This study examined the reliability and inter-list equivalency of two new recorded spoken word recognition measures, the Lexical Neighborhood Test (LNT) and the Multisyllabic Lexical Neighborhood Test (MLNT), and evaluated the effects of lexical difficulty on spoken word recognition by children with hearing loss. Participants were 16 children with prelingual, profound deafness who used a cochle...

Children’s truncations of multisyllabic words, i.e. the omission of entire syllables, are investigated. More specifically, the consistency of truncation patterns is analyzed in two studies. First, a systematic quantitative analysis of the truncations of a single Dutch speaking Flemish boy is reported. Secondly, the generalizability of the findings of the case study is assessed: the results are ...

1. Cluttering is a fluency disorder characterized by a rate that is perceived to be abnormally rapid, irregular, or both for the speaker, and... a. This rate problem causes one or more of the following: b. An excessive number of disfluencies c. The frequent placement of pauses and odd prosodic patterns d. Inappropriate/excessive degree of coarticulation, especially in multisyllabic words e. (St...

Presented is an extension of the simple recurrent network (SRN), termed the sequence encoder, which learns fixedwidth representations of variable-length sequences. This architecture was used to learn orthographic representations for nearly 75,000 English words, of which nearly 69,000 were multisyllabic. Analyses showed that sequence encoder representations are shaped by the dependencies among l...

In this phase I rehabilitation study, we investigated the effects of an intensive phonomotor rehabilitation program on verbal production in a 73-year-old male, 11 years postonset a left-hemisphere stroke, who exhibited apraxia of speech and aphasia. In the context of a single-subject design, we studied whether treatment would improve phoneme production and generalize to repetition of multisylla...

Connectionist learning of natural language words and their phonetic regularities is presented. The Neural Network (NN) model we employ in this problem is the Simple Recurrent Network, trained with the Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) learning algorithm. During the training, it was assigned the task of predicting the next phoneme given one phoneme at each moment and keeping information of the...

Are neonates sensitive to the different rhythmical units that are used in different spoken languages? And do they use these units to represent and discriminate multisyllabic words? In the present study, we used the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure to test whether 3-day-old French infants discriminate lists of Japanese words. The lists of words differed either in the number of syllabic units or ...

Words derive their structure not only from the sounds they include but also from the organization of those sounds within the word. This organization is the phonotactic level of the word: roughly, its shape including the sequence of its elements. Often, children with immature or disordered phonologies demonstrate phonotactic as well as phonetic limitations. Sometimes, the child may produce an ag...

Typically unstressed non-final syllables in the adult target words are truncated (see Fikkert, 1994 for Dutch; Echols & Newport, 1992, Gerken, 1994 and Kehoe & Stoel-Gammon, 1997 for English; Lleo & Demuth, 1999 for German and Spanish). How can this phenomenon be explained? In the literature two possible sources for truncations have been established: the child’s lexical representation (‘a lexic...

Accurate pronunciation is an important component of language ability and the main outward linguistic sign of whether someone is a native speaker of a language or not. An area of particular difficulty for Persian-speaking learners of English, which may cause 'foreign accent' or misunderstanding in speaking, is placement of stress on multi-syllable words. Game-based pronunciation teaching can be ...