This study examined the effect of word class (nouns vs. verbs) on L2 pronunciation accuracy of Korean–English bilinguals. The participants were 192 adult immigrants whose age of arrival (AOA) in the United States ranged from 6 to 23 years. Transcriptions of their productions of English sentences indicated that they were more accurate in pronouncing verbs than nouns. Similarly, the results of a grammaticality judgment test revealed that they were more accurate in detecting incorrect formulations of verbs than nouns. These effects were significant in late L2 learners (AOA 12–23). The results were interpreted to reflect the influence of the linguistic structure of Korean (where the verb is more prominent than the noun) on learning English as an L2.

Previous research has shown a clear relationship between phonological awareness and early reading ability. This article concerns some aspects of spoken language skill that may contribute to the development of phonological awareness, as manifested in rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness. It addresses the hypothesis that phonological awareness abilities are associated with measures that purportedly tap into the strength of phonological representations. We examined rhyme awareness, phoneme awareness, articulatory skill, speech perception, vocabulary, and letter and word knowledge in 40 children, aged 4 to 6, who were just beginning to be exposed to formal reading experiences in private preschools. The children also received cognitive tests and tests of reading ability. The results did not validate strength of phonological representation as a unitary construct underlying phonological awareness more generally, but instead revealed a selective pattern of associations between spoken language tasks and aspects of phonological awareness. Speech perception was closely associated with rhyme awareness measures when age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge were controlled. Children with a less developed sense of rhyme had a less mature pattern of articulation, independent of age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge. Phoneme awareness was associated with phonological perception and production. Children with low phoneme awareness skills showed a different pattern of speech perception and articulation errors than children with strong abilities. However, these differences appeared to be largely a function of age, letter knowledge, and especially vocabulary knowledge.

A total of 38 preschool children (3 and 4 years old) were assessed on a set of phonological awareness tasks three times over the course of a year. The tasks used were rhyme and alliteration matching tasks with distractor items that were either semantically or phonologically related to the target. In both tasks, the children found the distractors matched for phonological similarity more difficult to reject than the semantically related distractors or the unrelated distractors. The results emphasize the importance of controlling for global phonological factors when designing phonological awareness tasks. The longitudinal findings are discussed within the context of current theories on the development of phonological representations.

This study explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have particular difficulty in processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties (n = 18) were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. First, an accent auditory lexical decision task was administered. In one condition, the children made lexical decisions about stimuli presented in their own accent (London). In the second condition, the stimuli were spoken in an unfamiliar accent (Glaswegian). The results showed that the children with speech difficulties had a specific deficit on the unfamiliar accent. Performance on the other auditory discrimination tasks revealed additional deficits at lower levels of input processing. The wider clinical implications of the findings are considered.

This article addresses whether phonological representation is an area of weakness for children with SLI and whether it contributes to their difficulty with grammatical morphemes. Bishop (1997) proposed that children with SLI form phonological representations more slowly than typically developing children. This hypothesis was investigated by exposing a group of children with SLI and a group of typically developing children, matched for language ability, to novel morphemes. Their ability to detect phonemic changes from the target morpheme was tested. Children with SLI were less able than typically developing children to detect changes when the morphemes were presented in nonfinal utterance positions. Hence, children with SLI were less able to form fully specified phonological representations of morphemes in conditions of low perceptual salience. The results are interpreted within a limited processing capacity framework.

The phonological representations of adult less skilled readers (n = 25) were studied in comparison to those of adult skilled readers (n = 25) and adolescent reading-age controls (n = 25). Participants were tested on a paired confrontation naming and spelling test, given two times to evaluate consistency of performance, and a pseudoword repetition task. On confrontation naming, less skilled readers were less accurate and less consistent, and they made more phonological errors. Likewise, their spellings were less accurate and consistent than those of the control groups; inaccurate naming influenced their spelling significantly more often than it did the spelling of adult skilled readers. They also had fewer correct responses on the pseudoword repetition task. The results confirm that there are weaknesses in the phonological representations of known and new words for adult less skilled readers, with observable consequences for spelling.

Despite the evidence for a core phonological deficit in dyslexia, the nature of this deficit at the level of the phonological representation is not well understood. In this study, the auditory word gating paradigm was used to examine the quality of the underlying phonological representations in dyslexic and average readers. Although the dyslexic children showed age-related nonword and rapid naming deficits, they did not differ from the age-matched controls in the amount of acoustic–phonetic input required to identify sets of words that varied in word frequency and phonological neighborhood density. These results indicate that input phonological processing, as tapped by the gating task, is normal in this group of dyslexic children, whereas their deficits on the RAN tasks suggest that there are problems with phonological retrieval. The implications of these results are considered in relation to the phonological representations hypothesis of dyslexia; the evidence suggests that what is impaired in dyslexia are the retrieval processes that operate on phonological representations.

A longitudinal study investigated the claim that phonological memory contributes to vocabulary acquisition in young children. In the first phase, children were given tests of receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, nonword repetition, phonological sensitivity (or “awareness”), and performance IQ. In the second phase, children were given the nonword repetition and receptive vocabulary tests. In Session 1, both nonword repetition and phonological sensitivity accounted for variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar after performance IQ effects were controlled. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled, nonword repetition did not account for significant additional variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar. When performance IQ and autoregression effects were controlled, all Session 1 verbal ability measures predicted Session 2 vocabulary, but only Session 1 vocabulary predicted Session 2 nonword repetition. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled, Session 1 nonword repetition (leniently scored) predicted Session 2 vocabulary. Overall, these findings show qualified support for the claim that the capacity component of nonword repetition contributes directly to vocabulary in young children. They suggest that the association between nonword repetition and vocabulary in young children may, to a substantial extent, reflect a latent phonological processing ability that is also manifest in phonological sensitivity.

This book focuses on non-functional phonologies (NFP): that is, phonological disorders with no known physiological or neurological causes. It is a substantial book, well written and carefully researched, with an applied and pedagogical orientation that will make it invaluable for clinicians and students in speech pathology and child phonology. It is an ambitious and original work; its practical guidance for those assessing child phonology is based on a comprehensive and up-to-date descriptive and theoretical review of phonological systems and their realization in children's speech. It consists of six chapters, each of which introduces general concepts of phonology as well as modern concepts of nonlinear phonology and includes practical material, most notably a set of original worksheets that are geared to assessment or other types of intervention. It also has three appendices: the first reviews commercial tests, the second provides examples of stress patterns in English lexical items, and the third presents conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In the preface to this passionately argued text, the author makes the political aspects of the work quite clear. She states that she hopes readers will “become angry, desperate, frustrated, as well as reflective, optimistic and eager to join me and others in demanding, suggesting, creating, and implementing change” (p. xv). This statement sets the tone for the entire book: a mixture of self-professed utopian thinking (p. 600) and clear-sighted accounts of actually existing conditions. Recognizing that a simple call for justice is not enough in a world dominated by transnational capitalism and marked by institutionalized inequities in power, the author admits that a human rights approach to linguistic issues will only work if there is also a redistribution of the world's resources. The book is thus a call to action on a variety of fronts.