Phonological Word Research Articles

Evidence for right hemisphere phonology in a backward masking task

The extent to which orthographic and phonological processes are available during the initial moments of word recognition within each hemisphere is under specified, particularly for the right hemisphere. Few studies have investigated whether each hemisphere uses orthography and phonology under constraints that restrict the viewing time of words and reduce overt phonological demands. The current study used backward masking in the divided visual field paradigm to explore hemisphere differences in the availability of orthographic and phonological word recognition processes. A 20 ms and 60 ms SOA were used to track the time course of how these processes develop during pre-lexical moments of word recognition. Nonword masks varied in similarity to the target words such that there were four types: orthographically and phonologically similar, orthographically but not phonologically similar, phonologically but not orthographically similar and unrelated. The results showed the left hemisphere has access to both orthography and phonology early in the word recognition process. With more time to process the stimulus, the left hemisphere is able to use phonology which benefits word recognition to a larger extent than orthography. The right hemisphere also demonstrates access to both orthography and phonology in the initial moments of word recognition, however, orthographic similarity improves word recognition to a greater extent than phonological similarity.

Enclitic Particles in Western Abenaki: The Syntax of Second Position

In Western Abenaki, an Eastern Algonquian language, a number of enclitic particles, as well as certain cliticized words, are stationed in second position in the clause. In simple cases, second position is the position following the first phonological word of the clause, but complexities arise in particular constructions. A clause-initial conjunction may either host an enclitic or be skipped over in figuring clitic placement. A wh -word or focused expression may be skipped over as well, with clitics then appearing well inside the clause. Two preverbs that occupy a left-peripheral position appear to receive special treatment. These effects are shown here to follow from simple assumptions about phrase structure, coupled with a clitic placement rule that states only that clitics are stationed in second position within CP or IP.

THE CORRELATION BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND WORD LEARNING

This is a preliminary study to investigate the possible relationship between phonological awareness and word learning. The subjects of this study were 18 elementary students in the second grade. The subjects were first given three phonological awareness tests to measure their level of phonological awareness. Based on the results of the phonological awareness tests, the subjects were divided into the high and low phonological awareness groups. Afterwards, the subjects in both groups were taught 10 new words, followed by a vocabulary test to examine their ability in learning the new words. The results of the vocabulary test showed that the high phonological awareness group performed slightly better than the low phonological awareness group. This finding supports the assumption that L2 learners’ ability to learn L2 vocabularies is affected by their phonological awareness. Keyword: Phonological Awareness, Word Learning

E033 Factors affecting the hearing and language development in children with cochlear implant children: Theoretical study

E033 Factors affecting the hearing and language development in children with cochlear implant children: Theoretical study

Phonological domains: Universals and deviations (review)

