension, the DFC group with phonological awareness, and the fluency-impaired group with phonological awareness and rapid naming. A series of regression models investigating whether responder status explained unique variation in cognitive skills yielded largely null results consistent with a continuum of severity associated with level of reading impairment, with no evidence for qualitative differences in the cognitive attributes of adequate and inadequate responders. PMID:28579668

  1. Cognitive Attributes of Adequate and Inadequate Responders to Reading Intervention in Middle School.

    PubMed

    Miciak, Jeremy; Stuebing, Karla K; Vaughn, Sharon; Roberts, Greg; Barth, Amy Elizabeth; Fletcher, Jack M

    2014-12-01

    No studies have investigated the cognitive attributes of middle school students who are adequate and inadequate responders to Tier 2 reading intervention. We compared students in Grades 6 and 7 representing groups of adequate responders ( n = 77) and inadequate responders who fell below criteria in (a) comprehension ( n = 54); (b) fluency ( n = 45); and (c) decoding, fluency, and comprehension (DFC; n = 45). These students received measures of phonological awareness, listening comprehension, rapid naming, processing speed, verbal knowledge, and nonverbal reasoning. Multivariate comparisons showed a significant Group-by-Task interaction: the comprehension-impaired group demonstrated primary difficulties with verbal knowledge and listening comprehension, the DFC group with phonological awareness, and the fluency-impaired group with phonological awareness and rapid naming. A series of regression models investigating whether responder status explained unique variation in cognitive skills yielded largely null results consistent with a continuum of severity associated with level of reading impairment, with no evidence for qualitative differences in the cognitive attributes of adequate and inadequate responders.

  2. Reading in Children With Fragile X Syndrome: Phonological Awareness and Feasibility of Intervention.

    PubMed

    Adlof, Suzanne M; Klusek, Jessica; Hoffmann, Anne; Chitwood, Kerrie L; Brazendale, Allison; Riley, Karen; Abbeduto, Leonard J; Roberts, Jane E

    2018-05-01

    Individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS) present with significant deficits in reading skills, but scant research exists to understand the characteristics of the reading delays or best practices for reading instruction with this population. Study 1 examined the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills in individuals with FXS. Study 2 evaluated the feasibility of a web-based reading intervention, which incorporated phonological awareness and phonics instruction but was originally developed for mainstream students, for children with FXS. Results suggest that phonological awareness and reading skills are correlated in this population, and that instruction targeting phonological awareness and phonics should not be ruled out for individuals with FXS. Further studies are needed to examine their potential effects.

  3. Phonetic radicals, not phonological coding systems, support orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese.

    PubMed

    Li, Luan; Wang, Hua-Chen; Castles, Anne; Hsieh, Miao-Ling; Marinus, Eva

    2018-07-01

    According to the self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995), phonological decoding is fundamental to acquiring orthographic representations of novel written words. However, phonological decoding is not straightforward in non-alphabetic scripts such as Chinese, where words are presented as characters. Here, we present the first study investigating the role of phonological decoding in orthographic learning in Chinese. We examined two possible types of phonological decoding: the use of phonetic radicals, an internal phonological aid, andthe use of Zhuyin, an external phonological coding system. Seventy-three Grade 2 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of twelve novel compound characters over four days. They were then exposed to the written characters in short stories, and were assessed on their reading accuracy and on their subsequent orthographic learning via orthographic choice and spelling tasks. The novel characters were assigned three different types of pronunciation in relation to its phonetic radical - (1) a pronunciation that is identical to the phonetic radical in isolation; (2) a common alternative pronunciation associated with the phonetic radical when it appears in other characters; and (3) a pronunciation that is unrelated to the phonetic radical. The presence of Zhuyin was also manipulated. The children read the novel characters more accurately when phonological cues from the phonetic radicals were available and in the presence of Zhuyin. However, only the phonetic radicals facilitated orthographic learning. The findings provide the first empirical evidence of orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese, and reveal how phonological decoding functions to support learning in non-alphabetic writing systems. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  4. Neural Changes after Phonological Treatment for Anomia: An fMRI Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rochon, Elizabeth; Leonard, Carol; Burianova, Hana; Laird, Laura; Soros, Peter; Graham, Simon; Grady, Cheryl

    2010-01-01

    Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the neural processing characteristics associated with word retrieval abilities after a phonologically-based treatment for anomia in two stroke patients with aphasia. Neural activity associated with a phonological and a semantic task was compared before and after treatment with…

  5. A patient with phonologic alexia can learn to read "much" from "mud pies"

    PubMed Central

    Lott, Susan Nitzberg; Sample, Diane M.; Oliver, Robyn T.; Lacey, Elizabeth H.; Friedman, Rhonda B.

    2008-01-01

    People with phonologic alexia often have difficulty reading functors and verbs, in addition to pseudowords. Friedman et al (2002) reported a successful treatment for phonologic alexia that paired problematic functors and verbs with easily read relays that were homophonous nouns (e.g. "be" paired with "bee"). The current study evaluates the efficacy of pairing problematic grammatical words with relays that share initial phonemes, but vary in the relationship of their final phonemes. Results showed that reading of target grammatical words improved to criterion level (90% accuracy over two consecutive probes) in all experimental conditions with shared phonology, but remained far below criterion level in control conditions. There was a significant correlation between degree of phonologic relatedness and error rate. Maintenance of the treatment effect was poor as assessed by traditional measurement, however a dramatic savings during relearning was demonstrated during a subsequent treatment phase. The finding that reading can be re-organized by pairing target words not only with homophones, but with other phonologically related relays, suggests that this approach could be applied to a wide corpus of words and, therefore, potentially be of great use clinically. We suggest, within a connectionist account, that the treatment effect results from relays priming the initial phonologic units of the targets. PMID:18513760

  6. Contributions of Emergent Literacy Skills to Name Writing, Letter Writing, and Spelling in Preschool Children

    PubMed Central

    Puranik, Cynthia S.; Lonigan, Christopher J.; Kim, Young-Suk

    2011-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to examine which emergent literacy skills contribute to preschool children’s emergent writing (name-writing, letter-writing, and spelling) skills. Emergent reading and writing tasks were administered to 296 preschool children aged 4–5 years. Print knowledge and letter-writing skills made positive contributions to name writing; whereas alphabet knowledge, print knowledge, and name writing made positive contributions to letter writing. Both name-writing and letter-writing skills made significant contributions to the prediction of spelling after controlling for age, parental education, print knowledge, phonological awareness, and letter-name and letter-sound knowledge; however, only letter-writing abilities made a significant unique contribution to the prediction of spelling when both letter-writing and name-writing skills were considered together. Name writing reflects knowledge of some letters rather than a broader knowledge of letters that may be needed to support early spelling. Children’s letter-writing skills may be a better indicator of children’s emergent literacy and developing spelling skills than are their name-writing skills at the end of the preschool year. Spelling is a developmentally complex skill beginning in preschool and includes letter writing and blending skills, print knowledge, and letter-name and letter-sound knowledge. PMID:21927537

  7. Brain Activity during Performance of Naming Tasks: Comparison between Dyslexic and Regular Readers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Breznitz, Zvia

    2005-01-01

    This research was aimed at contributing to the current understanding of the underlying factors of naming speed and the causes of naming speed deficits. Forty regular readers and 40 dyslexic university students participated in the study. Electrophysiological (Event-Related Potentials [ERPs]) and behavioral measures were employed. Behavioral…

  8. An investigation into semantic and phonological processing in individuals with Williams syndrome.

    PubMed

    Lee, Cheryl S; Binder, Katherine S

    2014-02-01

    The current study examined semantic and phonological processing in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS). Previous research in language processing in individuals with WS suggests a complex linguistic system characterized by "deviant" semantic organization and differential phonological processing. Two experiments explored these representations in individuals with WS. The first experiment analyzed the relative typicality and frequency of participants' responses to a semantic and phonological fluency task. The second experiment tapped into online language processing through a semantic priming task and an online sentence reading task measuring the effects of word frequency. Thirteen participants with WS were matched to a group of participants on reading grade level and a group of participants on chronological age. The results of the semantic fluency task, semantic priming task, and word frequency task suggest that semantic organization in individuals with WS appears commensurate with their reading level rather than deviant. The pattern of results suggests that individuals with WS do not appear to have deviant semantic organization, while confirming that online tasks that tap into these processes are a promising direction in investigations that include atypically developing populations. These findings for the phonological tasks warrant further research into phonological processing in individuals with WS.

