The arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is a fundamental assumption in modern linguistic theory. In recent years, however, a growing amount of research has investigated the nature of non-arbitrary relations between linguistic sounds and semantics. This review aims at illustrating the amount of findings obtained so far and to organize and evaluate different lines of research dedicated to the is...

In this article, the possibility is raised that some children may implicitly view the therapy situation as one in which new sounds and language forms are learned and practiced. In contrast, the primary purpose of talking outside of therapy is meaningful communication. Inherent in this view of therapy and non-therapy is the incompatibility or inconsistency between practicing speech and communica...

Numerous studies have revealed an asymmetry tied to the perception of coronal place of articulation: participants accept a labial mispronunciation of a coronal target, but not vice versa. Whether or not this asymmetry is based on language-general properties or arises from language-specific experience has been a matter of debate. The current study suggests a bias of the first type by documenting...

This study investigated acoustic-phonetics of coronal stop production by adult simultaneous bilingual and monolingual speakers of Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). Differences in the phonetics of CF and CE include voicing and place of articulation distinctions. CE has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position) contrasting shortand long-lag VOT; coronal stops in C...

Twenty children with mental retardation (MR), age 7-12, completed a phonological reading skills program over approximately 10 weeks. As a result of the instruction, they were better able to sound out learned and transfer words compared to a control group matched on age, IQ, nonword reading, language comprehension, and phonemic awareness. Final sounding out was predicted by beginning reading ski...

The attentional blink (AB) refers to a decrease in accuracy that occurs when participants are required to detect the second of two rapidly sequential targets displayed randomly in a stream of distracters. Dyslexic individuals have been shown to exhibit a prolonged AB in the visual modality, interpreted as evidence of sluggish attentional shifting (SAS). However, the amodal SAS theory predicts t...

Fluent speech with phonological paraphasia is characteristic of conduction aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia. Phonological paraphasia is characterized by speech sound errors that still convey the intended meaning. Some patients with phonological paraphasia show auditory–verbal short-term memory (STM) disturbances. However, it is not certain that phonological paraphasia results from such memory dis...

In their article ‘What we know about what we have never heard: Evidence from perceptual illusions’, Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, and Vaknin (2007) address the question of whether listeners have innate knowledge of phonological markedness. Focusing on sonority and syllable structure, they answer this question positively. SpeciWcally, they argue that English listeners’ perception of onset clusters...

BACKGROUND speech intelligibility evaluation. AIM to develop and validate items for a speech intelligibility assessment scale based on the speech of individuals with phonological disorder (PD) who present common phonological repair strategies (RS) in the Brazilian Portuguese language (BP), through the testing of its effectiveness in classifying the speech of these subjects. Also to observe th...