Reviewed by: Phonological domains: Universals and deviations Judith Meinschaefer Phonological domains: Universals and deviations. Ed. by Janet Grijzenhout and Bariş Kabak. (Interface explorations 16.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. Pp. viii, 356. ISBN 9783110205404. $137 (Hb). This book contains a selection of articles originally presented at a workshop on phonological domains held in 2007 as part of the annual meeting of the German Linguistic Association. Their shared topic is the theory of prosodic phonology. The focus of the articles is on the basic principles constraining prosodic structure, particularly various aspects of the strict layer hypothesis, as well as on the precise nature of the prosodic hierarchy and its constituents. While the articles address a wide array of phenomena and languages, some aspects are especially salient: (i) the nature of the prosodic word as a domain, (ii) the question of whether prosodic structure is, like morphosyntactic structure, recursive and based on constituent boundaries, and (iii) questions about the general architecture of the interface of morphosyntactic and prosodic structure. The volume comprises an introduction by the editors and ten articles presenting original research. In the introduction, ‘Prosodic phonology: An appraisal’ (1–7), Janet Grijzenhout and Barış Kabak recapitulate the most important hypotheses and research questions that have guided research on prosodic domains in the last three decades and show how the articles relate to these issues. The first article, by Irene Vogel, ‘The status of the clitic group’ (15–46), reassesses the evidence for and against a prosodic domain that stands between the prosodic word and the phonological phrase. Such an intermediate domain was proposed more than two decades ago, but it has been discussed controversially in subsequent research. As pointed out by Vogel, phonological phenomena in various languages provide evidence for a domain between the word and the phrase, which cannot be reduced to either of the two. While in earlier work this domain was termed the clitic group (CG) and was invoked primarily to account for the prosodification of clitics, Vogel here proposes to rename it the composite group, since morphological compounds also display the phonological properties that motivate this domain. The alternative to postulating a separate domain between word and phrase is to allow for recursion at the level of the prosodic word, an approach taken by Bariş Kabak and Anthi Revithiadou in their chapter, ‘An interface approach to [End Page 201] prosodic word recursion’ (105–33). Adopting an optimality-theoretic approach to prosodic structure, they show that recursive prosodic constituents may be derived straightforwardly by drawing on the well-established constraints, Align and Wrap, with no need for additional constraints referring explicitly to recursivity. On the empirical side, based on the observations from Greek and Turkish compounds and host-clitic sequences, they claim that such structures, which are larger than prosodic words, nevertheless display the same phonological properties as these. At the same time, they are different from phonological phrases and are therefore best analyzed as recursive prosodic words. Arguments for prosodic recursion at the word level are likewise put forward in Junko Ito and Armin Mester’s article, ‘The extended prosodic word’ (135–94). The authors carefully discuss the phonological behavior of function-word complexes in English and German with regard to a variety of segmental and rhythmic alternations. They conclude that for both languages, a structure with the function word adjoined to its host’s prosodic word can best explain the phenomena. As for the question of how to derive prosodic word adjunction (i.e. recursivity), they propose a constraint requiring that prosodic heads be contained in lexical words, which, besides favoring prosodic adjunction of function words, provides a theoretical ground for the observation that function words are, in general, prosodically invisible. Adecidedly typological approach to the prosodic word is chosen in ‘The distribution of phonological word domains: A probabilistic typology’ (47–75) by Balthasar Bickel, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, and René Schiering. They investigate the prosodic domains of phonological alternations in more than sixty languages from different language families, concentrating on wordsize domains (defined as domains containing exactly one lexical stem) to examine whether crosslinguistically such alternations cluster on a...

Gestörter Wortabruf im kognitiven Modell und im Gehirn - eine Therapiestudie mit 3 Einzelfällen

In the present therapy study, we have for the first time combined cognitive and neural methods of examination in a model-oriented treatment setting for 3 subjects with aphasic word retrieval deficits. Based on a computer-assisted determination of the cognitive lesion in the Dell model, we applied lesion-specific and -unspecific therapies to compare their differential effectiveness. We used a picture/word interference fMRI-paradigm before and after therapy in order to assess therapy-induced changes in brain activation, the functioning of linguistic steps of processing and cognitive control, and the response to priming. As a result, all 3 subjects presented with a lexical-semantic lesion in the Dell model. In 2 subjects, the effectiveness of the lesion-specific semantic therapy was significantly stronger than that of the more unspecific phonological therapy. Due to therapy, brain activations were focused on language regions of the left or both hemispheres. Moreover, all patients recruited parts of the neural network that we had previously found in healthy speakers using the fMRI-paradigm (Abel et al., 2009, NeuroImage). A neural correlate of phonological processing was consistently located in the left superior temporal gyrus. In accordance with the cognitive lesion type, the neural correlate of semantic processing was less pronounced. Furthermore, we detected neural priming for phonological word distractors in all subjects and an additional decrease of cognitive control (monitoring) in 2 subjects. Over and above cognitive-linguistic observations, the individual pattern of brain activations therefore has the potential to indicate the type of disorder, the response to treatment techniques and the optimal therapy procedures.

Kalomoira Nikolou. The phonological word in Greek and its comparison with Arabic: Findings and applications. University of the Aegean, 2008. [nikolou@rhodes.aegean.gr

Kalomoira Nikolou. The phonological word in Greek and its comparison with Arabic: Findings and applications. University of the Aegean, 2008. [nikolou@rhodes.aegean.gr

Phonological typicality influences sentence processing in predictive contexts: Reply to Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009).

In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological typicality when they combined stimuli from the separate experiments into a single experiment. We replicated Staub et al.'s experiment and found that the combination of stimulus sets affects the predictiveness of the syntactic context; this reduces the phonological typicality effect as the experiment proceeds, although the phonological typicality effect was still evident early in the experiment. Although an ambiguous context may diminish sensitivity to the probabilistic relationship between the sound of a word and its lexical category, phonological typicality does influence online sentence processing during normal reading when the syntactic context is predictive of the lexical category of upcoming words.

