We investigated whether and how sublexical units such as phonological syllables mediate access to the lexicon in French visual word recognition. To do so, two lexical decision task (LDT) experiments examined the nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 1a and b, the number of higher frequency syllabic neighbours was manipulated while controlling for the first bigram. The resu...

Recent research on the alignment between F0 “targets” (e.g. maxima and minima) and the segmental string show that F0 targets exhibit “segmental anchoring”, i.e. they co-occur with specific segmental landmarks such as the onset of a stressed syllable. Undoubtedly there are principles of speech production at work in this phenomenon, but the purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that phonological...

The evidence of supporting phonological deficit as a cause of developmental dyslexia has been accumulating rapidly over the past 2 decades, yet the exact mechanisms underlying this deficit remain controversial. Some authors assume that a temporal processing deficit is the source of the phonological disorder observed in dyslexic children. Others maintain that the phonological deficit in dyslexia...

This thesis investigates the nature of the interface between two components of language morphology and phonology in children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLi), compared to those with typically-developing language. I focus principally on the impact of phonological complexity on past tense inflection, but I also investigate other areas of morphology. More specifically, I show ...

Drawing on phonology research within the generative linguistics tradition, stochastic methods, and notions from complex systems, we develop a modelling paradigm linking phonological structure, expressed in terms of syllables, to speech movement data acquired with 3D electromagnetic articulography and X-ray microbeam methods. The essential variable in the models is syllable structure. When mappe...

In current theories of word reading the structure and operations of the phonological buffer are quite underspecified. We investigated this issue by running a reading aloud experiment in Italian. We adopted a priming paradigm, with three-syllabic words as primes and targets and we jointly manipulated two effects ascribed to the stage of phonological and phonetic encoding, that is stress priming ...

It has been proposed that Tashlhiyt is a language which allows any segment, including obstruents, to be a syllable nucleus. The most striking and controversial examples taken as arguments in favour of this analysis involve series of words claimed to contain only obstruents. This claim is disputed in some recent work, where it is argued that these consonant sequences contain schwas that can be s...

We investigate whether children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI) are also phonologically impaired and, if so, what the nature of that impairment is. We focus on the prosodic complexity of words, based on their syllabic and metrical (stress) structure, and investigate this using a novel non-word repetition procedure, the Test of Phonological Structure (TOPhS). Participants w...

Previous meta-analyses of the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and reading have been conducted mostly in children who speak English, a language with an opaque writing system. In this study, we present meta-analysis that examined mean correlations three PA tasks testing phonemic, syllabic, intrasyllabic word reading, nonword comprehension Spanish, near-transparent A random-effect...