Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

Children who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) using Listening and spoken language (LSL) as their primary mode of communication have emerged as a growing population in general education and special education classroom settings, and have educational performance expectations similar to their same aged hearing peers. Academic instruction that…

Every language has its own rhythm. Unlike many other languages in the world, English depends on the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed or weakened syllables recurring in the same phrase or sentence. Mastering the rhythm of English makes speaking more effective. Experiments have shown that we tend to hear speech as more rhythmical…

This updated and expanded version of a 1991 book provides an account of the development of Spanish over the last 2,000 years. The six chapters include: (1) "Introduction" (e.g., Indo-European, Latin, and Romance); (2) "Phonology" (phonological change, transmission, suprasegmental features, development of the vowel system, development of the…

This paper addresses teachers and researchers of English as a second or foreign language who are interested in speech intelligibility training and/or vocabulary acquisition. The study reports a stress-pattern analysis of the Academic Word List (AWL) as made available by Coxhead [TESOL Quarterly 34 (2000) 213]. To examine the AWL in a new way, we…

''Rhythm is one of the most pervasive aspects of the human condition; it is in the world around us and in the world within us, in our bodies and our minds, our living and our thinking'' [Auer, P., Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Muller, F. (1999). "Language in time: the rhythm and tempo of spoken interaction." New York: Oxford University…