Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Previous event-related potentials (ERP) research has investigated how foreign accent modulates listeners' neural responses to lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic errors. We extended this line of research to consider whether pronunciation errors in Mandarin Chinese are processed differently when a foreign-accented speaker makes them relative to…

Purpose: Subjective speech intelligibility assessment is often preferred over more objective approaches that rely on transcript scoring. This is, in part, because of the intensive manual labor associated with extracting objective metrics from transcribed speech. In this study, we propose an automated approach for scoring transcripts that provides…

Background: Successful reading can be achieved by means of two different procedures: sub-word processes for the pronunciation of words without semantics or pseudowords (PW) and whole-word processes that recruit word-specific information regarding the pronunciation of words with atypical orthography-to-phonology mappings (exception words, EW).…

Purpose: This study documented the efficacy of visual-acoustic biofeedback intervention for residual rhotic errors, relative to a comparison condition involving traditional articulatory treatment. All participants received both treatments in a single-subject experimental design featuring alternating treatments with blocked randomization of…

This paper compares the oral reading errors between the contextual sentences and random words among schoolchildren. Two sets of reading materials were developed to test the oral reading errors in 30 schoolchildren (10.00±1.44 years). Set A was comprised contextual sentences while Set B encompassed random words. The schoolchildren were asked to…

Dual route models of reading suggest there are 2 pathways for reading words: an orthographic-lexical pathway, used to read familiar regular words and exception words, and a grapheme-to-phoneme-conversion-(GPC)-sublexical pathway, used to read unfamiliar regular words, pseudohomophones (PHs), and nonwords. It is unclear, however, whether PHs…

This article reports a lexical-decision experiment that was conducted to investigate the impact of word stress on visual word recognition in German. Reaction-time latencies and error rates of German readers on different levels of reading proficiency (i.e., third graders and fifth graders from primary school and university students) were compared…

This paper is devoted to finding adequate answers to the following queries: (A) what are the segmental and syllabic pattern errors made by Kurdish students in their pronunciation? (B) Can the problematic areas in pronunciation be predicted by a systematic comparison of the sound systems of both native and target languages? (C) Can there be any…

In a study of very young children's pronunciation of nouns and verbs, ten children aged 20 to 25 months were exposed to experimental nouns and verbs, which had not yet been comprehended or produced by the children. Each of the objects and actions was given an experimental name based on phonemes in the children's speech. These objects and actions…

Examines the sound-to-letter patterns of misspelling in a Danish child at ages seven and eight by comparing his misspellings with transcriptions of his pronunciation. (MSE)

This study analyzed the pronunciation of English interdental fricatives by two native speakers of Turkish, focusing on whether there was systematic variation of forms according to the kind of discourse and the surrounding phonemes. Subjects were two adult Turkish learners of English as a Second Language, both of whom had been in the United States…

Pronunciation is an important subskill in second language learning, therefore worth evaluating. Its quality is commonly assessed in a global, impressionistic way by having learners read aloud. While this allows comparison of examinees' skills, ability to read aloud is a possible confounding variable. An alternative method is to have learners read…

This paper reports results of an analysis of pronunciation problems and error patterns in the recorded speech of 38 immigrants to Sweden. The recordings, of both spontaneous and elicited speech in Swedish, were taken from an archival collection. The native-language groups studied include British English, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, Greek, Persian,…