  9. Auditory Middle Latency Response and Phonological Awareness in Students with Learning Disabilities

    PubMed Central

    Romero, Ana Carla Leite; Funayama, Carolina Araújo Rodrigues; Capellini, Simone Aparecida; Frizzo, Ana Claudia Figueiredo

    2015-01-01

    Introduction Behavioral tests of auditory processing have been applied in schools and highlight the association between phonological awareness abilities and auditory processing, confirming that low performance on phonological awareness tests may be due to low performance on auditory processing tests. Objective To characterize the auditory middle latency response and the phonological awareness tests and to investigate correlations between responses in a group of children with learning disorders. Methods The study included 25 students with learning disabilities. Phonological awareness and auditory middle latency response were tested with electrodes placed on the left and right hemispheres. The correlation between the measurements was performed using the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. Results There is some correlation between the tests, especially between the Pa component and syllabic awareness, where moderate negative correlation is observed. Conclusion In this study, when phonological awareness subtests were performed, specifically phonemic awareness, the students showed a low score for the age group, although for the objective examination, prolonged Pa latency in the contralateral via was observed. Negative weak to moderate correlation for Pa wave latency was observed, as was positive weak correlation for Na-Pa amplitude. PMID:26491479

  10. Crossover of Phonological Processing Skills: A Study of Spanish-Speaking Students in Two Instructional Settings

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Leafstedt, Jill M.; Gerber, Michael M.

    2005-01-01

    This study investigated three questions: Do phonological processes show cross-linguistic transfer? How does the language of instruction influence the relationship between phonological processes and decoding? Does performance on Spanish and English phonological processing tasks similarly predict English decoding for the same English learners (ELs)?…

  11. Reduced Phonological Similarity Effects in Patients with Damage to the Cerebellum

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Justus, Timothy; Ravizza, Susan M.; Fiez, Julie A.; Ivry, Richard B.

    2005-01-01

    Ten cerebellar patients were compared to 10 control subjects on a verbal working memory task in which the phonological similarity of the words to be remembered and their modality of presentation were manipulated. Cerebellar patients demonstrated a reduction of the phonological similarity effect relative to controls. Further, this reduction did not…

  12. Phonological Skills and Learning to Read. Psychology Press & Routledge Classic Editions

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Goswami, Usha; Bryant, Peter

    2016-01-01

    In this classic edition of their ground-breaking work, Usha Goswami and Peter Bryant revisit their influential theory about how phonological skills support the development of literacy. The book describes three causal factors which can account for children's reading and spelling development: (1) pre­school phonological knowledge of rhyme and…

  13. Development of Phonological Sensitivity in 2- to 5-Year- Old Children.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lonigan, Christopher J.; Burgess, Stephen R.; Anthony, Jason L.; Barker, Theodore A.

    1998-01-01

    Phonological sensitivity was examined in 238 children ages two to five years from middle-to-upper-income families and 118 children from lower-income families across different levels of linguistic complexity. Overall, results indicated an increase in phonological sensitivity with age, as well as increasing stability and significant social class…

  14. Rapid Naming in Relation to Reading and Writing in Korean (Hangul), Chinese (Hanja) and English among Korean Children: A 1-Year Longitudinal Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cho, Jeung-Ryeul; Chiu, Ming Ming

    2015-01-01

    The relation of rapid automatised naming (RAN) to word recognition may depend on the phonological regularity of the orthography. This study examined differential contributions of RAN to reading and writing in Korean alphabetic Hangul, logographic Hanja (Chinese) and English as a second language among 73 fifth graders in Korea across 1?year. RAN…

  15. The Double-Deficit Hypothesis: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Evidence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Vukovic, Rose K.; Siegel, Linda S.

    2006-01-01

    The double-deficit hypothesis of developmental dyslexia proposes that deficits in phonological processing and naming speed represent independent sources of dysfunction in dyslexia. The present article is a review of the evidence for the double-deficit hypothesis, including a discussion of recent findings related to the hypothesis. Studies in this…

  16. Classification of Double Deficit Groups across Time: An Analysis of Group Stability from Kindergarten to Second Grade

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Steacy, Laura M.; Kirby, John R.; Parrila, Rauno; Compton, Donald L.

    2014-01-01

    The Double Deficit Hypothesis of dyslexia is one approach to classifying students with reading disabilities. The theory offers four distinct groups of readers: (a) average readers, (b) students with phonological deficits, (c) students with naming speed deficits, and (d) students with double deficits: those having both (b) and (c). This study…

  17. Cognitive Mechanisms of Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Adults: The Role of Phonological Memory

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kaushanskaya, Margarita

    2012-01-01

    Previous studies have indicated that bilingualism may facilitate lexical learning in adults. The goals of this research were (i) to examine whether bilingual influences on word learning diverge for phonologically-familiar and phonologically-unfamiliar novel words, and (ii) to examine whether increased phonological memory capacity can account for…

  18. An Investigation into Semantic and Phonological Processing in Individuals with Williams Syndrome

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lee, Cheryl S.; Binder, Katherine S.

    2014-01-01

    Purpose: The current study examined semantic and phonological processing in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS). Previous research in language processing in individuals with WS suggests a complex linguistic system characterized by "deviant" semantic organization and differential phonological processing. Method: Two experiments…

  19. Relations among Language Exposure, Phonological Memory, and Language Development in Spanish-English Bilingually-Developing Two-Year-Olds

    PubMed Central

    Parra, Marisol; Hoff, Erika; Core, Cynthia

    2010-01-01

    The relation of phonological memory to language experience and development was investigated in 41 Spanish-English bilingual first language learners. The children’s relative exposure to English and Spanish and phonological memory for English-like and Spanish-like nonwords were assessed at 22 months; their productive vocabulary and grammar in both languages were assessed at 25 months. Phonological memory for English- and Spanish-like nonwords were highly correlated, and each was related to vocabulary and grammar in both languages, suggesting a language-general component to phonological memory skill. In addition, there was evidence of language-specific benefits of language exposure to phonological memory skill and of language-specific benefits of phonological memory skill to language development. PMID:20828710

  20. Degree of Illiteracy and Phonological and Metaphonological Skills in Unschooled Adults

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Loureiro, Clara de Santos; Willadino Braga, Lucia; Souza, Ligia do Nascimento; Filho, Gilberto Nunes; Queiroz, Elizabeth; Dellatolas, Georges

    2004-01-01

    Phonological and metaphonological skills are explored in 97 Brazilian illiterate and semiliterate adults. A simple letter- and word-reading task was used to define the degree of illiteracy. Phonemic awareness was strongly dependent on the level of letter and word reading ability. Phonological memory was very low in illiterates and unrelated to…

  1. Input-Driven Differences in Toddlers' Perception of a Disappearing Phonological Contrast

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van der Feest, Suzanne V. H.; Johnson, Elizabeth K.

    2016-01-01

    How does phonological development differ in children exposed to one versus two variants of a single language? If children receive mixed evidence for a phonological contrast (i.e., one language variant in the environment maintains a contrast while another neutralizes it), will they treat this contrast as noncontrastive (i.e., as allophonic)? Or…

  2. How phonological awareness mediates the relation between working memory and word reading efficiency in children with dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Knoop-van Campen, Carolien A N; Segers, Eliane; Verhoeven, Ludo

    2018-05-01

    This study examined the relation between working memory, phonological awareness, and word reading efficiency in fourth-grade children with dyslexia. To test whether the relation between phonological awareness and word reading efficiency differed for children with dyslexia versus typically developing children, we assessed phonological awareness and word reading efficiency in 50 children with dyslexia (aged 9;10, 35 boys) and 613 typically developing children (aged 9;5, 279 boys). Phonological awareness was found to be associated with word reading efficiency, similar for children with dyslexia and typically developing children. To find out whether the relation between working memory and word reading efficiency in the group with dyslexia could be explained by phonological awareness, the children with dyslexia were also tested on working memory. Results of a mediation analysis showed a significant indirect effect of working memory on word reading efficiency via phonological awareness. Working memory predicted reading efficiency, via its relation with phonological awareness in children with dyslexia. This indicates that working memory is necessary for word reading efficiency via its impact on phonological awareness and that phonological awareness continues to be important for word reading efficiency in older children with dyslexia. © 2018 The Authors Dyslexia Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  3. Therapy for naming difficulties in bilingual aphasia: which language benefits?