The arbitrariness of the sign: Learning advantages from the structure of the vocabulary.

Recent research has demonstrated that systematic mappings between phonological word forms and their meanings can facilitate language learning (e.g., in the form of sound symbolism or cues to grammatical categories). Yet, paradoxically from a learning viewpoint, most words have an arbitrary form-meaning mapping. We hypothesized that this paradox may reflect a division of labor between 2 different language learning functions: arbitrariness facilitates learning specific word meanings and systematicity facilitates learning to group words into categories. In a series of computational investigations and artificial language learning studies, we varied the extent to which the language was arbitrary or systematic. For both the simulations and the behavioral studies, we found that the optimal structure of the vocabulary for learning incorporated this division of labor. Corpus analyses of English and French indicate that these predicted patterns are also found in natural languages.

Neuro-cognitive foundations of word stress processing - evidence from fMRI

BackgroundTo date, the neural correlates of phonological word stress processing are largely unknown.MethodsIn the present study, we investigated the processing of word stress and vowel quality using an identity matching task with pseudowords.ResultsIn line with previous studies, a bilateral fronto-temporal network comprising the superior temporal gyri extending into the sulci as well as the inferior frontal gyri was observed for word stress processing. Moreover, we found differences in the superior temporal gyrus and the superior temporal sulcus, bilaterally, for the processing of different stress patterns. For vowel quality processing, our data reveal a substantial contribution of the left intraparietal cortex. All activations were modulated by task demands, yielding different patterns for same and different pairs of stimuli.ConclusionsOur results suggest that the left superior temporal gyrus represents a basic system underlying stress processing to which additional structures including the homologous cortex site are recruited with increasing difficulty.

A note on phonological phrasing in South Kyungsang

Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 16.3. 371-382. The contrasting tonal profiles of swul (H?L), mwul (HH), and t?n (LH) are used as probes of phonological phrasing. It is shown that monosyllables combine with the following phonological word to form a single Minor Phrase when they appear at the beginning of a Major Phrase in a variety of syntactic constructions.

Semantic priming occurs for word but not location pronunciation in the postcue task

Semantic priming refers to the finding that a word response is facilitated if it is preceded by a related word compared to when it is preceded by an unrelated word. Dallas and Merikle (Can J Psychol 30: 15-21 1976a; Bull Psychon Soc 8: 441-444 1976b) demonstrated that semantic priming occurred under conditions in which a pair of simultaneously displayed words was previewed for over a second prior to the onset of a cue indicating which of the words should be pronounced aloud (postcue task). In contrast, semantic interference effects have been reported for postcue picture-naming tasks (Dean et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 27: 733-743, 2001; Humphreys et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 21: 961-980, 1995). According to Dean et al., the semantic interference effects in postcue picture naming occur because the integration of the object and the cued attribute in memory is more difficult for categorically related pictures than for unrelated pictures. The aim of this experiment was to determine whether this idea was true for postcue word pronunciation tasks. Participants completed two postcue tasks, one requiring pronunciation of the target word indicated by a locational cue and another requiring pronunciation of the location of a centrally presented word. Results indicated a semantic priming effect only for the locational cue condition suggesting that the integration of the cue and identity information was unaffected by word context. These data suggest that priming in a postcue word pronunciation task may be due to feedback from residual activation within the semantic system facilitating access to the target word's phonology.

Sentence imitation as a tool in identifying expressive morphosyntactic difficulties in children with severe speech difficulties

