This research was designed to establish the importance of phonological awareness and print awareness in learning to read Spanish. A sample of 136 preliterate Spanish children (70 boys and 66 girls) whose ages ranged from 5.1 to 6.6 years (average age 5.6 years) participated in the study. The results, using path analysis, from this longitudinal study support the existence of a relationship betwe...

The aim of this research was to analyze temporal auditory processing and phonological awareness in school-age children with benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS). Patient group (GI) consisted of 13 children diagnosed with BECTS. Control group (GII) consisted of 17 healthy children. After neurological and peripheral audiological assessment, children underwent a behavioral ...

This paper proposes a new experimental paradigm to explore the discriminability of languages, a question which is crucial to the child born in a bilingual environment. This paradigm employs the speech resynthesis technique, enabling the experimenter to preserve or degrade acoustic cues such as phonotactics, syllabic rhythm, or intonation from natural utterances. English and Japanese sentences w...

This study investigated several factors presumed to influence the intelligibility of song lyrics. Twenty-seven participants listened to recordings of musical passages sung in English; each passage consisted of a brief musical phrase sung by a solo voice. Six vocalists produced the corpus of sung phrases. Eight hypotheses derived from common phonological and prosodic principles were tested. Inte...

This paper presents a series of experiments on sub-syllabic unit selection across the two Chinese dialects – Mandarin and Cantonese. Evaluations are based on syllable recognition using only acoustic information, and no lexical knowledge is incorporated. We use a variety of subsyllabic acoustic models, motivated by phonological and lingustic structures charactersitics of Chinese. Our results sho...

Similarly to lahguage aquisition, language processing faces a strong input-datadeficiency problem. When we speak we alter a great deal in the idealised phonetic and phonological representations. We delete whole phonemes, we radically change allophones, we shift stresses, we break up intonational patterns, we insert paus es in the most unexpected places, etc. If to such crippled phonological str...

It is widely agreed that learning to read starts with the establishment of letter-to-phoneme correspondences. However, it is also widely agreed that prereaders do not have access to phoneme units. Here we show that the building of associations between letters and syllables, which we call the 'syllabic bridge', might be a faster and more direct way of learning spelling-to-sound correspondences i...