    PubMed

    Croft, Stephen; Marshall, Jane; Pring, Tim; Hardwick, Matthew

    2011-01-01

    The majority of the world's population is bilingual. Yet, therapy studies involving bilingual people with aphasia are rare and have produced conflicting results. One recent study suggested that therapy can assist word retrieval in bilingual aphasia, with effects generalizing to related words in the untreated language. However, this cross-linguistic generalisation only occurred into the person's stronger language (L1). While indicative, these findings were derived from just three participants, and only one received therapy in both languages. This study addressed the following questions. Do bilingual people with aphasia respond to naming therapy techniques developed for the monolingual population? Do languages respond differently to therapy and, if so, are gains influenced by language dominance? Does cross-linguistic generalisation occur and does this depend on the therapy approach? Is cross-linguistic generalisation more likely following treatment in L2 or L1? The study involved five aphasic participants who were bilingual in English and Bengali. Testing showed that their severity and dominance patterns varied, so the study adopted a case series rather than a group design. Each person received two phases of naming therapy, one in Bengali and one in English. Each phase treated two groups of words with semantic and phonological tasks, respectively. The effects of therapy were measured with a picture-naming task involving both treated and untreated (control) items. This was administered in both languages on four occasions: two pre-therapy, one immediately post-therapy and one 4 weeks after therapy had ceased. Testing and therapy in Bengali was administered by bilingual co-workers. Four of the five participants made significant gains from at least one episode of therapy. Benefits arose in both languages and from both semantic and phonological tasks. There were three instances of cross-linguistic generalisation, which occurred when items had been treated in the person

  4. Phonological abilities in literacy-impaired children: Brain potentials reveal deficient phoneme discrimination, but intact prosodic processing.

    PubMed

    Männel, Claudia; Schaadt, Gesa; Illner, Franziska K; van der Meer, Elke; Friederici, Angela D

    2017-02-01

    Intact phonological processing is crucial for successful literacy acquisition. While individuals with difficulties in reading and spelling (i.e., developmental dyslexia) are known to experience deficient phoneme discrimination (i.e., segmental phonology), findings concerning their prosodic processing (i.e., suprasegmental phonology) are controversial. Because there are no behavior-independent studies on the underlying neural correlates of prosodic processing in dyslexia, these controversial findings might be explained by different task demands. To provide an objective behavior-independent picture of segmental and suprasegmental phonological processing in impaired literacy acquisition, we investigated event-related brain potentials during passive listening in typically and poor-spelling German school children. For segmental phonology, we analyzed the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) during vowel length discrimination, capturing automatic auditory deviancy detection in repetitive contexts. For suprasegmental phonology, we analyzed the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) that automatically occurs in response to prosodic boundaries. Our results revealed spelling group differences for the MMN, but not for the CPS, indicating deficient segmental, but intact suprasegmental phonological processing in poor spellers. The present findings point towards a differential role of segmental and suprasegmental phonology in literacy disorders and call for interventions that invigorate impaired literacy by utilizing intact prosody in addition to training deficient phonemic awareness. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

  5. Phonological Skills, Visual Attention Span, and Visual Stress in Developmental Dyslexia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Saksida, Amanda; Iannuzzi, Stéphanie; Bogliotti, Caroline; Chaix, Yves; Démonet, Jean-François; Bricout, Laure; Billard, Catherine; Nguyen-Morel, Marie-Ange; Le Heuzey, Marie-France; Soares-Boucaud, Isabelle; George, Florence; Ziegler, Johannes C.; Ramus, Franck

    2016-01-01

    In this study, we concurrently investigated 3 possible causes of dyslexia--a phonological deficit, visual stress, and a reduced visual attention span--in a large population of 164 dyslexic and 118 control French children, aged between 8 and 13 years old. We found that most dyslexic children showed a phonological deficit, either in terms of…

  6. Evaluation of a Phonological Reading Programme for Children with Down Syndrome

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Baylis, Pamela; Snowling, Margaret J.

    2012-01-01

    This article reports the evaluation of a 10-week phonologically-based literacy programme involving 10 children with Down syndrome (DS). At the outset, each child relied on a whole word method of reading with no apparent use of decoding strategies. The reading and phonological skills of the children were assessed twice prior to undertaking the…

  7. Phonological Process and Accuracy Measures in Typically Developing Punjabi Speaking Children between 3-5 Years

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kaur, Simran; John, Sunila; Veena, K. D.; Rajashekhar, B.

    2013-01-01

    Phonology is an area of linguistics that is concerned with the sounds of language. Since each language has its own unique system of sound patterns, there is a need to study phonological development in different languages. However, lack of published data necessitates the present study on phonological developmental pattern in Punjabi language…

  8. What Do Phonological Processing Errors Tell about Students' Skills in Reading, Writing, and Oral Language?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Choi, Dowon; Hatcher, Ryan C.; Dulong-Langley, Susan; Liu, Xiaochen; Bray, Melissa A.; Courville, Troy; O'Brien, Rebecca; DeBiase, Emily

    2017-01-01

    The kinds of errors that children and adolescents make on phonological processing tasks were studied with a large sample between ages 4 and 19 (N = 3,842) who were tested on the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-Third Edition (KTEA-3). Principal component analysis identified two phonological processing factors: Basic Phonological Awareness…

  9. Orthographic and phonological neighborhood effects in handwritten word perception

    PubMed Central

    Goldinger, Stephen D.

    2017-01-01

    In printed-word perception, the orthographic neighborhood effect (i.e., faster recognition of words with more neighbors) has considerable theoretical importance, because it implicates great interactivity in lexical access. Mulatti, Reynolds, and Besner Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32, 799–810 (2006) questioned the validity of orthographic neighborhood effects, suggesting that they reflect a confound with phonological neighborhood density. They reported that, when phonological density is controlled, orthographic neighborhood effects vanish. Conversely, phonological neighborhood effects were still evident even when controlling for orthographic neighborhood density. The present study was a replication and extension of Mulatti et al. (2006), with words presented in four different formats (computer-generated print and cursive, and handwritten print and cursive). The results from Mulatti et al. (2006) were replicated with computer-generated stimuli, but were reversed with natural stimuli. These results suggest that, when ambiguity is introduced at the level of individual letters, top-down influences from lexical neighbors are increased. PMID:26306881

  10. Phonological Awareness: Factors of Influence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Frohlich, Linda Paulina; Petermann, Franz; Metz, Dorothee

    2013-01-01

    Early child development is influenced by various genetic and environmental factors. This study aims to identify factors that affect the phonological awareness of preschool and first grade children. Based on a sample of 330 German-speaking children (mean age = 6.2 years) the following domains were evaluated: Parent factors, birth and pregnancy,…

  11. Phonological Awareness and Musical Aptitude.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Peynircioglu, Zehra F.; Durgunoglu, Aydyn Y.; Oney-Kusefoglu, Banu

    2002-01-01

    Examines the relationship between phonological awareness and musical aptitude in pre-school Turkish and American children. Finds that children in the high musical aptitude group did much better on all tasks than those in the low musical aptitude group, showing that success in manipulating linguistic sounds was related to awareness of distinct…

  12. A Comparison of Two Phonological Awareness Techniques between Samples of Preschool Children.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Maslanka, Phyllis; Joseph, Laurice M.

    2002-01-01

    Examines the differential effects of sound boxes and sound sort phonological awareness instructional techniques on preschoolers' phonological awareness performance. Finds that children in the sound box group significantly outperformed children in the sound sort group on isolating medial sounds and segmenting phonemes. Reveals that preschool…

  13. Effects of a phonological awareness program on English reading and spelling among Hong Kong Chinese ESL children.

    PubMed

    Yeung, Susanna S S; Siegel, Linda S; Chan, Carol K K

    2013-05-01

    This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.

  14. Recall of short word lists presented visually at fast rates: effects of phonological similarity and word length.

    PubMed

    Coltheart, V; Langdon, R

    1998-03-01

    Phonological similarity of visually presented list items impairs short-term serial recall. Lists of long words are also recalled less accurately than are lists of short words. These results have been attributed to phonological recoding and rehearsal. If subjects articulate irrelevant words during list presentation, both phonological similarity and word length effects are abolished. Experiments 1 and 2 examined effects of phonological similarity and recall instructions on recall of lists shown at fast rates (from one item per 0.114-0.50 sec), which might not permit phonological encoding and rehearsal. In Experiment 3, recall instructions and word length were manipulated using fast presentation rates. Both phonological similarity and word length effects were observed, and they were not dependent on recall instructions. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated the effects of irrelevant concurrent articulation on lists shown at fast rates. Both phonological similarity and word length effects were removed by concurrent articulation, as they were with slow presentation rates.

