The development of stress sensitivity and its contribution to word reading in school-aged children.

Background: This study examined the development of stress sensitivity and its relationship with word reading. Previous research has rarely measured phoneme and stress sensitivity in the same task, making a direct comparison of the contribution between the two in reading development difficult.

Methods: Participants were native English-speaking adults and children at ages of 6, 8, and 10 years ( = 24, 22, 22, and 24, respectively).

Recent language experience influences cross-language activation in bilinguals with different scripts.

Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether the phonological information in the non-target language is activated and its influence on bilingual processing.

Approach: Using the Stroop paradigm, Mandarin-English bilinguals named the ink color of Chinese characters in English in Experiment 1 and named the Chinese characters in addition to the color naming in English in Experiment 2. Twenty-four participants were recruited in each experiment.

The Contributions of Segmental and Suprasegmental Information in Reading Chinese Characters Aloud.

The Chinese writing system provides an excellent case for testing the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental information in reading words aloud within the same language. In logographic Chinese characters, neither segmental nor tonal information is explicitly represented, whereas in Pinyin, an alphabetic transcription of the character, both are explicitly represented. Two primed naming experiments were conducted in which the targets were always written characters.

Acoustic cues to perception of word stress by English, Mandarin, and Russian speakers.

Purpose: This study investigated how listeners' native language affects their weighting of acoustic cues (such as vowel quality, pitch, duration, and intensity) in the perception of contrastive word stress.

Method: Native speakers (N = 45) of typologically diverse languages (English, Russian, and Mandarin) performed a stress identification task on nonce disyllabic words with fully crossed combinations of each of the 4 cues in both syllables.

Results: The results revealed that although the vowel quality cue was the strongest cue for all groups of listeners, pitch was the second strongest cue for the English and the Mandarin listeners but was virtually disregarded by the Russian listeners.

Native and novel language prosodic sensitivity in English-speaking children with and without dyslexia.

Children with reading disability and normal reading development were compared in their ability to discriminate native (English) and novel language (Mandarin) from nonlinguistic sounds. Children's preference for native versus novel language sounds and for disyllables containing dominant trochaic versus non-dominant iambic stress patterns was also assessed. Participants included second and third grade monolingual native English speakers with reading disability (N = 18) and normal reading development (N = 18).

The activation of segmental and tonal information in visual word recognition.

Mandarin Chinese has a logographic script in which graphemes map onto syllables and morphemes. It is not clear whether Chinese readers activate phonological information during lexical access, although phonological information is not explicitly represented in Chinese orthography. In the present study, we examined the activation of phonological information, including segmental and tonal information in Chinese visual word recognition, using the Stroop paradigm.

The processing of lexical tones by young Chinese children.

The current study examined five- and seven-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's processing of lexical tones in relation to speech segments by varying onset and rime in an oddity task (onset±rime±). Results showed that children experienced more difficulty in lexical tone oddity judgment when rimes differed across monosyllables (e.g.