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摘要：The extent to which risk for French as a second language (L2) reading and language learning impairment are distinct and can be predicted using first language (L1) predictors was examined in English-speaking students in total French immersion programs. A total of 86 children were tested in fall of kindergarten, spring kindergarten, and spring Grade 1 using an extensive battery of L1 predictor tests (in kindergarten) and L2 outcome tests (in Grade 1). Analyses of the kindergarten predictor scores revealed distinct underlying components, one related to reading and one to oral language. Further analyses revealed that phonological awareness, phonological access, and letter-sound knowledge in L1 were significant predictors of risk for reading difficulties in L2 while performance on L1 sentence repetition, phonological awareness, and tense marking tests in kindergarten were the best predictors of risk for L1 and L2 oral language difficulties. Both fall- and spring-kindergarten predictors predicted Grade 1 outcomes to a significant extent, with the spring-kindergarten predictors being more accurate. These results provide support for distinctive risk profiles for L2 oral language and reading difficulty and, furthermore, argue that assessment of L1 abilities can be used to make reasonably accurate predictions of later reading and/or oral language learning difficulties in L2 students. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In spoken French, the phonological processes of liaison and resyllabification can render word and syllable boundaries ambiguous (e.g., un air 'an air'/un nerf 'a nerve,' both [.nE]). Production data have demonstrated that speakers of French vary the duration of consonants that surface in liaison environments relative to consonants produced word initially. Further research has suggested that listeners exploit these durational differences in the processing of running speech, although no study to date has directly tested this hypothesis. The current study examines the exploitation of duration in word recognition processes by manipulating this single acoustic factor while holding all other factors in the signal constant. The pivotal consonants in potentially ambiguous French sequences (e.g., /n/ in un nerf) were instrumentally shortened and lengthened and presented to listeners in two behavioral tasks. The results suggest that listeners are sensitive to segmental duration and use this information to modulate the lexical interpretation of spoken French. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Children's spoken nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialect use and their knowledge about phonological representations of word pronunciations were assessed in a sample of 105 children in kindergarten through second grade. Children were given expressive and receptive tasks with dialect-sensitive stimuli. Students who produced many NMAE features in speech nonetheless demonstrated considerable knowledge of 'standard' English forms on the tasks, and their phonological representations were not deficient. In regression analyses, an inverse relationship between NMAE use and reading skill was observed, but mediated by phonological awareness. The findings are inconsistent with the view that print-speech mismatches interfere with young NMAE speakers' reading acquisition, and instead suggest that dialect variation among beginning readers reflects metalinguistic differences that influence reading acquisition. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The goal of this study was to test on a non-francophone population a repetition task of non-words created for a francophone population. A group of heritage language speakers (n = 27) was paired with a group of native speakers of French (n = 27) with a corresponding level of receptive lexical knowledge. The scores of both groups on a task consisting of the repetition of nonwords were compared. An analysis of variance showed that heritage language participants scores were similar to those of native speakers of French, even though their first language was not the one from which the non-words had been formed. The results highlight the potential of using a non-word repetition task with a linguistically heterogeneous population. The findings also suggest that the best measurement of phonological memory may be the number of correct syllables produced, as this may limit the influence of various factors on the task. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Many learners of a foreign language (L2) struggle to correctly pronounce newly learned speech sounds, yet many others achieve this with apparent ease. Here we explored how a training study of learning complex consonant clusters at the very onset of L2 acquisition can inform us about L2 learning in general and individual differences in particular. To this end, adult Dutch native speakers were trained on Slovak words with complex consonant clusters (e.g., pstruh/pstrux/"trout", stvrt'/(esh)tvrc/"quarter") using auditory and orthographic input. In the same session following training, participants were tested on a battery of L2 perception and production tasks. The battery of L2 tests was repeated twice more with 1 week between sessions. In the first session, an additional battery of control tests was used to test participants' native language (L1) skills. Overall, in line with some previous research, participants showed only weak learning effects across the L2 perception tasks. However, there were considerable individual differences across all L2 tasks, which remained stable across sessions. Only two participants showed overall high L2 production performance that fell within 2 standard deviations of the mean ratings obtained for an L1 speaker. The mispronunciation detection task was the only perception task which significantly predicted production performance in the final session. We conclude by discussing several recommendations for future L2 learning studies. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Learners' ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated using a paired-comparison discrimination task. Minimal pairs containing contrasts in five linguistic categories (i.e., the formational parameters of movement, handshape, orientation, and location in ASL phonology, and a category comprised of contrasts in complex morphology) were presented in sentence contexts to a sample of 127 hearing learners at beginning and intermediate levels of proficiency and 10 Deaf native signers. Participants' responses were analyzed to determine the relative difficulty of the linguistic categories and the effect of proficiency level on performance. The results indicated that movement contrasts were the most difficult and location contrasts the easiest, with the other categories of stimuli of intermediate difficulty. These findings have implications for language learning in situations in which the first language is a spoken language and the second language (L2) is a signed language. In such situations, the construct of language transfer does not apply to the acquisition of L2 phonology because of fundamental differences between the phonological systems of signed and spoken languages, which are associated with differences between the modalities of speech and sign.