  15. Mapping the reading circuitry for skilled deaf readers: an fMRI study of semantic and phonological processing.

    PubMed

    Emmorey, Karen; Weisberg, Jill; McCullough, Stephen; Petrich, Jennifer A F

    2013-08-01

    We examined word-level reading circuits in skilled deaf readers whose primary language is American Sign Language, and hearing readers matched for reading ability (college level). During fMRI scanning, participants performed a semantic decision (concrete concept?), a phonological decision (two syllables?), and a false-font control task (string underlined?). The groups performed equally well on the semantic task, but hearing readers performed better on the phonological task. Semantic processing engaged similar left frontotemporal language circuits in deaf and hearing readers. However, phonological processing elicited increased neural activity in deaf, relative to hearing readers, in the left precentral gyrus, suggesting greater reliance on articulatory phonological codes, and in bilateral parietal cortex, suggesting increased phonological processing effort. Deaf readers also showed stronger anterior-posterior functional segregation between semantic and phonological processes in left inferior prefrontal cortex. Finally, weaker phonological decoding ability did not alter activation in the visual word form area for deaf readers. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  16. Expressive Phonology as Evaluative Comment in Personal Oral Narrative: The Play Frame and Language Learning

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mischler, James J., III

    2008-01-01

    This article presents a case study of phonological types of internal evaluation in the personal oral narrative of one non-native speaker of English. The purpose was twofold: (1) to study whether laughter and exhaled breath can serve the functions of expressive phonology; i.e., phonological features which provide commentary and point of view for…

  17. The Role of Extensive Reading in the Development of Phonological Processing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nisanci, Sinan

    2017-01-01

    The present study aims to investigate the role of extensive reading in the acquisition of implicit phonological knowledge. Through extensive exposure to print, L2 learners can improve their phonological processing skills, and this could contribute to their word recognition fluency. On the basis of the Oxford Placement Test, 30 9th graders and 30…

  18. The Interaction of High-Speed Turbulence with Flames: Turbulent Flame Speed

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2010-08-05

    AND ADDRESS(ES) 10. SPONSOR / MONITOR’S ACRONYM(S) 9 . SPONSORING / MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 11. SPONSOR / MONITOR’S REPORT NUMBER(S...UL 38 A.Y. Poludnenko (202) 767-6582 05 -08-2010 Memorandum Report Turbulent premixed combustion Turbulence Flamelet Turbulent flame speed Office of...3.4. Stretch factor and the balance between ST and AT ...................................................................... 9 4. Flame surface

  19. Phonological Concept Learning.

    PubMed

    Moreton, Elliott; Pater, Joe; Pertsova, Katya

    2017-01-01

    Linguistic and non-linguistic pattern learning have been studied separately, but we argue for a comparative approach. Analogous inductive problems arise in phonological and visual pattern learning. Evidence from three experiments shows that human learners can solve them in analogous ways, and that human performance in both cases can be captured by the same models. We test GMECCS (Gradual Maximum Entropy with a Conjunctive Constraint Schema), an implementation of the Configural Cue Model (Gluck & Bower, ) in a Maximum Entropy phonotactic-learning framework (Goldwater & Johnson, ; Hayes & Wilson, ) with a single free parameter, against the alternative hypothesis that learners seek featurally simple algebraic rules ("rule-seeking"). We study the full typology of patterns introduced by Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins () ("SHJ"), instantiated as both phonotactic patterns and visual analogs, using unsupervised training. Unlike SHJ, Experiments 1 and 2 found that both phonotactic and visual patterns that depended on fewer features could be more difficult than those that depended on more features, as predicted by GMECCS but not by rule-seeking. GMECCS also correctly predicted performance differences between stimulus subclasses within each pattern. A third experiment tried supervised training (which can facilitate rule-seeking in visual learning) to elicit simple rule-seeking phonotactic learning, but cue-based behavior persisted. We conclude that similar cue-based cognitive processes are available for phonological and visual concept learning, and hence that studying either kind of learning can lead to significant insights about the other. Copyright © 2015 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  20. Effects of Perceptual and Contextual Enrichment on Visual Confrontation Naming in Adult Aging

    PubMed Central

    Rogalski, Yvonne; Peelle, Jonathan E.; Reilly, Jamie

    2013-01-01

    Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of enriching line drawings with color/texture and environmental context as a facilitator of naming speed and accuracy in older adults. Method Twenty young and 23 older adults named high-frequency picture stimuli from the Boston Naming Test (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 2001) under three conditions: (a) black-and-white items, (b) colorized-texturized items, and (c) scene-primed colored items (e.g., “hammock” preceded 1,000 ms by a backyard scene). Results With respect to speeded naming latencies, mixed-model analyses of variance revealed that young adults did not benefit from colorization-texturization but did show scene-priming effects. In contrast, older adults failed to show facilitation effects from either colorized-texturized or scene-primed items. Moreover, older adults were consistently slower to initiate naming than were their younger counterparts across all conditions. Conclusions Perceptual and contextual enrichment of sparse line drawings does not appear to facilitate visual confrontation naming in older adults, whereas younger adults do tend to show benefits of scene priming. We interpret these findings as generally supportive of a processing speed account of age-related object picture-naming difficulty. PMID:21498581

  1. Phonological similarity in working memory span tasks.

    PubMed

    Chow, Michael; Macnamara, Brooke N; Conway, Andrew R A

    2016-08-01

    In a series of four experiments, we explored what conditions are sufficient to produce a phonological similarity facilitation effect in working memory span tasks. By using the same set of memoranda, but differing the secondary-task requirements across experiments, we showed that a phonological similarity facilitation effect is dependent upon the semantic relationship between the memoranda and the secondary-task stimuli, and is robust to changes in the representation, ordering, and pool size of the secondary-task stimuli. These findings are consistent with interference accounts of memory (Brown, Neath, & Chater, Psychological Review, 114, 539-576, 2007; Oberauer, Lewandowsky, Farrell, Jarrold, & Greaves, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19, 779-819, 2012), whereby rhyming stimuli provide a form of categorical similarity that allows distractors to be excluded from retrieval at recall.

  2. Automaticity of phonological and semantic processing during visual word recognition.

    PubMed

    Pattamadilok, Chotiga; Chanoine, Valérie; Pallier, Christophe; Anton, Jean-Luc; Nazarian, Bruno; Belin, Pascal; Ziegler, Johannes C

    2017-04-01

    Reading involves activation of phonological and semantic knowledge. Yet, the automaticity of the activation of these representations remains subject to debate. The present study addressed this issue by examining how different brain areas involved in language processing responded to a manipulation of bottom-up (level of visibility) and top-down information (task demands) applied to written words. The analyses showed that the same brain areas were activated in response to written words whether the task was symbol detection, rime detection, or semantic judgment. This network included posterior, temporal and prefrontal regions, which clearly suggests the involvement of orthographic, semantic and phonological/articulatory processing in all tasks. However, we also found interactions between task and stimulus visibility, which reflected the fact that the strength of the neural responses to written words in several high-level language areas varied across tasks. Together, our findings suggest that the involvement of phonological and semantic processing in reading is supported by two complementary mechanisms. First, an automatic mechanism that results from a task-independent spread of activation throughout a network in which orthography is linked to phonology and semantics. Second, a mechanism that further fine-tunes the sensitivity of high-level language areas to the sensory input in a task-dependent manner. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  3. Otitis Media in Early Childhood and Its Relationship to Later Phonological Development.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Roberts, Joanne Erwick; And Others

    1988-01-01

    Examination of 55 socioeconomically disadvantaged children found no significant relationship between otitis media in early childhood and number of common phonological processes or consonants in error used during preschool years. However, otitis media in early childhood was associated with total number of phonological processes used by children…

  4. Similarity in L2 Phonology

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Barrios, Shannon L.

