An ongoing debate concerns whether spoken word recognition happens in an incremental or continuous manner (Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989; McClelland & Elman, 1986). In the current study, participants (31 adults and 49 infants aged 24-30months) were presented with four images while they heard a sentence like “Look at the cat”. Among the images was one object that rhymed with the spoken word...

While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech. However, there is currently little evidence regarding whether this inner voice resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. To investigate this issue, we compared reading behaviour of Northern and Southern English participants who have differing pronunciations for words like 'glass', in which the vowel d...

A longitudinal study of one child aged 2;5 documents an invented language game consisting of suffixal reduplication and onset replacement. Initially, reduplication is partial: the reduplicant enlarges in discrete increments over the five stages of the game until by the last stage reduplication is total. Reduplication is accompanied by a process of onset replacement, in which the reduplicant alw...

Infants' preferences for a novel or familiar nursery rhyme were examined as an index of long-term memory. One-to 2-month-old infants' preference were tested, using a nonnutritive sucking, discrimination-learning procedure, at 1, 2, or 3 days after the last of multiple familiarization sessions. A consistent novelty preference was observed at the 1-day retention interval, no consistent preference...

This study was designed to investigate orthographic effects on spoken word recognition by combining the priming paradigm with a measure of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Primes and targets either shared both orthography and phonology of the rhyme (beef-reef) or they shared rhyme phonology only (leaf-reef). The two "related" conditions were compared against an "unrelated" condition (sick...

The sources of knowledge that individuals use to make similarity judgments between words are thought to tap underlying phonological representations. We examined the effects of perceptual similarity between stimuli on deaf children's ability to make judgments about the phonological similarity between words at 3 levels of linguistic structure (syllable, rhyme, and phoneme). Manipulation of stimul...

will allow us to answer the following question: Two production experiments investigating possible factors influencing the domain of final lengthening are described. Results indicate that final lengthening is generally confined to the final syllable, except when its rhyme contains only a schwa, in which case the penultimate rhyme is lengthened as well. Apparently, only the weight of the final sy...

Previous research shows that children with language impairments (LI) are significantly less rhythmic during motor tasks than typically developing children who are chronologically and linguistically agematched. This study aims to explore a speech rhythm task and to shed new light on the rhythmic abilities of children with LI. Specifically, the authors investigate whether children with LI are imp...

Recent research in verbal learning has produced considerable evidence on the importance of natural language parameters such as syntax, semantic meaning, and word-order in learning and retention of meaningful verbal materials. To test the effect of rhyme and meter on the acquisition and retention of four-word sentences, three levels of meter were used: iambic, trochaic, and mixed (iambic and tro...

We explored the role that poetic form can play in people's perceptions of the accuracy of aphorisms as descriptions of human behavior. Participants judged the ostensible accuracy of unfamiliar aphorisms presented in their textually surviving form or a semantically equivalent modified form. Extant rhyming aphorisms in their original form (e.g., "What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals") were jud...