Referring to the "vital parts" of speech that do not appear in print, E. B. Huey (1908/1968) described prosody in reading as "the rise and fall of pitch and inflection, the hurrying here and slowing there, what we have called the melody of speech." In this paper, we discuss the role prosody plays in reading, contextualized in…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

We review cognitive-linguistic approaches to conveying meaning, sound, and orthographic information across scripts in order to highlight the impact of variability in written and spoken language on learning to read and to write words. With examples of word recognition and word writing from different scripts, including Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and…

The present study investigated the representation and processing of segmental and tonal information in visual Chinese word recognition in native and non-native Chinese readers. Two experiments using homophone judgement paradigm were conducted. When judging two Chinese characters (Experiment 1), both groups showed difficulties when the segmental…

Background: This study examined the development of stress sensitivity and its relationship with word reading. Previous research has rarely measured phoneme and stress sensitivity in the same task, making a direct comparison of the contribution between the two in reading development difficult. Methods: Participants were native English-speaking…

For monolingual English-speaking children, judgment and production of stress in derived words, including words with phonologically neutral (e.g., -ness) and non-neutral suffixes (e.g., "-ity"), is important to both academic vocabulary growth and to word reading. For Mandarin-speaking adult English learners (AELs) the challenge of…

In polysyllabic languages the assignment of stress is crucial for understanding the reading process. Here we review empirical evidence, drawn mainly from studies on Italian, and discuss critical issues in understanding reading. We first discuss the lexical and sublexical mechanisms responsible for stress assignment and propose that the former is…

Phonemic and prosodic awareness are both phonological processes that operate at different levels: the former at the level of the individual sound segment and the latter at the suprasegmental level across syllables. Both have been shown to be related to word reading in young readers. In this study we examine how these processes are differentially…

This study examined pinyin (the official phonetic system that transcribes the lexical tones and pronunciation of Chinese characters) invented spelling and English invented spelling in 72 Mandarin-speaking 6th graders who learned English as their second language. The pinyin invented spelling task measured segmental-level awareness including…

This study examines the effect of non-sentential context prosody pattern on lexical activation in Persian. For this purpose a questionnaire including target and non-target words is used. The target words are homographs with two possible stress patterns belonging to different syntactic categories. Participants are asked to read out the words aloud…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives has long been considered as the absence of short vowels, however there is more to be dealt with. While the correlation of 28 Arabic consonants pose no great difficulty in deciphering the script, the six vowel phonemes voiced only by three letters even with help of some relevant…

To assign lexical stress when reading, the Greek reader can potentially rely on lexical information (knowledge of the word), visual-orthographic information (processing of the written diacritic), or a default metrical strategy (penultimate stress pattern). Previous studies with secondary education children have shown strong lexical effects on…

In silent reading, short-memory tasks, such as semantic and syntactic processing, require a stage of phonetic encoding between visual representation and the actual extraction of meaning, and this encoding includes prosodic as well as segmental features. To test for this suprasegmental coding, an experiment was conducted in which subjects were…

Papers on French linguistics, most in French, address the following topics: micro structural treatment of regionalisms in three French dictionaries; effects of the use of Quebec French on the intelligibility of synthesized speech; reading comprehension as a constructive process; acoustic markers of the utterance in Quebec French; constraints and…