To learn to read, the brain must repurpose neural systems for oral language and visual processing to mediate written language. We begin with a description of computational models for how alphabetic written language is processed. Next, we explain the roles of a dorsal sublexical system in the brain that relates print and speech, a ventral lexical…

Purpose: Physiological and phonetic studies suggest that, at moderate levels of epilaryngeal stricture, the ventricular folds impinge upon the vocal folds and influence their dynamical behavior, which is thought to be responsible for constricted laryngeal sounds. In this work, the authors examine this hypothesis through biomechanical modeling.…

During speech comprehension, bilinguals co-activate both of their languages, resulting in cross-linguistic interaction at various levels of processing. This interaction has important consequences for both the structure of the language system and the mechanisms by which the system processes spoken language. Using computational modeling, we can…

Emerging phonotactic knowledge facilitates the development of the mental lexicon, as demonstrated by studies showing that infants use the phonotactic patterns of their native language to extract words from continuous speech. The present study provides a computational account of how infants might induce phonotactics from their immediate language…

The aims of this research were to develop guidelines for designing interaction tasks for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) and to investigate the attitudes of CFL learners toward a full CFL class in Second Life (SL). Three research questions were addressed in this research: (1) what are the attitudes of CFL learners toward the…

The Shortlist model is presented, which incorporates the desirable properties of earlier models of back-propagation networks with recurrent connections that successfully model many aspects of human spoken word recognition. The new model is entirely bottom-up and can readily perform simulations with vocabularies of tens of thousands of words. (DR)

Examines Nickels's claim that interactive models of lexical access in speech production cannot account for naming data from a group of anomic patients. This paper reiterates that the behavior of connectionist models is not easily predictable without running the appropriate simulations, and discusses the role of frequency in lexical access in…

Discusses computer-mediated communication (CMC) and computer-assisted language learning and explains how second language learners become communicatively fluent through a text-based CMC setting. Highlights include how asynchronous and synchronous CMC can support learners' cognitive processes; and models for combining text-based CMC with spoken…

The goal of the Pre Teacher Assessment Center is to give college sophomores a diagnostic assessment of their potential teaching skills across 13 skill dimensions felt to be prerequisites for teaching. The pre teacher assessment provides students with detailed information about potential teaching strengths and weaknesses and helps remediate…