This review describes a computational approach for modeling the development of speech motor control in infants. We address the development of two levels of control: articulation of individual speech sounds (defined here as phonemes, syllables, or words for which there is an optimized motor program) and production of sound sequences such as phrases…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained as…

This paper has been written to fall within the orbit of the moraic framework of the syllable, particularly the syllable weight, of Basrah Arabic. Universal as its nature is, mora, when studied and then applied, has, metaphorically speaking, the power of casting its phonological 'spell' over the problems of the morphophonology of Basrah…

Purpose: Words, syllables, and phonemes have each been regarded as basic encoding units of speech production in various psycholinguistic models. The present article investigates the role of each unit in the interface with speech articulation, using a paradigm from motor control research. Method: Seventy-six native speakers of French were trained…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

This study explores Finnish children's word-level spelling by applying a linguistically based multilayered word structure model for assessing spelling performance. The model contributes to the analytical qualitative assessment approach in order to identify children's spelling performance for enhancing writing skills. The children (N = 105)…

Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…

Concept of word in print is the development of an understanding of how monosyllabic and multisyllabic words operate in print. Young children show evidence of this understanding when they are able to repeat a line of text while accurately pointing to each word as it is said. A small but robust line of work has examined the knowledge, skills, and…

The relationships of different levels of phonological processing (sounds in heard and spoken words for whole words, syllables, phonemes, and rimes) to multi-leveled functional reading or writing systems were studied. Participants in this cross-sectional study were students in fourth-grade (n = 119, mean age 116.5 months) and sixth-grade (n = 105,…

This article examines phonological development and its relationship to input statistics. Using novel data from a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous child speech in Polish, we evaluate and compare the predictions of a variety of input-based phonotactic models for syllable structure acquisition. We find that many commonly examined input statistics…

Learning the structure of event sequences is a ubiquitous problem in cognition and particularly in language. One possible solution is to learn a probabilistic generative model of sequences that allows making predictions about upcoming events. Though appealing from a neurobiological standpoint, this approach is typically not pursued in…

Novel phonotactic constraints can be acquired by hearing or speaking syllables that follow a novel constraint. When learned from hearing syllables, these newly learned constraints generalize to syllables that were not experienced during training. However, generalization of phonotactic learning to novel syllables has never been persuasively…

Researchers have extensively documented how various statistical properties of words (e.g., word frequency) influence lexical processing. However, the impact of lexical variables on nonword decision-making performance is less clear. This gap is surprising, because a better specification of the mechanisms driving nonword responses may provide…

Endress and Mehler (2009) reported that when adult subjects are exposed to an unsegmented artificial language composed from trisyllabic words such as ABX, YBC, and AZC, they are unable to distinguish between these words and what they coined as the "phantom-word" ABC in a subsequent test. This suggests that statistical learning generates knowledge…

There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in word processing tasks. Recently it has also been shown that orthographic redundancy, related to the pattern of bigram frequencies, could not explain the syllable number effect on lexical decision times. This was demonstrated on a large sample of words taken from…