We investigated Finnish children's use of morphological knowledge in spelling. A spelling task and an oral morpheme manipulation task given to first-year children showed that, although morphological facilitation emerged in children's spelling by April of Year 1, this facilitation was not specifically connected to children's morphological knowledge despite a general relationship between spelling and morphological knowledge. Experiment 2, using pseudowords with endings analogous to case inflections, suggested that these caselike endings prompted morphological parsing during spelling. The results suggest that in the transparent Finnish orthography there is no specific connection between morphological knowledge and mastery of certain spelling patterns. Instead, the facilitation arises from the morpheme-based organization of the lexicon and the subsequent parsing of words into their constituent morphemes.

This article investigated the development of phonological encoding in speech production by examining the production of reiterant two-word sequences varying in phonological similarity. Two groups of typically developing children and a group of college-aged adults participated. Both groups of children produced target words with longer durations when they were preceded by words sharing initial consonant–vowel (CV) sequences than when preceded by phonologically unrelated words or words sharing vowel–consonant (VC) sequences. For adults, the duration of target words was shorter when they were preceded by words sharing final VC sequences than in the other conditions. The developmental decrease in the influence of CV-related prime words on target-word duration may be related to changes in the level of activation of lexical items during speech production. Developmental changes in the influence of VC-related prime words are less clear, but may be due to age-group specific behavior in the production of identical sequences of words.

Twenty 9- to 12-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared with 18 age-matched controls on auditory discrimination tasks, using a three-interval, two-alternative forced-choice format. The first task used minimal word pairs in silence and in noise. Nonspeech tasks involved discriminating direction of frequency glides and had two versions: (a) the glide moved from 500 to 1500 Hz, and duration was adaptively decreased; (b) all glides lasted 250 ms, and the frequency range was adaptively modified until a threshold was reached. Control and SLI groups did not differ on the glide tasks. Around half the children in both groups accurately discriminated 20 ms glides. There was a small but significant group difference on the speech-in-noise task, and scores were weakly related to literacy level. Perception of brief, transient, nonspeech stimuli is not abnormal in the majority of school-aged children with SLI.

Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to typically developing same-age peers (TD-A) and younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) in terms of their use of grammatical morphology in spontaneous speech. The children with SLI showed high levels of accuracy on present tense and past tense (preterite) verb inflections. However, their use of definite articles and direct object clitics was significantly more problematic than for either the TD-MLU or the TD-A children. Substitutions and omissions were observed, especially in contexts requiring plural articles and clitics. Many of the details of the observed Spanish SLI profile were predicted by Wexler's (Extended) Unique Checking Constraint (EUCC) proposal. Remaining details in the data could be accommodated by making additional assumptions within the same general linguistic framework as the EUCC. Some of the differences between the findings from Spanish and those from previous studies on related languages such as Italian suggest the need for clinical assessment and intervention procedures that are shaped as much by language-specific details as by the language's typology.

The effectiveness of a high variability identification training procedure to improve native Japanese identification and production of the American English (AE) mid and low vowels /æ/, //, //, //, // was investigated. Vowel identification and production performance for two groups of Japanese participants was measured before and after a 6-week identification training period. Recordings were made of both group's pre-/posttraining vowel productions of the five vowels, which were evaluated by a group of native AE listeners using a five-alternative, forced-choice identification task and by an acoustic analysis of the vowel productions. The overall results confirmed that the identification performance of the experimental (trained) participants improved after identification training with feedback and that the training also had a positive effect on their production of the target AE vowels.

Spelling performances in 104 Danish children from Grades 4 to 6 were compared across three levels of orthographic transparency. At the first level all spellings that were plausible at the level of the single phoneme were accepted. At the second level spellings were accepted only if they were plausible when the phonological context was considered (context sensitive spellings). At the third level word-specific spelling accuracy was required. There were 16 word items per level, matched for structure and frequency. Scores for context sensitive spellings were intermediate between scores at the phonemic level and the word-specific level, both for vowel and consonant spellings. Scores for context sensitive vowels and consonants were significantly interrelated even when performances at the phonemic and word-specific levels were controlled. The results demonstrate that Danish spellers beyond the initial phases of literacy development rely on phonological entities larger than the single phoneme. They extend similar findings from English in suggesting that knowledge of context sensitive spellings is a separate component of spelling competence.

The primary purpose of the study reported here was to explore the effects of the complexity of syllable structure and the effects of task differences in the explanation of deficit in phonological awareness (PA). A sample of 97 subjects was selected and organized into three different groups: 29 reading-disabled (RD) children, 41 normal readers matched in age with the former, and 27 younger normal readers at the same reading level as those with reading disabilities. We administered PA tasks which included items with different complexity of syllable structure. The results showed that the complexity of syllable structure had no particularly marked effect on the dyslexic children. Rather, the isolation task revealed the phonological deficit across all syllable structures.

Although phonemic awareness does not usually develop outside the acquisition of alphabetic reading, nonnegligible phoneme manipulation abilities have been reported in Japanese fourth graders who knew only the kana, nonalphabetic, writing system. The present contribution explored whether some characteristics of this system may facilitate phonemic awareness in Japanese children. In two distinct training studies, the pre- and posttest phonemic awareness abilities of three groups were compared, one trained with explicit reference to some organizational aspects of the kana matrix, one trained without such reference, and one control. Training was effective in both studies, especially when displaying explicit reference to the kana system. Some features of this system thus seem helpful in drawing Japanese children's attention to phonemic constituents.