Morphological effects on pronunciation

Converging, albeit inconsistent, empirical evidence suggests that the morphological structure of a word influences its pronunciation. We investigated this issue using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging in the context of an experimental cognitive psychology paradigm. Scottish speakers were trained on apparently homophonous monomorphemic and bimorphemic novel words (e.g. zord, zorred), and tested on speech production tasks. Monomorphemic items were realised acoustically with shorter durations than bimorphemic items; however, this difference was not statistically significant. Progressive coarticulatory effects were also observed in the monomorphemic condition for some speakers. A dynamic analysis of the articulatory data revealed that the observed differences in the pronunciations of the two types of items could be due to factors other than morphological structure. Our results, albeit inconclusive, make a significant contribution to the literature in this research domain insofar as the presence or absence of morphological effects on pronunciation has important implications for extant theories of speech production.https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs/icphs2015caslpub3961pub81

Common Patterns of Prediction of Literacy Development in Different Alphabetic Orthographies

We are grateful to Brett Kessler for computing the consistency estimates in each of the four languages of this studyPrevious studies have shown that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal memory span are reliable correlates of learning to read in English. However, the extent to which these different predictors have the same relative importance in different languages remains uncertain. In this article, we present the results from a 10-month longitudinal study that began just before or soon after the start of formal literacy instruction in four languages (English, Spanish, Slovak, and Czech). Longitudinal path analyses showed that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN (but not verbal memory span) measured at the onset of literacy instruction were reliable predictors, with similar relative importance, of later reading and spelling skills across the four languages. These data support the suggestion that in all alphabetic orthographies, phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN may tap cognitive processes that are important for learning to read.Grant PITN-215961 – ELDEL from the Marie Curie, Seventh Framework Programm

Transposed-letter priming effects in reading aloud words and nonwords

A masked nonword prime generated by transposing adjacent inner letters in a word (e.g., jugde) facilitates the recognition of the target word (JUDGE) more than a prime in which the relevant letters are replaced by different letters (e.g., junpe). This transposed-letter (TL) priming effect has been widely interpreted as evidence that the coding of letter position is flexible, rather than precise. Although the TL priming effect has been extensively investigated in the domain of visual word recognition using the lexical decision task, very few studies have investigated this empirical phenomenon in reading aloud. In the present study, we investigated TL priming effects in reading aloud words and nonwords and found that these effects are of equal magnitude for the two types of items. We take this result as support for the view that the TL priming effect arises from noisy perception of letter order within the prime prior to the mapping of orthography to phonology.6 page(s

Morphological processing across modalities and languages

International audienceThe present study examined cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing in the visual and auditory modality. French and German adults performed a visual and auditory lexical decision task that involved the same translation-equivalent items. The focus of the study was on nonwords, which were constructed in a way that the independent role of stems and suffixes in visual and auditory processing could be investigated. Results revealed a stem-by-modality and a suffix-by-modality interaction, indicating a more prominent role for morphology in the visual than in the auditory domain. Moreover, a significant language-by-stem interaction indicated more robust morphological processing in German than in French. The latter result supports the idea that morphological processing is influenced by the morphological productivity of a language