摘要：The cognitive mechanisms for writing to dictation of Chinese syllables by healthy adults were investigated using large-sample multiple regression analyses. In the experiment, subjects wrote down a corresponding character upon hearing a syllable. We mainly examined the effects of three types of attributes (i.e., lexical, semantic, and phonology to orthography conversion [POC] ones) in predicting the production probability of specific characters out of the homophone families for target syllables. We observed significant effects for all three types of attributes, as well as interactions between POC and the lexical attributes, and between POC and the semantic attributes. We further found that the semantic effects vanished for the writing stimuli without homophones. A feedback procedure (i.e., phonetic radical transparency) was also observed to influence Chinese writing performances. Our results support the hypothesis that the extent of semantic involvement in writing (spelling) to dictation is influenced by the effectiveness of POC procedure in a certain language and/or word set. The existence of an interaction between the lexical semantic route and the POC route in writing is further consolidated. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The theoretical framework of this study is based on the prevalent debate of whether prosodic processing is influenced by higher level linguistic-specific circuits or reflects lower level encoding of physical properties. Using the dichotic listening technique, the study investigates the hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent by native Japanese listeners and two groups of nonnative listeners with no prior pitch accent experience but differing in their native language experience with linguistic pitch: native listeners of Mandarin (a tone language with higher linguistic functional use of pitch) and native listeners of English (a stress language with lower functional use of pitch). The overall results reveal that, for both native and nonnative listeners, the processing of Japanese pitch accent is less lateralized (compared to lexical tone processing, which has been found to be a left hemisphere property). However, detailed analysis with individual pitch accents across groups shows a right hemisphere preference for processing the high-accent-low (H*L) pattern, a left hemisphere preference for LH*, and no hemisphere dominance for LH, indicating a significant reliance on the acoustic cues. These patterns are particularly prominent with the English listeners who are least experienced with linguistic pitch. Together, the findings suggest an interplay of linguistic and acoustic aspects in the processing of Japanese pitch accent by native and nonnative listeners. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The effects of the age of acquisition (AoA) of words were examined in the clinical treatment of 10 preschool children with phonological delays. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline experimental design, children were enrolled in one of four conditions that varied the AoA of the treated words (early vs. late acquired) relative to their corresponding word frequency (high vs. low frequency). Phonological generalization to treated and untreated sounds in error served as the dependent variable. Results showed that late acquired words induced greater generalization, with an effect size four times greater than early acquired words, whereas the effects of word frequency were minimized. Results are discussed relative to hypotheses about the role of AoA in language acquisition and the relevance of this variable for phonological learning. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Four eye movement experiments investigated whether readers use parafoveal input to gain information about the phonological or orthographic forms of consonants, vowels, and tones in word recognition when reading Thai silently. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which consonant, vowel, or tone information was manipulated. Previews of homophonous consonants (Experiment 1) and concordant vowels (Experiment 2) did not substantially facilitate processing of the target word, whereas the identical previews did. Hence, orthography appears to be playing the prominent role in early word recognition for consonants and vowels. Incorrect tone marker previews (Experiment 3) substantially retarded the subsequent processing of the target word, indicating that lexical tone plays an important role in early word recognition. Vowels in VOP (Experiment 4) did not facilitate processing, which points to vowel position being a significant factor. Primarily, orthographic codes of consonants and vowels (HOP) in conjunction with tone information are assembled from parafoveal input and used for early lexical access. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Word production difficulties are well documented in dyslexia, whereas the results are mixed for receptive phonological processing. This asymmetry raises the possibility that the core phonological deficit of dyslexia is restricted to output processing stages. The present study investigated whether a group of dyslexics had word level receptive difficulties using an auditory lexical decision task with long words and nonsense words. The dyslexics were slower and less accurate than chronological age controls in an auditory lexical decision task, with disproportionate low performance on nonsense words. The finding suggests that input processing difficulties are associated with the phonological deficit, but that these difficulties may be stronger above the level of phoneme perception. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Individual differences in abilities to form, access, and hone phonological representations of words are implicated in the development of oral and written language. This study addressed three important gaps in the literature concerning measurement of individual differences in phonological representation. First, we empirically examined the dimensionality of phonological representation abilities. Second, we empirically compared how well typical measures index various representation-related phonological processing abilities. Third, we supply data on Spanish phonological representation abilities of incipient Spanish-English bilingual children to address the need for information on phonological representation across languages. Specifically, nine measures of accessibility to and precision of phonological presentations were administered to 129 preschool children in the United States. Confirmatory factor analyses validated three separate but correlated a priori phonological processing abilities, that is, efficiency of accessing phonological codes, precision of phonological codes as reflected in speech production, and precision of phonological codes as reflected in speech perception. Most prototypic measures were strong indicators of their respective representation-related phonological ability. We discuss how the current data in Spanish compares to limited data in English, and the implications for the organization of phonological representations abilities. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examines how listener judgments of second language speech relate to individual differences in listeners' phonological memory, attention control, and musical ability. Sixty native English listeners (30 music majors, 30 nonmusic majors) rated 40 nonnative speech samples for accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency. The listeners were also assessed for phonological memory (serial recognition), attention control (trail making), and musical aptitude. Results showed that music majors assigned significantly lower scores than nonmusic majors solely for accentedness, particularly for low ability second language speakers. However, the ratings were not significantly affected by individual differences in listeners' phonological memory and attention control, which implies that these factors do not bias listeners' subjective judgments of speech. Implications for psycholinguistic research and for high-stakes speaking assessments are discussed. Adapted from the source document