PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to describe the growth of children's segmentation and representation of consonant blends in the kindergarten year and to evaluate the extent to which linguistic features influence segmentation and representation of consonant blends. Specifically, the roles of word position (initial blends, final blends), class of blends, homorganicity, and nasality were con...

Thai offers a unique opportunity to investigate the role of lexical tone processing during visual-word recognition, as tone is explicitly expressed in its script. In order to investigate the contribution of tone at the orthographic/phonological level during the early stages of word processing in Thai, we conducted a masked priming experiment-using both lexical decision and word naming tasks. Fo...

Johnson et al (1988) found that normal-hearing listeners' consonant recognition scores on a nonsense syllable test were significantly better when they were seated within versus beyond the critical distance of a typical lecture hall. The present study used a Sequential Information Analysis (SINFA) to document a priori perceptual features for Johnson et al's subjects' confusion errors to the init...

Consonant mastery is one of the most widely used metrics of typical phonological acquisition and of phonological disorder. Two fundamental methodological questions concerning research on consonant acquisition are (1) how to elicit a representative sample of productions and (2) how to analyse this sample once it has been collected. This paper address these two questions by reviewing relevant asp...

Previous studies investigating domain-initial prosodic strengthening have shown that consonants undergo cumulative strengthening at the beginning of prosodic domains. However, evidence for articulatory strengthening of domain-initial vowels is sparse [1], [2]. At least two possible hypotheses exist why vowels fail to show domain-initial strengthening: a) Domain-initial strengthening only target...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the phonemic inventories of syllable-initial consonants in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants, assessing the relationship between the children's mastery levels of consonant production and their receptive and expressive language skills. DESIGN Descriptive study. SETTING Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan, Taiwan. PATIENTS The 30 prelingually deaf childr...

OBJECTIVE Scores on consonant-recognition tests are widely used as an index of speech-perception ability in cochlear implant (CI) users. The consonant stimuli in these tests are typically presented in the /alpha/ vowel context, even though consonants in conversational speech occur in many other contexts. For this reason, it would be useful to know whether vowel context has any systematic effect...

In Russian, the same consonant sequences are permitted in various phonotactic environments. The presence of a word boundary or reduced vowel can be phonologically contrastive, and both learners and experienced listeners may rely on fine acoustic cues to discriminate between phonotactic possibilities. In this study, durational characteristics of consonant sequences are examined to establish whet...