The effects of word frequency and spelling-to-sound regularity were examined using standard naming, standard lexical-decision, go/no-go naming, and go/no-go lexical-decision tasks. In both the standard and go/no-go naming tasks, tasks requiring phonological coding, a significant Frequency x Regularity interaction was observed. That is, the regularity effect was limited to low-frequency words. I...

This paper applies finite state technologies to verify the typological validity of Turbid Spreading, a theory of vowel harmony in Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). Previous analyses of vowel harmony in OT have been prone to typological inconsistencies, predicting grammars that do not occur in natural language (Wilson, 2003). However, attempts to eliminate typological patho...

BACKGROUND Phonological disorder. AIM To apply the percentage of correct consonant (PCC) index and to verify the correlation between this index and the one applied perceptually by judges. METHOD The PCC index of 50 phonological disordered subjects was calculated, after 60 judges heard the phonological tests for each subject and perceptually attributed the severity. RESULTS The PCC index v...

BACKGROUND Self-awareness of speech impairment according to the following extralinguistic variables: gender and age. AIM To examine the influence of gender and age on the self-awareness of speech impairment. METHOD Participants were 24 children with the diagnosis of phonological disorder, 15 boys and 9 girls, with ages ranging between 5:0 and 7:7 years. For this group the assessment of self...

Phonological properties of the words in a sentence have been shown to affect processing fluency and comprehension. However, the exact role of phonology in sentence comprehension remains unclear. If constituents are stored in working memory during routine processing and accessed through their phonological code, phonological information may exert a pervasive influence on post-lexical comprehensio...

Traditionally, models of speech comprehension and production do not depend on concepts and processes from the phonological short-term memory (pSTM) literature. Likewise, in working memory research, pSTM is considered to be a language-independent system that facilitates language acquisition rather than speech processing per se. We discuss couplings between pSTM, speech perception and speech prod...

The cerebral organization of word identification processes in reading was examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Changes in fMRI signal intensities were measured in 38 subjects (19 males and 19 females) during visual (line judgement), orthographic (letter case judgement), phonological (nonword rhyme judgement) and semantic (semantic category judgement) tasks. A strategy of...

Mapping word forms onto their corresponding meanings is one of the most complex tasks that young infants acquiring their native language have to perform. This is due to the fact that an utterance can refer to many different aspects of a scene, a problem known as referential ambiguity (Quine 1960). An even more basic problem, though, is that it is not easy to find word forms to start with. In fa...

The current study investigated the role of the central executive and the phonological loop in arithmetic strategies to solve simple addition problems (Experiment 1) and simple subtraction problems (Experiment 2). The choice/no-choice method was used to investigate strategy execution and strategy selection independently. The central executive was involved in both retrieval and procedural strateg...

Repetition has been shown to activate the so-called 'dorsal stream', a network of temporo-parieto-frontal areas subserving the mapping of acoustic speech input onto articulatory-motor representations. Among these areas, a region in the posterior Sylvian fissure at the temporo-parietal boundary (also called 'area Spt') has been suggested to play a central role particularly with increasing comput...