A bilingual's language system is highly interactive. When hearing a second language (L2), bilinguals access native-language (L1) words that share sounds across languages. In the present study, we examine whether input modality and L2 proficiency moderate the extent to which bilinguals activate L1 phonotactic constraints (i.e., rules for combining…

Purpose: Auditory feedback perturbation with voice pitch manipulation has been widely used in previous studies. There are several hardware and software tools for such manipulations, but audio plug-ins developed for music, movies, and radio applications that operate in digital audio workstations may be extremely beneficial and are easy to use,…

Oral communication often takes place in noisy environments, which challenge spoken-word recognition. Previous research has suggested that the presence of background noise extends the number of candidate words competing with the target word for recognition and that this extension affects the time course and accuracy of spoken-word recognition. In…

This study aims to identify the phonological error patterns of normally developing children who speak colloquial Jordanian Arabic dialect and to provide normative data for the age of suppression for each phonological error pattern. One hundred fifty-four normally developing children (68 females and 86 males) ranging from 3 to 6.5 years were…

This study revisits the roles of different aspects of phonological vocabulary knowledge in second language (L2) listening. Japanese learners of English (n = 114) completed the TOEIC Listening test and three phonological vocabulary tests assessing (a) ability to recognize the meanings of aural forms (meaning recognition), (b) ability to recall the…

Background: Nonword repetition (NWR) is a common phonological processing task that is reported to tap into many cognitive, perceptual, and motor processes. For this reason, NWR is often used in assessment batteries to aid in verifying the presence of a reading or language disorder. Aims: To examine the extent to which child- and item-level factors…

While voicing contrasts in word-onset position are acquired relatively early, much less is known about how and when they are acquired in word-coda position, where accurate production of these contrasts is also critical for distinguishing words (e.g., dog vs. dock). This study examined how the acoustic cues to coda voicing contrasts are realized in…

A key question in developmental research concerns how children learn associations between words and meanings in their early language development. Given a vast array of possible referents, how does the child know what a word refers to? We contend that onomatopoeia (e.g. "knock," "meow"), where a word's sound evokes the sound…

Developmental studies examining relations between word reading (WR) and decoding in typical and dyslexic populations routinely cut the reading distribution to form distinct groups. However, dichotomizing continuous variables to study development is problematic for multiple reasons. Instead, we modeled and visualized the parallel growth of WR and…

Sign language phonological parameters are somewhat analogous to phonemes in spoken language. Unlike phonemes, however, there is little linguistic literature arguing that these parameters interact at the sublexical level. This situation raises the question of whether such interaction in spoken language phonology is an artifact of the modality or…

The input to phonological reasoning are alternations, that is, variations in the pronunciation of related words, such as in "electri[k]" - "electri[s]-ity." But phonologists cannot agree what counts as a relevant alternation: the issue is highly contentious despite a research record of over 50 years. We believe that the…

Much research in child speech development suggests that young children coarticulate more than adults. There are multiple, not mutually-exclusive, explanations for this pattern. For example, children may coarticulate more because they are limited by immature motor control. Or they may coarticulate more if they initially represent phonological…

The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the targets of vowels in speech production. Three experiments investigate vowel production in non-native speech, probing how new vowel categories, and thus targets, are formed. Three research questions are addressed: (1) Do vowels have articulatory targets (as predicted by Browman &…

Background: Learning to read is a complex process that involves phonological and orthographic processing abilities, broader language skills and cognitive processes across all writing systems. Although these components remain common, the pace of acquisition of phonological and orthographic processing and reading abilities differ across writing…

Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers…