Network analyses of the phonological mental lexicon show that words are clustered into communities and phonologically dissimilar words can be connected to each other through distant paths. Here we investigate whether behavioral traces of the large-scale structure of the phonological lexicon can be obtained. Participants listened to pairs of spoken…

Reading comprehension in bilingual children depends on the extent to which each language is used in daily life. To date, most bilingual studies have focused on children who learn the majority language as their second language (L2 bilingual children). In contrast, bilingual children learning the majority language as their first language (L1…

This dissertation aims to analyze the Western Armenian (WA) verbal morphology from a diachronic perspective and perform an internal reconstruction to trace the modern Western dialects back to Classical Armenian (CA) or an older, unattested variant of Armenian. The dissertation's methodology (Chapter 1) is based on comparative dialectology (Chapter…

In this dissertation, I establish a research program that uses computational modeling as a testbed for theories of phonological learning. This dissertation focuses on a fundamental question: how do children acquire sound patterns from noisy, real-world data, especially in the presence of lexical exceptions that defy regular patterns? For instance,…

Acknowledged as a far-reaching pedagogical method, Project-Based Learning is nationally imperative in Indonesian education despite the disinclination of its execution. This paper scrutinizes the phonetics and phonology-based English pronunciation dimensions and scaffolding traits as the bases to devise the scaffolding assignments for PBL…

The Arabic traditional grammar as well as Chomsky's mainstream theory may not be able to provide a good analysis of some fixed Arabic phrases. The challenge of such data directly stems from the fact that the general syntactic rules assumed by the two opposing theories cannot explain the syntactic and the semantic aspects of the fixed Arabic data.…

Purpose: We examined the effect of bite block insertion (BBI) on lingual movements and formant frequencies in corner vowel and diphthong production in a sentence context. Method: Twenty young adults produced the corner vowels (/u/, /[open back unrounded vowel]/, [ae]/, /i/) and the diphthong /[open back unrounded vowel][near-close near-front…

Human language is an incredibly rich yet incredibly constrained system. Learning and generalizing these systematic constraints from small, sparse, and underspecified data presents a fundamental inference problem. Therapidity and ease by which humans learn these constraints has made this a foundational study in cognitive science, linguistics, and…

By 12 months of age, infants exhibit behavioral sensitivity to sound symbolism (e.g. sound-shape correspondences) when they hear universally sound symbolic pseudowords (e.g. "bouba," "kiki"). Here, we investigated whether infant's sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences is affected when they hear language-specific sound…

The relative importance of phonological versus morphological processes in reading varies depending on the writing system's orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. This study investigated the interplay between phonology and morphology in Hebrew reading acquisition, a language offering a unique opportunity for such examination with…

The importance of early literacy skills is well established in previous studies; reading abilities and academic success in later grades depend on the foundational early literacy skills developed in preschools. However, little is known about preschool teachers' understanding of the impact of speech sound disorder (SSD) on early literacy skills.…

Familial risk for developmental dyslexia can compromise auditory and speech processing and subsequent language and literacy development. According to the phonological deficit theory, supporting phonological development during the sensitive infancy period could prevent or ameliorate future dyslexic symptoms. Music is an established method for…

This study examined how toddler looking to a discourse referent is mediated by the information status of the referent and the pitch contour of the referring expression. Eighteen-month-olds saw a short discourse of three sets of images with the proportion of looking time to a target analyzed during the final image. At test, the information status…

This study aims to explore and tackle different phenomena of syllable structure and syllabification patterns in Jordanian Arabic (JA). The study compares and contrasts the permissible syllable structures in different Jordanian dialects. It also presents a comprehensive analysis of how speakers of different Jordanian dialects tackle the consonantal…

Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different…