    2013-01-01

    Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty…

  5. Phonological awareness: explicit instruction for young deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

    PubMed

    Miller, Elizabeth M; Lederberg, Amy R; Easterbrooks, Susan R

    2013-04-01

    The goal of this study was to explore the development of spoken phonological awareness for deaf and hard-of-hearing children (DHH) with functional hearing (i.e., the ability to access spoken language through hearing). Teachers explicitly taught five preschoolers the phonological awareness skills of syllable segmentation, initial phoneme isolation, and rhyme discrimination in the context of a multifaceted emergent literacy intervention. Instruction occurred in settings where teachers used simultaneous communication or spoken language only. A multiple-baseline across skills design documented a functional relation between instruction and skill acquisition for those children who did not have the skills at baseline with one exception; one child did not meet criteria for syllable segmentation. These results were confirmed by changes on phonological awareness tests that were administered at the beginning and end of the school year. We found that DHH children who varied in primary communication mode, chronological age, and language ability all benefited from explicit instruction in phonological awareness.

  6. Neural signatures of phonological deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia.

    PubMed

    Cao, Fan; Yan, Xin; Wang, Zhao; Liu, Yanni; Wang, Jin; Spray, Gregory J; Deng, Yuan

    2017-02-01

    There has been debate on whether phonological deficits explain reading difficulty in Chinese, since Chinese is a logographic language which does not employ grapheme-phoneme-correspondence rules and remote memorization seems to be the main method to acquire reading. In the current study, we present neuroimaging evidence that the phonological deficit is also a signature of Chinese dyslexia. Specifically, we found that Chinese children with dyslexia (DD) showed reduced brain activation in the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG) when compared to both age-matched controls (AC) and reading-matched controls (RC) during an auditory rhyming judgment task. This suggests that the phonological processing deficit in this region may be a signature of dyslexia in Chinese, rather than a difference due to task performance or reading ability, which was matched on DD and RC. At exactly the same region of the left dIFG, we found a positive correlation between brain activation and reading skill in DD, suggesting that the phonological deficit is associated with the severity of dyslexia. We also found increased brain activation in the right precentral gyrus in DD than both AC and RC, suggesting a compensation of reliance on articulation. Functional connectivity analyses revealed that DD had a weaker connection between the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) and fusiform gyrus (FG) than the two control groups, suggesting that the reduced connection between phonology and orthography is another neural signature of dyslexia. In contrast, DD showed greater connectivity between the left dIFG and the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) than both control groups, suggesting a reduced segregation between the language network and default mode network in dyslexic children. We also found that connectivity between the left STG and the left dIFG was sensitive to task performance and/or reading skill rather than being dyslexic or not, because AC was greater than both RC and DD, while the

  7. Early lexical and phonological acquisition and its relationships.

    PubMed

    Wiethan, Fernanda Marafiga; Nóro, Letícia Arruda; Mota, Helena Bolli

    2014-01-01

    Verifying likely relationships between lexical and phonological development of children aged between 1 year to 1 year, 11 months and 29 days, who were enrolled in public kindergarten schools of Santa Maria (RS). The sample consisted of 18 children of both genders, with typical language development and aged between 1 year to 1 year, 11 months and 29 days, separated in three age subgroups. Visual recordings of spontaneous speech of each child were collected and then lexical analysis regarding the types of the said lexical items and phonological assessment were performed. The number of sounds acquired and partially acquired were counted together, and the 19 sounds and two all phones of Brazilian Portuguese were considered. To the statistical analysis, the tests of Kruskal-Wallis and Wilcoxon were used, with significance level of prelace_LT0.05. When compared the means relating to the acquired sounds and mean of the acquired and partially acquired sounds percentages, there was difference between the first and the second age subgroup, and between the first and the third subgroup. In the comparison of the said lexical items means among the age subgroups, there was difference between the first and the second subgroup, and between the first and the third subgroup again. In the comparison between the said lexical items and acquired and partially acquired sounds in each age subgroup, there was difference only in the age subgroup of 1 year and 8 months to 1 year, 11 months and 29 days, in which the sounds highlighted. The phonological and lexical domains develop as a growing process and influence each other. The Phonology has a little advantage.

  8. Stroop effects in Alzheimer's disease: selective attention speed of processing, or color-naming? A meta-analysis.

    PubMed

    Ben-David, Boaz M; Tewari, Anita; Shakuf, Vered; Van Lieshout, Pascal H H M

    2014-01-01

    Selective attention, an essential part of daily activity, is often impaired in people with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Usually, it is measured by the color-word Stroop test. However, there is no universal agreement whether performance on the Stroop task changes significantly in AD patients; or if so, whether an increase in Stroop effects reflects a decrease in selective attention, a slowing in generalized speed of processing (SOP), or is the result of degraded color-vision. The current study investigated the impact of AD on Stroop performance and its potential sources in a meta-analysis and mathematical modeling of 18 studies, comparing 637 AD patients with 977 healthy age-matched participants. We found a significant increase in Stroop effects for AD patients, across studies. This AD-related change was associated with a slowing in SOP. However, after correcting for a bias in the distribution of latencies, SOP could only explain a moderate portion of the total variance (25%). Moreover, we found strong evidence for an AD-related increase in the latency difference between naming the font-color and reading color-neutral stimuli (r2 = 0.98). This increase in the dimensional imbalance between color-naming and word-reading was found to explain a significant portion of the AD-related increase in Stroop effects (r2 = 0.87), hinting on a possible sensory source. In conclusion, our analysis highlights the importance of controlling for sensory degradation and SOP when testing cognitive performance and, specifically, selective attention in AD patients. We also suggest possible measures and tools to better test for selective attention in AD.

  9. Parallel Activation in Bilingual Phonological Processing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lee, Su-Yeon

    2011-01-01

    In bilingual language processing, the parallel activation hypothesis suggests that bilinguals activate their two languages simultaneously during language processing. Support for the parallel activation mainly comes from studies of lexical (word-form) processing, with relatively less attention to phonological (sound) processing. According to…

  10. Use of Phonological Codes for Chinese Characters: Evidence from Processing of Parafoveal Preview when Reading Sentences

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tsai, Jie-Li; Lee, Chia-Ying; Tzeng, Ovid J. L.; Hung, Daisy L.; Yen, Nai-Shing

    2004-01-01

    The role of phonological coding for character identification was examined with the benefit of processing parafoveal characters in eye fixations while reading Chinese sentences. In Experiment 1, the orthogonal manipulation of phonological and orthographic similarity can separate two types of phonological benefits for homophonic previews, according…

  11. Genetic dyslexia risk variant is related to neural connectivity patterns underlying phonological awareness in children.

    PubMed

    Skeide, Michael A; Kirsten, Holger; Kraft, Indra; Schaadt, Gesa; Müller, Bent; Neef, Nicole; Brauer, Jens; Wilcke, Arndt; Emmrich, Frank; Boltze, Johannes; Friederici, Angela D

    2015-09-01

    Phonological awareness is the best-validated predictor of reading and spelling skill and therefore highly relevant for developmental dyslexia. Prior imaging genetics studies link several dyslexia risk genes to either brain-functional or brain-structural factors of phonological deficits. However, coherent evidence for genetic associations with both functional and structural neural phenotypes underlying variation in phonological awareness has not yet been provided. Here we demonstrate that rs11100040, a reported modifier of SLC2A3, is related to the functional connectivity of left fronto-temporal phonological processing areas at resting state in a sample of 9- to 12-year-old children. Furthermore, we provide evidence that rs11100040 is related to the fractional anisotropy of the arcuate fasciculus, which forms the structural connection between these areas. This structural connectivity phenotype is associated with phonological awareness, which is in turn associated with the individual retrospective risk scores in an early dyslexia screening as well as to spelling. These results suggest a link between a dyslexia risk genotype and a functional as well as a structural neural phenotype, which is associated with a phonological awareness phenotype. The present study goes beyond previous work by integrating genetic, brain-functional and brain-structural aspects of phonological awareness within a single approach. These combined findings might be another step towards a multimodal biomarker for developmental dyslexia. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  12. Teachers' Perceptions and Pedagogical Content Knowledge of Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Dyslexia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Williams, Jennifer S.

