This study aimed to determine how Chinese children adapt to Chinese orthography-phonology correspondence by acquiring phonetic radical awareness (PRA). This study used two important Chinese encoding approaches (rote and orthographic approaches) as the developmental trajectory, in which the present study hypothesized that phonological awareness…

Children's ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children's learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a "pseudohomophone") has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when…

In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbourhood density (ND) on vocabulary size in a computational model of vocabulary development. A word has a high ND if there are many words phonologically similar to it. High ND words are more easily learned by infants of all abilities (e.g. Storkel, 2009; Stokes, 2014). We present a neural network…

Purpose: Recent findings in preschool children indicated novel adjective recall was enhanced when learned using repeated retrieval with contextual reinstatement (RRCR) compared to repeated study (RS). Recall was similar for learned pictures used during training and new (generalized) pictures with the same adjective features. The current study…

The concept of an output-driven map formally characterizes an intuitive notion about phonology: that disparities between the input and the output are introduced only to the extent necessary to satisfy restrictions on outputs. When all of the grammars definable in a phonological system are output-driven, the implied structure provides significant…

It is well known that information from spoken language is integrated into reading processes, but the nature of these links and how they are acquired is less well understood. Recent evidence has suggested that predictions about the written form of newly learned spoken words are already generated prior to print exposure. We extend this work to…

Following a review of contemporary models of word-level processing for reading and their limitations, we propose a new hypothetical model of Chinese character reading, namely, the graded lexical space mapping model that characterizes how sublexical radicals and lexical information are involved in Chinese character reading development. The…

It had been hypothesized that, in developmental dyslexia (DD), an implicit learning deficit explains children's problems in encoding the phoneme-grapheme correspondences underlying the writing system and thus the development of spelling skills. The present study tested the efficacy of an intervention to facilitate implicit learning of…

We examined whether 14-month-olds learn the mapping between a novel word and object in an associative-learning task when the forms differ minimally in only one segment where the crucial difference occurs in a stressed syllable. Fifty infants were presented with novel word-object pairings. Infants in one group heard the minimal difference in an…

Over the past several decades, researchers have discovered a great deal of information about the processes underlying language acquisition. From as early as they can be studied, infants are sensitive to the nuances of native-language sound structure. Similarly, infants are attuned to the visual and conceptual structure of their environments…