Sentence imitation has been identified as a good indicator of children's language skills, with performance differentiating children with specific language impairment and showing relationships with other language measures. It has a number of advantages over other methods of assessment. The assessment of morphosyntax in children who have severe speech difficulties presents unique challenges which currently available sentence imitation assessments do not address. This paper presents a new sentence imitation test (The Sentence Imitation Test (SIT-61)) and reports on an investigation which sets out to determine whether this test (1) reveals differences in performance between a group of children diagnosed with specific language impairment and a group of typically developing children (2) reveals distinct profiles of performance amongst children with different speech difficulties, and (3) provides information about morphosyntactic strengths and difficulties. SIT-61 is a finely graded sentence imitation test in which the phonotactic structure, segmental phonology and length of words were kept as developmentally simple as possible. Responses are scored for number of content words, function words and inflections correct. A novel scoring system was devised to credit a child where there was evidence of targeting a morpheme even if it was mispronounced. The test was administered to four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 6 years: 33 children with typical development, 13 children with known expressive morphosyntactic difficulties (specific language impairment), and two groups of 14 children with different types of speech disorder: a group with consistent phonological disorder, who used atypical phonological error patterns consistently; and a group with inconsistent phonological disorder, who produced atypical phonological errors inconsistently. SIT-61 found differences in performance between the group of typically developing participants and the three clinic groups. While the consistent phonological disorder group obtained extremely high scores for content and function words, they obtained lower inflection scores reflective of their speech difficulties. The scores of the specific language impairment and inconsistent phonological disorder groups were comparable for content and function words, but the groups were differentiated through an analysis of their errors. Further analyses confirmed that low scores obtained by some children in the inconsistent phonological disorder group were due to morphosyntactic difficulties and not speech difficulties. A new sentence imitation test, the SIT-61, is shown to be valuable tool for identifying expressive morphosyntactic difficulties in children. It is informative about the morphosyntactic abilities of children with speech disorders and raises questions as to the nature of their difficulties.

Phonological phrasing in Germanic: the judgement of history, confirmed through experiment

There are contrary views on how phonological phrasing in Germanic is determined: either by surface syntax or by rhythmic principles (forming trochaic ⁄ dactylic or iambic ⁄ anapaestic groupings) or alternately by both depending on speech style (spontaneous ⁄ planned, casual ⁄ careful). It is shown in this paper that a host of historical developments in Germanic – having to do with cliticisation and the creation of new inflectional affixes from clitics, and with attendant changes of the forms involved – point to a default phonological phrasing of grammatical ⁄ function words which associates them leftwards regardless of morphosyntactic constituency and which does not respect morphological word integrity either. Thus, encliticisation predominates almost exclusively, and productive inflectional affixes innovated via cliticisation are all suffixes. Experimental evidence from contemporary Germanic (in this case Dutch) confirms that phonological words are crucial units in speech planning, with such units equally formed as trochees irrespective of the phrasal syntax of grammatical and lexical words.

Listening to the sound of silence: disfluent silent pauses in speech have consequences for listeners

Silent pauses are a common form of disfluency in speech yet little attention has been paid to them in the psycholinguistic literature. The present paper investigates the consequences of such silences for listeners, using an Event-Related Potential (ERP) paradigm. Participants heard utterances ending in predictable or unpredictable words, some of which included a disfluent silence before the target. In common with previous findings using er disfluencies, the N400 difference between predictable and unpredictable words was attenuated for the utterances that included silent pauses, suggesting a reduction in the relative processing benefit for predictable words. An earlier relative negativity, topographically distinct from the N400 effect and identifiable as a Phonological Mismatch Negativity (PMN), was found for fluent utterances only. This suggests that only in the fluent condition did participants perceive the phonology of unpredictable words to mismatch with their expectations. By contrast, for disfluent utterances only, unpredictable words gave rise to a late left frontal positivity, an effect previously observed following ers and disfluent repetitions. We suggest that this effect reflects the engagement of working memory processes that occurs when fluent speech is resumed. Using a surprise recognition memory test, we also show that listeners were more likely to recognise words which had been encountered after silent pauses, demonstrating that silence affects not only the process of language comprehension but also its eventual outcome. We argue that, from a listener's perspective, one critical feature of disfluency is the temporal delay which it adds to the speech signal.

Conceptual and non-conceptual repetition priming in category exemplar generation: Evidence from bilinguals

One measure of conceptual implicit memory is repetition priming in the generation of exemplars from a semantic category, but does such priming transfer across languages? That is, do the overlapping conceptual representations for translation equivalents provide a sufficient basis for such priming? In Experiment 1 (N=96) participants carried out a deep encoding task, and priming between languages was statistically reliable, but attenuated, relative to within-language priming. Experiment 2 (N=96) replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and assessed the contributions of conceptual and non-conceptual processes using a levels-of-processing manipulation. Words that underwent shallow encoding exhibited within-language, but not between-language, priming. Priming in shallow conditions cannot therefore be explained by incidental activation of the concept. Instead, part of the within-language priming effect, even under deep-encoding conditions, is due to increased availability of language-specific lemmas or phonological word forms.