    2012-01-01

    In 2011, a small Midwestern school district referred an increasing number of 2nd-4th grade students, with reading problems due to phonetic and phonological awareness deficits, to the district's intervention team. Framed in Shulman's pedagogical content knowledge model and the International Dyslexia Association's phonological deficit theory of…

  13. Sensitivity to Linguistic Stress, Phonological Awareness and Early Reading Ability in Preschoolers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Goodman, Ilana; Libenson, Amanda; Wade-Woolley, Lesly

    2010-01-01

    Recent research has found that sensitivity to linguistic stress is related to phonological awareness and reading development. This study investigated the roles of two types of linguistic stress sensitivity (lexical and metrical stress) in the phonological awareness and reading development of young children. Forty-five kindergarten children were…

  14. Exploring the Contribution of Phonological Memory to Metasyntactic Abilities in Bilingual Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Fortier, Véronique; Simard, Daphnée

    2017-01-01

    The contribution of phonological memory to syntactic abilities has been demonstrated in various populations, but its relationship to metasyntactic abilities, defined as the ability to control syntactic aspects of language, remains largely unexplored. This study therefore aims to examine the contribution of phonological memory in the completion of…

  15. Negative induced mood influences word production: An event-related potentials study with a covert picture naming task.

    PubMed

    Hinojosa, J A; Fernández-Folgueiras, U; Albert, J; Santaniello, G; Pozo, M A; Capilla, A

    2017-01-27

    The present event-related potentials (ERPs) study investigated the effects of mood on phonological encoding processes involved in word generation. For this purpose, negative, positive and neutral affective states were induced in participants during three different recording sessions using short film clips. After the mood induction procedure, participants performed a covert picture naming task in which they searched letters. The negative compared to the neutral mood condition elicited more negative amplitudes in a component peaking around 290ms. Furthermore, results from source localization analyses suggested that this activity was potentially generated in the left prefrontal cortex. In contrast, no differences were found in the comparison between positive and neutral moods. Overall, current data suggest that processes involved in the retrieval of phonological information during speech generation are impaired when participants are in a negative mood. The mechanisms underlying these effects were discussed in relation to linguistic and attentional processes, as well as in terms of the use of heuristics. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  16. Redefining Individual Growth and Development Indicators: Phonological Awareness.

    PubMed

    Wackerle-Hollman, Alisha K; Schmitt, Braden A; Bradfield, Tracy A; Rodriguez, Michael C; McConnell, Scott R

    2015-01-01

    Learning to read is one of the most important indicators of academic achievement. The development of early literacy skills during the preschool years is associated with improved reading outcomes in later grades. One of these skill areas, phonological awareness, shows particular importance because of its strong link to later reading success. Presented here are two studies that describe the development and revision of four measures of phonological awareness skills: Individual Growth and Development Indicators Sound Blending, Syllable Sameness, Rhyming, and Alliteration 2.0. The authors discuss the measure development process, revision, and utility within an early childhood Response to Intervention framework. © Hammill Institute on Disabilities 2013.

  17. Phonological and Lexical Effects in Verbal Recall by Children with Specific Language Impairments

    PubMed Central

    Coady, Jeffry A.; Mainela-Arnold, Elina; Evans, Julia L.

    2014-01-01

    Background & Aims The present study examined how phonological and lexical knowledge influences memory in children with specific language impairments (SLI). Previous work showed recall advantages for typical adults and children due to word frequency and phonotactic pattern frequency and a recall disadvantage due to phonological similarity among words. While children with SLI have well documented memory difficulties, it is not clear whether these language knowledge factors also influence recall in this population. Methods & Procedures 16 children with SLI (mean age 10;2) and CAM controls recalled lists of words differing in phonological similarity, word frequency, and phonotactic pattern frequency. While previous studies used a small set of words appearing in multiple word lists, the current study used a larger set of words, without replacement, so that children could not gain practice with individual test items. Outcomes & Results All main effects were significant. Interactions revealed that children with SLI were affected by similarity, but less so than their peers, comparably affected by word frequency, and unaffected by phonotactic pattern frequency. Conclusions Results due to phonological similarity suggest that children with SLI use less efficient encoding, while results due to word frequency and phonotactic pattern frequency were mixed. Children with SLI used coarse-grained language knowledge (word frequency) comparably to peers, but were less able to use fine-grained knowledge (phonotactic pattern frequency). Paired with phonological similarity results, this suggests that children with SLI have difficulty establishing robust phonological knowledge for use in language tasks. PMID:23472955

  18. Influences of Phonological Context on Tense Marking in Spanish–English Dual Language Learners

    PubMed Central

    Barlow, Jessica A.; Potapova, Irina; Pruitt-Lord, Sonja

    2017-01-01

    Purpose The emergence of tense-morpheme marking during language acquisition is highly variable, which confounds the use of tense marking as a diagnostic indicator of language impairment in linguistically diverse populations. In this study, we seek to better understand tense-marking patterns in young bilingual children by comparing phonological influences on marking of 2 word-final tense morphemes. Method In spontaneous connected speech samples from 10 Spanish–English dual language learners aged 56–66 months (M = 61.7, SD = 3.4), we examined marking rates of past tense -ed and third person singular -s morphemes in different environments, using multiple measures of phonological context. Results Both morphemes were found to exhibit notably contrastive marking patterns in some contexts. Each was most sensitive to a different combination of phonological influences in the verb stem and the following word. Conclusions These findings extend existing evidence from monolingual speakers for the influence of word-final phonological context on morpheme production to a bilingual population. Further, novel findings not yet attested in previous research support an expanded consideration of phonological context in clinical decision making and future research related to word-final morphology. PMID:28750415

  19. Monitoring Different Phonological Parameters of Sign Language Engages the Same Cortical Language Network but Distinctive Perceptual Ones.

    PubMed

    Cardin, Velia; Orfanidou, Eleni; Kästner, Lena; Rönnberg, Jerker; Woll, Bencie; Capek, Cheryl M; Rudner, Mary

    2016-01-01

    The study of signed languages allows the dissociation of sensorimotor and cognitive neural components of the language signal. Here we investigated the neurocognitive processes underlying the monitoring of two phonological parameters of sign languages: handshape and location. Our goal was to determine if brain regions processing sensorimotor characteristics of different phonological parameters of sign languages were also involved in phonological processing, with their activity being modulated by the linguistic content of manual actions. We conducted an fMRI experiment using manual actions varying in phonological structure and semantics: (1) signs of a familiar sign language (British Sign Language), (2) signs of an unfamiliar sign language (Swedish Sign Language), and (3) invented nonsigns that violate the phonological rules of British Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language or consist of nonoccurring combinations of phonological parameters. Three groups of participants were tested: deaf native signers, deaf nonsigners, and hearing nonsigners. Results show that the linguistic processing of different phonological parameters of sign language is independent of the sensorimotor characteristics of the language signal. Handshape and location were processed by different perceptual and task-related brain networks but recruited the same language areas. The semantic content of the stimuli did not influence this process, but phonological structure did, with nonsigns being associated with longer RTs and stronger activations in an action observation network in all participants and in the supramarginal gyrus exclusively in deaf signers. These results suggest higher processing demands for stimuli that contravene the phonological rules of a signed language, independently of previous knowledge of signed languages. We suggest that the phonological characteristics of a language may arise as a consequence of more efficient neural processing for its perception and production.

  20. Phonological Differentiation before Age Two in a Tagalog-Spanish-English Trilingual Child

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Montanari, Simona

    2011-01-01

    This study focuses on a trilingual toddler's ability to differentiate her Tagalog, Spanish and English productions on phonological/phonetic grounds. Working within the articulatory phonology framework, the word-initial segments produced by the child in Tagalog, Spanish and English words at age 1;10 were narrowly transcribed by two researchers and…

  1. Phonological Awareness: Explicit Instruction for Young Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Miller, Elizabeth M.; Lederberg, Amy R.; Easterbrooks, Susan R.

    2013-01-01

    The goal of this study was to explore the development of spoken phonological awareness for deaf and hard-of-hearing children (DHH) with functional hearing (i.e., the ability to access spoken language through hearing). Teachers explicitly taught five preschoolers the phonological awareness skills of syllable segmentation, initial phoneme isolation,…

  2. Failing to Succeed the First School: Exploring Phonological Factors and Letter Reading Ability in Grade 1

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gafoor, Kunnathodi Abdul; Remia, K. R.

