Cross-sectional studies have already addressed the question of the syllable's role in the first steps of reading acquisition--though with mixed results. To determine whether and when (1) syllables become units that drive the segmentation of and access to words and how (2) sublexical orthographic and phonological syllable frequency mediate the…

We analyzed a Japanese lexical database to investigate the structure of the lexical environment based on the hypothesis that the lexical environment is optimized for the functioning of verbal working memory. Our prediction was that, as a consequence of the cultural transmission of language, low-imageable meanings tend to be represented by frequent…

This study investigated phonological whole-word measures in bilingual Arabic-English speakers to explore how the target approximations influence children's phonological development. To this end, fifteen bilingual Arabic-English speakers and nine monolingual Arabic-speaking children aged 36-48 months (mean = 42) participated in a parent-child…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the associations of phonological, lexical, and grammatical skills within and between languages in Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers. Method: Sixty-three Singaporean Mandarin-English bilingual children aged 3-5 years were assessed for articulation, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar using…

Purpose: Speech sound disorder (SSD) is one of the major speech disorders in school-age children. Given the heterogeneity in terms of subtypes within SSD, there is a need to develop techniques for a quick identification of these subtypes. Furthermore, given the paucity of studies from children with SSD from Cantonese-speaking homes and a noted…

This study traced different types of distractor effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) task across repeated naming. Starting point was a PWI study by Kurtz et al. (2018). It reported that naming a picture (e.g., of a duck) was slowed down by a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative picture name from a different taxonomic…

This study analyses the production of French /y/ and /u/ by 42 native English learners of French (ELoF) at the start and end of a Residence Abroad (RA) in a French-speaking country. As an approximation of both phonological and phonetic development, categorical change is teased apart from gradient change using k-medoid clustering of acoustic data…

This study presents an exhaustive analysis of the phonological, morphological, and pragmatic dimensions of an artificial intelligence (AI) application developed to facilitate the pedagogical dissemination of Arabic to non-native speakers. The research examines Arabits, a leading AI application created by the Alef Educational Institution, designed…

Background: Oral language has long been acknowledged as a prominent influence on children's reading development. Here, we examine the intersecting contribution of two prominent aspects of oral language - phonology and morphology. We explore this interface by examining contributions from the two dimensions of phonology - phonemic and prosodic - of…

It has been widely accepted that developmental dyslexia (DD) exhibits deficits in reading and spelling. However, the role of phonology and semantics in reading and spelling in dyslexia has not been systematically investigated. In Experiment 1, 45 Chinese children with DD and 43 age-matched controls read two tests with Chinese characters. One test…

Replication studies have become an emerging line of research in recent decades, including in computer-assisted language learning (CALL). Exact replication, which closely follows a study's protocol, is rare as it is hard to recreate results without establishing a highly controlled environment. However, using data available online, we were able to…

Purpose: This study conducted a transcription-based and spectral moments' analysis of alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives in monolingual and bilingual Frenchs-peaking children, aged 2;6--6;10 (years;months). We measured the percent accuracy of fricatives and investigated whether young children could distinguish alveolar and alveopalatal…

I investigate the acquisition of affrication in Québec French (QF), where affricates are in complementary distribution with coronal stops, being realized before high front vowels and glides. Previous research on other languages shows that affricates are acquired before branching onsets, which supports the idea that complexity at the level of the…

Background: Children born with cleft palate ± lip (CP ± L) are at risk of speech sound disorder (SSD). Up to 40% continue to have SSD at age 5-6 years. These difficulties are typically described as articulatory in nature and often include cleft speech characteristics (CSC) hypothesized to result from structural differences. In non-CP ± L SSD…

The present study aimed to investigate whether and how Chinese single character reading and 2-character word reading can reflect somewhat different processes. Tasks of Chinese rapid automatized naming (RAN), morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, along with vocabulary knowledge and nonverbal intelligence tasks,…