Phonological decisions require both the left and right supramarginal gyri

Recent functional imaging studies demonstrated that both the left and right supramarginal gyri (SMG) are activated when healthy right-handed subjects make phonological word decisions. However, lesion studies typically report difficulties with phonological processing after left rather than right hemisphere damage. Here, we used a unique dual-site transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) approach to test whether the SMG in the right hemisphere contributes to modality-independent (i.e., auditory and visual) phonological decisions. To test task-specificity, we compared the effect of real or sham TMS during phonological, semantic, and perceptual decisions. To test laterality and anatomical specificity, we compared the effect of TMS over the left, right, or bilateral SMG and angular gyri. The accuracy and reaction times of phonological decisions were selectively disrupted relative to semantic and perceptual decisions when real TMS was applied over the left, right, or bilateral SMG. These effects were not observed for TMS over the angular gyri. A follow-up experiment indicated that the threshold-intensity for inducing a disruptive effect on phonological decisions was identical for unilateral TMS over the right or left SMG. Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence that the right SMG contributes to accurate and efficient phonological decisions in the healthy brain, with no evidence that the left and right SMG can compensate for one another during TMS. Our findings motivate detailed studies of phonological processing in patients with acute or long-term damage of the right SMG.

Argument structure deficits in aphasia: New perspective on models of lexical production

Background: The study explores the ability of fluent and non-fluent aphasic patients to produce verbs using the appropriate argument structure, i.e., a feature specifying the number and type of participants in the event described by the verb. According to Chomsky's Minimalist Program (1995), the lexical entry of a verb contains information about the number of arguments and the thematic roles assigned, which is then mapped onto the sentence argument structure, while Bock and Levelt's (1994; see also Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) model of lexical production assumes that the information regarding verb argument structure (VAS) is part of the lemma and is accessed before the retrieval of the phonological word form, i.e., the lexeme. Aim: Participants were tested to investigate their ability to map thematic information onto the corresponding syntactic argument structure. Methods & Procedures: Seven aphasic patients (five suffering from non-fluent aphasia with agrammatism and two from fluent aphasia) and ten neurologically unimpaired individuals participated in the study. They were given a picture description task formulated in two conditions: in the first condition they were asked to provide a free description of the image, while in the second condition they had to complete the sentence structure provided by the examiner. Patients showing deficits in verb production were also tested for the use of prepositions within prepositional compounds and in a sentence context. Outcomes & Results: Four agrammatic patients and one fluent aphasic patient scored a high rate of argument structure errors in the selection of the appropriate verb, which was employed with an incorrect argument structure. Furthermore, these patients tended to substitute rather than to omit prepositions when required to fill the gap in a sentence. Conclusions: Our results indicate an impaired access to (VAS) and/or in mapping the thematic role information onto the syntactic argument structure. This deficit, which was found in both the agrammatic and the fluent aphasic patients, conflicts with an alternative interpretation of verb production errors in terms of omission of the preposition introducing the manner adjunct. Data support the hypothesis of retrieval of the verb lexeme without prior access to the corresponding lemma, where information about argument structure is stored.

Making and breaking the rules: lexical creativity in the alternative music scene

This article delves into the connections between language as a rule-governed system of communication and music as a means to express subcultural ideologies and satisfy collective needs. By resorting to the morphological analysis of a corpus of names of alternative music artists, the article evinces that language is a manipulable code through which users can convey their desire for self-assertion and their rejection of established commercialism and mainstream culture. Language is thus used to break away from the norm, and also from what is foreseeable or even politically correct. In morphological terms, this is reflected in the manipulation of morphological rules, which results in the creative or deviant use of word-formation devices, such as affixation (Preprophecy), conversion (Damnwells), compounding (The Lovemongers), or blending (The Beatscuits). Moreover, the fragile correspondence between an orthographic word, a phonological word and a lexeme is constantly challenged by the creative use of graphemes and punctuation, word play, or semantically anomalous word combinations (W00d5b17ch, Celibate Rifles). In conclusion, the study illustrates the users’ awareness of the possibilities of the system and their ability to manipulate it in order to meet pragmatic, aesthetic, intellectual, and social needs.

Effects of Direct Instruction on Phonological Awareness and Word Recognition for Students with Nonverbal Cerebral Palsy

Effects of Direct Instruction on Phonological Awareness and Word Recognition for Students with Nonverbal Cerebral Palsy