    2013-01-01

    The context of this paper is studies worldwide on influence of phonological factors in language development of children. Such studies reveal the significance of Phonological Awareness in development language skills: including, predictive value of phonological short-term memory for reading skills in Grade 1. This paper throws light on factors in…

  3. Study the left prefrontal cortex activity of Chinese children with dyslexia in phonological processing by NIRS

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Zhang, Zhili; Li, Ting; Zheng, Yi; Luo, Qingming; Song, Ranran; Gong, Hui

    2006-02-01

    Developmental dyslexia, a kind of prevalent psychological disease, represents that dyslexic children have unexpected difficulties in phonological processing and recognition test of Chinese characters. Some functional imaging technologies, such as fMRI and PET, have been used to study the brain activities of the children with dyslexia whose first language is English. In this paper, a portable, 16-channel, continuous-wave (CW) NIRS instrument was used to monitor the concentration changes of each hemoglobin species when Chinese children did the task of phonological processing and recognition test. The NIRS recorded the hemodynamic changes in the left prefrontal cortex of the children. 20 dyslexia-reading children (10~12 years old) and 20 normal-reading children took part in the phonological processing of Chinese characters including the phonological awareness section and the phonological decoding section. During the phonological awareness section, the changed concentration of deoxy-hemoglobin in dyslexia-reading children were significantly higher (p<0.05) than normal-reading children in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC). While in the phonological decoding section, both normal and dyslexic reading children had more activity in the left VLPFC, but only normal-reading children had activity in the left middorsal prefrontal cortex. In conclusion, both dyslexic and normal-reading children have activity in the left prefrontal cortex, but the degree and the areas of the prefrontal cortex activity are different between them when they did phonological processing.

  4. Phonological Sensitivity: A Quasi-Parallel Progression of Word Structure Units and Cognitive Operations.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Anthony, Jason L.; Lonigan, Christopher J.; Driscoll, Kimberly; Phillips, Beth M.; Burgess, Stephen R.

    2003-01-01

    Investigates the order of acquisition of phonological sensitivity skills among preschool and kindergarten children. Supports a developmental conceptualization of phonological sensitivity. Discusses findings in relation to their implications for improving assessment, early literacy instruction, and prevention of reading difficulties. (SG)

  5. Intelligibility as a clinical outcome measure following intervention with children with phonologically based speech-sound disorders.

    PubMed

    Lousada, M; Jesus, Luis M T; Hall, A; Joffe, V

    2014-01-01

    The effectiveness of two treatment approaches (phonological therapy and articulation therapy) for treatment of 14 children, aged 4;0-6;7 years, with phonologically based speech-sound disorder (SSD) has been previously analysed with severity outcome measures (percentage of consonants correct score, percentage occurrence of phonological processes and phonetic inventory). Considering that the ultimate goal of intervention for children with phonologically based SSD is to improve intelligibility, it is curious that intervention studies focusing on children's phonology do not routinely use intelligibility as an outcome measure. It is therefore important that the impact of interventions on speech intelligibility is explored. This paper investigates the effectiveness of the two treatment approaches (phonological therapy and articulation therapy) using intelligibility measures, both in single words and in continuous speech, as the primary outcome. Fourteen children with phonologically based SSD participated in the intervention. The children were randomly assigned to phonological therapy or articulation therapy (seven children in each group). Two assessment methods were used for measuring intelligibility: a word identification task (for single words) and a rating scale (for continuous speech). Twenty-one unfamiliar adults listened and judged the children's intelligibility. Reliability analyses showed overall high agreement between listeners across both methods. Significant improvements were noted in intelligibility in both single words (paired t(6)=4.409, p=0.005) and continuous speech (asymptotic Z=2.371, p=0.018) for the group receiving phonology therapy pre- to post-treatment, but no differences in intelligibility were found for those receiving the articulation therapy pre- to post-treatment, either for single words (paired t(6)=1.763, p=0.128) or continuous speech (asymptotic Z=1.442, p=0.149). Intelligibility measures were sensitive enough to show changes in the

  6. Orthographic and phonological preview benefits: parafoveal processing in skilled and less-skilled deaf readers.

    PubMed

    Bélanger, Nathalie N; Mayberry, Rachel I; Rayner, Keith

    2013-01-01

    Many deaf individuals do not develop the high-level reading skills that will allow them to fully take part into society. To attempt to explain this widespread difficulty in the deaf population, much research has honed in on the use of phonological codes during reading. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers, though not well supported, still lingers in the literature. We investigated skilled and less-skilled adult deaf readers' processing of orthographic and phonological codes in parafoveal vision during reading by monitoring their eye movements and using the boundary paradigm. Orthographic preview benefits were found in early measures of reading for skilled hearing, skilled deaf, and less-skilled deaf readers, but only skilled hearing readers processed phonological codes in parafoveal vision. Crucially, skilled and less-skilled deaf readers showed a very similar pattern of preview benefits during reading. These results support the notion that reading difficulties in deaf adults are not linked to their failure to activate phonological codes during reading.

  7. Phonological False Memories in Children and Adults: Evidence for a Developmental Reversal

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Swannell, Ellen R.; Dewhurst, Stephen A.

    2012-01-01

    False memories created by the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure typically show a developmental reversal whereby levels of false recall increase with age. In contrast, false memories produced by phonological lists have been shown to decrease as age increases. In the current study we show that phonological false memories, like semantic false…

  8. Exploring Assessment Demands and Task Supports in Early Childhood Phonological Awareness Assessments

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cassano, Christina M.; Steiner, Lilly

    2016-01-01

    Phonological awareness is assessed in various ways in both research studies and early childhood classrooms. The measures used to assess phonological awareness are related closely, although they differ in the linguistic unit used (e.g., word, syllable, onset-rime, or phoneme), the position of the linguistic unit (e.g., initial, medial, final), the…

  9. Masked Phonological Priming Effects in English: Are They Real? Do They Matter?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rastle, Kathleen; Brysbaert, Marc

    2006-01-01

    For over 15 years, masked phonological priming effects have been offered as evidence that phonology plays a leading role in visual word recognition. The existence of these effects--along with their theoretical implications--has, however, been disputed. The authors present three sources of evidence relevant to an assessment of the existence and…

  10. The Relationship between Prosodic Perception, Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary in Emergent Literacy

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Beattie, Rachel L.; Manis, Franklin R.

    2014-01-01

    Studies have begun to focus on what skills contribute to the development of phonological awareness, an important predictor of reading attainment. One of these skills is the perception of prosody, which is the rhythm, tempo and stress of a language. To examine whether prosodic perception contributes to phonological awareness prior to reading…

  11. Neurocognitive functioning in children with developmental dyslexia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Multiple deficits and diagnostic accuracy.

    PubMed

    Moura, Octávio; Pereira, Marcelino; Alfaiate, Cláudia; Fernandes, Eva; Fernandes, Boavida; Nogueira, Susana; Moreno, Joana; Simões, Mário R

    2017-04-01

    This study aimed to investigate the neurocognitive functioning of children with developmental dyslexia (DD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Four groups of children between the ages of 8 and 10 years participated in the study: typically developing children (TDC; N = 34), children with DD-only (N = 32), children with ADHD-only (N = 32), and children with DD+ADHD (N = 18). Children with DD and ADHD exhibited significant weaknesses on almost all neurocognitive measures compared with TDC. Large effect sizes were observed for naming speed and phonological awareness. The comorbid group showed deficits consistent with both DD and ADHD without additional impairments. Results from binary logistic regression and receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses suggested that some neurocognitive measures revealed an adequate sensitivity for the clinical diagnosis of both neurodevelopmental disorders. Specifically, naming speed and phonological awareness were the strongest predictors to correctly discriminate both disorders. Taken together, the results lend support to the multiple cognitive deficit hypothesis showing a considerable overlap of neurocognitive deficits between both disorders.

  12. Perspectives on Interlanguage Phonetics and Phonology.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Monroy, Rafael, Ed.; Gutierrez, Francisco, Ed.

