The study by Tamburelli, Jones, Gobet, and Pine (2012; henceforth TJGP) is a very welcome addition to the body of work concerning nonword repetition in typical development. TJGP go beyond previous work in considering three syllabic positions--onset, nucleus, and coda--with the aim of investigating how the positional role of phonemes within the…

Nonword repetition tasks (NWRTs) are employed widely in various studies on language development and are often relied upon as diagnostic tools. However, the mechanisms that underlie children's performance in NWRTs are very little understood. In this paper we present NWRT data from typically developing 5- to 6-year-olds (5:4-6:8) and examine the…

Theories of verbal self-monitoring generally assume an internal (pre-articulatory) monitoring channel, but there is debate about whether this channel relies on speech perception or on production-internal mechanisms. Perception-based theories predict that listening to one's own inner speech has similar behavioural consequences as listening to…

This paper investigates the effect of the repetition of phonological elements on accuracy in spontaneous language production. Using a corpus of naturalistic speech errors, it is shown that repetition of a whole segment doubles the error rate on the second token (a perseveratory effect), for onset consonants, vowels, and coda consonants; the effect…

We investigate linguistic relativity effects by examining whether the grammatical count/mass distinction in English affects English speakers' semantic representations of noun referents, as compared with those of Japanese speakers, whose language does not grammatically distinguish nouns for countability. We used two tasks which are sensitive to…

Event-related potentials were used to investigate if there is a lexical bias effect in comprehension monitoring. The lexical bias effect in language production (the tendency of phonological errors to result in existing words rather than nonwords) has been attributed to an internal self-monitoring system, which uses the comprehension system, and…

Previous research has found that "similar" sounds interact in phonological nasal consonant harmony, wherein certain consonants become nasals when the word contains a nasal (e.g., Kikongo: /-kun-idi/ [right arrow] [-kun-ini] "planted"). Across languages, stops and approximants are chiefly affected, especially voiced consonants and ones that match…

This is the first study that reports the lexicality effect (i.e., words read better than nonwords) in Italian with fully transparent and methodologically well-controlled stimuli. We investigated how words and nonwords are read aloud in the Italian transparent orthography, in which there is an almost strict one-to-one correspondence between…

Sixteen-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), and those showing typical language development (TD) responded to target words in sentences that were either grammatical or contained a grammatical error immediately before the target word. The TD participants showed the expected slower response times…

Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…

Dell, Burger, and Svec (1997) proposed that the proportion of speech errors classified as anticipations (e.g., "moot and mouth") can be predicted solely from the overall error rate, such that the greater the error rate, the lower the anticipatory proportion (AP) of errors. We report a study examining whether this effect applies to changes in error…