Word finding difficulty is a frequently reported subjective cognitive concern among persons with Multiple Sclerosis (pwMS). Word-finding relies on several information retrieval processes, including search and retrieval from the conceptual store, the phonological store, the syllabary, as well as other stores of information. Neuropsychological…

Background: To date, the immediate effects of a semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) configuration have been thoroughly demonstrated. However, it is not yet sufficiently confirmed whether a therapy programme (i.e. longer than one session) using SOVT exercises leads to an enhanced phonation and improved vocal quality. Aims: The aim of this study was to…

Weak syllables in Germanic and Romance languages have been reported to be challenging for young children, with syllable omission and/or incomplete reduction persisting till age five. In Mandarin Chinese, neutral tone (T0) involves a weak syllable with varied pitch realizations across (preceding) tonal contexts and short duration. The present study…

Every sound is made up of pitch, intensity and length (P, I and L). These universal parameters work together to give a sound its sensation. This paper presents a case of using P, I and L, and a hypothetical measure, "S[subscript c]" ("Stress Composite"), to appraise the effect of prosodic training. The main question this paper…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role and nature of phonology in silent reading of Japanese sentences. An experiment was conducted using a Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task. One important finding was that participants more rapidly rejected homophonic sentences in which one two-kanji compound word was replaced by its…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the short-term effect of 2 semi-occluded vocal tract training programs, "resonant voice training using nasal consonants" versus "straw phonation," on the vocal quality of vocally healthy future occupational voice users. Method: A multigroup pretest--posttest randomized control…

There has been considerable variability within the literature concerning the extent to which deaf/hard of hearing individuals are able to process phonological codes during reading. Two experiments are reported in which participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing correctly spelled words (e.g., church),…

Purpose: The aim of this article was to explore how the type of allomorph (e.g., past tense buzz[ d ] vs. nod[ ?d ]) influences the ability to perceive and produce grammatical morphemes in children with typical development and with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: The participants were monolingual Australian English--speaking children.…

The present study aims at investigating the effect of noticing on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students' speaking accuracy. For so doing, 32 Iranian EFL students were selected and randomly assigned to two conversation classes namely, control and experimental groups. Before the treatment both groups had a speaking pre-test. During 32…

Background: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix "ge-"). Findings reported in the literature are…

This longitudinal randomized trial study investigated the effects of phonological specificity training on second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Eighty-six Dutch secondary-school students participated in one of two experimental conditions or in an animacy judgment (active control) condition. Participants in the phonological specificity training…

The authors report two studies that examined how native- and second-language skills were related to second-language reading difficulties for native Chinese-speaking fourth graders learning to read English. In study 1, 50 poor English readers with Chinese-reading difficulties (the PB group) and 34 poor English readers without Chinese-reading…

This study tests the hypothesis that late first-language English / second-language Spanish learners (L1 English / L2 Spanish learners) acquire spirantization in stages according to the prosodic hierarchy (Zampini, 1997, 1998). In Spanish, voiced stops [b d g] surface after a pause or nasal stop, and continuants [ß? ð? ??] surface postvocalically,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether the underlying phonological impairment in dyslexia is associated with a deficit in categorizing regional dialects. Method: Twenty adults with dyslexia, 20 school-age children with dyslexia, and 40 corresponding control listeners with average reading ability listened to sentences produced…

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N = 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control,…