    2001-01-01

    Articles in this special issue include the following: "Allophonic Splits in L2 Phonology: The Questions of Learnability" (Fred R. Eckman, Abdullah Elreyes, Gregory K. Iverson); "Native Language Influence in Learners' Assessment of English Focus" (M. L. Garcia Lecumberri); "Obstruent Voicing in English and Polish. A…

  13. LEARNING NONADJACENT DEPENDENCIES IN PHONOLOGY: TRANSPARENT VOWELS IN VOWEL HARMONY

    PubMed Central

    Finley, Sara

    2015-01-01

    Nonadjacent dependencies are an important part of the structure of language. While the majority of syntactic and phonological processes occur at a local domain, there are several processes that appear to apply at a distance, posing a challenge for theories of linguistic structure. This article addresses one of the most common nonadjacent phenomena in phonology: transparent vowels in vowel harmony. Vowel harmony occurs when adjacent vowels are required to share the same phonological feature value (e.g. V+F C V+F). However, transparent vowels create a second-order nonadjacent pattern because agreement between two vowels can ‘skip’ the transparent neutral vowel in addition to consonants (e.g. V+F C VT−F C V+F). Adults are shown to display initial learning biases against second-order nonadjacency in experiments that use an artificial grammar learning paradigm. Experiments 1–3 show that adult learners fail to learn the second-order long-distance dependency created by the transparent vowel (as compared to a control condition). In experiments 4–5, training in terms of overall exposure as well as the frequency of relevant transparent items was increased. With adequate exposure, learners reliably generalize to novel words containing transparent vowels. The experiments suggest that learners are sensitive to the structure of phonological representations, even when learning occurs at a relatively rapid pace.* PMID:26146423

  14. An investigation of phonology and orthography in spoken-word recognition.

    PubMed

    Slowiaczek, Louisa M; Soltano, Emily G; Wieting, Shani J; Bishop, Karyn L

    2003-02-01

    The possible influence of initial phonological and/or orthographic information on spoken-word processing was examined in six experiments modelled after and extending the work Jakimik, Cole, and Rudnicky (1985). Following Jakimik et al., Experiment 1 used polysyllabic primes with monosyllabic targets (e.g., BUCKLE-BUCK/[symbol: see text]; MYSTERY-MISS,/[symbol: see text]). Experiments 2, 3, and 4 used polysyllabic primes and polysyllabic targets whose initial syllables shared phonological information (e.g., NUISANCE-NOODLE,/[symbol: see text]), orthographic information (e.g., RATIO-RATIFY,/[symbol: see text]), both (e.g., FUNNEL-FUNNY,/[symbol: see text]), or were unrelated (e.g., SERMON-NOODLE,/[symbol: see text]). Participants engaged in a lexical decision (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or a shadowing (Experiment 2) task with a single-trial (Experiments 2 and 3) or subsequent-trial (Experiments 1 and 4) priming procedure. Experiment 5 tested primes and targets that varied in the number of shared graphemes while holding shared phonemes constant at one. Experiment 6 used the procedures of Experiment 2 but a low proportion of related trials. Results revealed that response times were facilitated for prime-target pairs that shared initial phonological and orthographic information. These results were confirmed under conditions when strategic processing was greatly reduced suggesting that phonological and orthographic information is automatically activated during spoken-word processing.

  15. Schizophrenia as Failure of Left Hemispheric Dominance for the Phonological Component of Language

    PubMed Central

    Angrilli, Alessandro; Spironelli, Chiara; Elbert, Thomas; Crow, Timothy J.; Marano, Gianfranco; Stegagno, Luciano

    2009-01-01

    Background T. J. Crow suggested that the genetic variance associated with the evolution in Homo sapiens of hemispheric dominance for language carries with it the hazard of the symptoms of schizophrenia. Individuals lacking the typical left hemisphere advantage for language, in particular for phonological components, would be at increased risk of the typical symptoms such as auditory hallucinations and delusions. Methodology/Principal Findings Twelve schizophrenic patients treated with low levels of neuroleptics and twelve matched healthy controls participated in an event-related potential experiment. Subjects matched word-pairs in three tasks: rhyming/phonological, semantic judgment and word recognition. Slow evoked potentials were recorded from 26 scalp electrodes, and a laterality index was computed for anterior and posterior regions during the inter stimulus interval. During phonological processing individuals with schizophrenia failed to achieve the left hemispheric dominance consistently observed in healthy controls. The effect involved anterior (fronto-temporal) brain regions and was specific for the Phonological task; group differences were small or absent when subjects processed the same stimulus material in a Semantic task or during Word Recognition, i.e. during tasks that typically activate more widespread areas in both hemispheres. Conclusions/Significance We show for the first time how the deficit of lateralization in the schizophrenic brain is specific for the phonological component of language. This loss of hemispheric dominance would explain typical symptoms, e.g. when an individual's own thoughts are perceived as an external intruding voice. The change can be interpreted as a consequence of “hemispheric indecision”, a failure to segregate phonological engrams in one hemisphere. PMID:19223971

  16. Schizophrenia as failure of left hemispheric dominance for the phonological component of language.

    PubMed

    Angrilli, Alessandro; Spironelli, Chiara; Elbert, Thomas; Crow, Timothy J; Marano, Gianfranco; Stegagno, Luciano

    2009-01-01

    T. J. Crow suggested that the genetic variance associated with the evolution in Homo sapiens of hemispheric dominance for language carries with it the hazard of the symptoms of schizophrenia. Individuals lacking the typical left hemisphere advantage for language, in particular for phonological components, would be at increased risk of the typical symptoms such as auditory hallucinations and delusions. Twelve schizophrenic patients treated with low levels of neuroleptics and twelve matched healthy controls participated in an event-related potential experiment. Subjects matched word-pairs in three tasks: rhyming/phonological, semantic judgment and word recognition. Slow evoked potentials were recorded from 26 scalp electrodes, and a laterality index was computed for anterior and posterior regions during the inter stimulus interval. During phonological processing individuals with schizophrenia failed to achieve the left hemispheric dominance consistently observed in healthy controls. The effect involved anterior (fronto-temporal) brain regions and was specific for the Phonological task; group differences were small or absent when subjects processed the same stimulus material in a Semantic task or during Word Recognition, i.e. during tasks that typically activate more widespread areas in both hemispheres. We show for the first time how the deficit of lateralization in the schizophrenic brain is specific for the phonological component of language. This loss of hemispheric dominance would explain typical symptoms, e.g. when an individual's own thoughts are perceived as an external intruding voice. The change can be interpreted as a consequence of "hemispheric indecision", a failure to segregate phonological engrams in one hemisphere.

  17. Phonology and Handedness in Primary School: Predictions of the Right Shift Theory

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Smythe, Pamela; Annett, Marian

    2006-01-01

    Background: The right shift (RS) theory of handedness suggests that poor phonology may occur in the general population as a risk associated with absence of an agent of left cerebral speech, the hypothesised RS + gene. The theory predicts that poor phonology is associated with reduced bias to right-handedness. Methods: A representative cohort of…

  18. [Spanish drivers' beliefs about speed. Speeding is a major issue of road safety].

    PubMed

    Montoro González, Luis; Roca Ruiz, Javier; Lucas-Alba, Antonio

    2010-11-01

    Extending and updating our knowledge concerning drivers' motivational and cognitive processes is of essential importance if we are to apply policies with long-lasting effects. This study presents data from a representative national survey analyzing the Spanish drivers' beliefs about speed, the risks of speeding, the degree of violation of speed-limits and the reasons for speeding. Results indicate that Spanish drivers rate speeding as a serious offence, yet not among the most dangerous ones. All in all, they claim to comply mostly with the speed limits. However, some interesting violation patterns emerge: observance is lower for generic speed limits according to road type (vs. specific limits shown by certain road signs), and particularly in motorways (vs. single carriageways and urban areas). Risk perception and reasons for speeding emerge as the main factors predicting the levels of speed violations reported. Results suggest that any effective intervention strategy should consider such factors, namely the link between speed, road safety, and drivers' specific reasons for speeding.

  19. Phonological Awareness Errors Mirror Underlying Phonological Representations: Evidence from Hebrew L1-English L2 Adults

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Russak, Susie; Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor

    2017-01-01

    This article examines the effect of phonological context (singleton vs. clustered consonants) on full phoneme segmentation in Hebrew first language (L1) and in English second language (L2) among typically reading adults (TR) and adults with reading disability (RD) (n = 30 per group), using quantitative analysis and a fine-grained analysis of…

  20. Lexicality and phonological similarity: a challenge for the retrieval-based account of serial recall?

    PubMed

    Fallon, Anthony B; Mak, Eva; Tehan, Gerald; Daly, Charmaine

    2005-01-01

    The retrieval-based account of serial recall (Saint-Aubin & Poirier, 2000) attributes lexicality, phonological similarity, and articulatory suppression effects to a process where long-term representations are used to reconstruct degraded phonological traces. Two experiments tested this assumption by manipulating these factors in the recall of four- and five-item lists of words and non-words. Lexicality enhanced item recall (IR), but only affected position accuracy (PA) for five-item lists under suppression. Phonological similarity influenced both words and non-words, and produced impaired PA in silent and suppressed conditions. Consistent with the retrieval-based account, words and non-words of high word-likeness appear subject to redintegration. However, some findings, like suppression not reducing the phonological similarity impairment in suppressed conditions, present challenges for the retrieval-based account and other models of serial recall.