Nonword repetition tasks (NWRTs) are employed widely in various studies on language development and are often relied upon as diagnostic tools. However, the mechanisms that underlie children's performance in NWRTs are very little understood. In this paper we present NWRT data from typically developing 5- to 6-year-olds (5:4-6:8) and examine the…

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated how phonological reductions (e.g., "puter" for "computer") modulate phonological competition. Participants listened to sentences extracted from a spontaneous speech corpus and saw four printed words: a target (e.g., "computer"), a competitor similar to the canonical form (e.g., "companion"), one similar…

Theories of verbal self-monitoring generally assume an internal (pre-articulatory) monitoring channel, but there is debate about whether this channel relies on speech perception or on production-internal mechanisms. Perception-based theories predict that listening to one's own inner speech has similar behavioural consequences as listening to…

This commentary on a research study by Santiago et al. (2000) suggests that a reanalysis of the data that takes word length into account leads to a conclusion that is the opposite of what the study found. (Author/VWL)

Responds to a commentary written in response a research study conducted by the author (Santiago et al., 2000) that suggests that a reanalysis of the data on syllable structure effects that takes word length into account leads to a conclusion that is the opposite of what the study found. (Author/VWL)

An aphasic patient is described as one whose poor repetition of sentences and of lists of words contrasts with his or her surprisingly good performance on immediate problem recognition tasks. This result is interpreted as suggesting a distinction between phonological input and output buffers. (41 references) (Author/LB)

This comment on an article addresses two issues: (1) Different from what the authors of the article suggest, there are no theories of production claiming the phonological word to be the upper ground of advance planning before the onset of articulation; (2) the picture naming study of word frequency effect on speech onset is inconclusive by lack of…

Responds to a critique on an article and argues against criticisms put forth in the response. Shows that the hypotheses put forth in research about the scope of phonological encoding are well motivated in the context of current theories of speech production. (Author/VWL)

Used backward masking paradigm to investigate nature and time course of phonological assembly. Two experiments examined to what extent phonological assembly is a serial process. One showed recognition rates in a backward masking task varied as a function of the serial position of phonemes that were shared between backward masks and target words;…

Proposes that an important role for connectionist research in language acquisition is analyzing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analyzing the properties of real language corpora suggest a priori objections against the utility of distributional information are misguided. This…

Investigates deaf and hearing subjects' ratings of American Sign Language (ASL) signs to assess whether linguistic experience shapes judgments of sign similarity. Findings are consistent with linguistic theories that posit movement and location as core structural elements of syllable structure in ASL. (Author/VWL)

Works on constructing a computational model of phonological short-term memory. Initial goals include performing large-scale research for data on the characteristics of phonological retention and retrieval, learning existing theoretical constructs, exploring alternative computational methods, and gathering experimental evidence to constrain the…

This paper presents a discussion of the constraints imposed on lexicalisation during production by language-specific patterns, such as whether words exist in a language to describe a given event and whether language-specific syntactic and phonological information correlates with semantic properties. First, we introduce in broad strokes relevant…

Presents the case for a mapping theory of developmental language impairment, which branches into a theory that specific language impairment arises from impaired phonological processing and the consequent disruption of the mapping process through which the words and sentence structure of language are established. (Author/VWL)

Presents the first stage in a research effort developing a detailed computational model of working memory. The central feature of the model is counterintuitive. It is assumed that there is a primacy gradient of activation across successive list items. A second stage of the model is influenced by the combined effects of the primacy gradient and…