Theoretical interest in the relation between speech production and perception has led to research on whether individual speaker-listeners' production patterns are linked to the information they attend to in perception. However, for prosodic structure, the production-perception relation has received little attention. This dissertation investigates…

Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in…

This study investigates how "phonological neighborhood density" (PND) affects word production and recognition in 4-to-6-year-old Russian children in comparison to adults. Previous experiments with English-speaking adults showed that a dense neighborhood facilitated word production but inhibited recognition whereas a sparse neighborhood…

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to explain how learning to read can be thought of as learning statistical regularities and to demonstrate why this is relevant for theory, modeling, and practice. This tutorial also shows how triangulation of methods and cross-linguistic research can be used to gain insight. Method: The impossibility of…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…

Purpose: The objective was to investigate acoustic cue processing in lexical-tone recognition by pediatric cochlear-implant (CI) recipients who are native Mandarin speakers. Method: Lexical-tone recognition was assessed in pediatric CI recipients and listeners with normal hearing (NH) in 2 tasks. In Task 1, participants identified naturally…

This article describes and evaluates one residential school for the deaf and hard of hearing, Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf (ENCSD), and their experience in implementing the Fairview Learning program. The program consists of five components (Schimmel & Edwards, 2003). Two of the components--phonemic awareness and literature-based…

The present study examined visual word recognition processes in Hebrew (a Semitic language) among beginning learners whose first language (L1) was either Semitic (Arabic) or Indo-European (e.g. English). To examine if learners, like native Hebrew speakers, exhibit morphological sensitivity to root and word-pattern morphemes, learners made an…

In two eye-tracking experiments in Italian, we investigated how acoustic information and stored knowledge about lexical stress are used during the recognition of tri-syllabic spoken words. Experiment 1 showed that Italians use acoustic cues to a word's stress pattern rapidly in word recognition, but only for words with antepenultimate stress.…

What helps us determine whether a word is a noun or a verb, without conscious awareness? We report on cues in the way individual English words are spelled, and, for the first time, identify their neural correlates via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We used a lexical decision task with trisyllabic nouns and verbs containing…

Rodent studies have suggested that "pattern separation," the ability to distinguish among similar experiences, is diminished in a subset of aged rats. We extended these findings to the human using a task designed to assess spatial pattern separation behavior (determining at time of test whether pairs of pictures shown during the study were in the…

Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. *rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over plural forms inside compounds (e.g. mouse eater…

Speeded visual word naming and lexical decision performance are reported for 2,428 words for young adults and healthy older adults. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to investigate the unique predictive variance of phonological features in the onsets, lexical variables (e.g., measures of consistency, frequency, familiarity, neighborhood…

This study investigates recognition of spoken idioms occurring in neutral contexts. Experiment 1 showed that both predictable and non-predictable idiom meanings are available at string offset. Yet, only predictable idiom meanings are active halfway through a string and remain active after the string's literal conclusion. Experiment 2 showed that…