Search results for "syllable"
showing 10 items of 51 documents
Diagnostic subgroups of developmental dyslexia have different deficits in neural processing of tones and phonemes.
2004
The present study addressed auditory processing in 8-11-year-old children with developmental dyslexia by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Cortical sound reception was evaluated by recording N250 responses to syllables and tones and cortical sound discrimination by analyzing the mismatch negativity (MMN) to syllable and tone changes. We found that both cortical sound reception and sound discrimination were impaired in dyslexic children. The analysis of the data obtained from two dyslexic subgroups, Dyslexics-1 being impaired in non-word reading (or both non-word and frequent word reading) and Dyslexics-2 in frequent word reading but not in non-word reading, revealed that the MM…
Costs and Benefits of Orthographic Inconsistency in Reading: Evidence from a Cross-Linguistic Comparison.
2016
We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, …
Long-term melodic expectation: The unexpected observation of distant priming effects
2009
The report provides a brief account of an experiment whose control conditions produced interestingly counter-intuitive results. The method adapted priming techniques to explore whether imagining well-known melodies would facilitate perceptual discrimination of congruent compared to incongruent melodic continuations in a syllable identification task. This was shown to be the case, but in a subsequent control experiment, imagining an irrelevant lure melody also showed a priming effect. The persistent priming effect apparently related the target sequence to the aurally presented, nonadjacent opening notes, and not to the intervening mental image. A number of statistical analyses of the pitch …
Análisis pragmaprosódico del marcador discursivo bueno
2016
En líneas generales los marcadores del discurso han sido estudiados desde un enfoque gramatical, léxico, pragmático o pragmasintáctico, si bien, son pocos los estudios que han centrado su atención hacia el plano suprasegmental o prosódico. Nuestro trabajo parte de una hipótesis previa sobre la que ciertos rasgos prosódicos (acento, duración silábica, pausa, fronteras tonales) se asocian a la diversidad funcional de este tipo de unidades lingüísticas. De este modo, desarrollaremos de forma cualitativa y a título ejemplificador un análisis prosódico sobre el marcador discursivo bueno mediante la herramienta informática Praat, de acuerdo con la bibliografía al uso. Nos centraremos así en el es…
Can we see syllables in monosyllabic words? A study with illusory conjunctions
2009
Mathey, Zagar, Doignon, and Seigneuric (2006) reported an inhibitory effect of syllabic neighbourhood in monosyllabic French words suggesting that syllable units mediate the access to lexical representations of monosyllabic stimuli. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perception of syllable units in monosyllabic stimuli. The illusory conjunction paradigm was used to examine perceptual groupings of letters. Experiment 1 showed that potential syllables in monosyllabic French words (e.g., BI in BICHE) affected the pattern of illusory conjunctions. Experiment 2 indicated that the perceptual parsing in monosyllabic items was due to syllable information and orthographic redundancy. …
Does omitting the accent mark in a word affect sentence reading? Evidence from Spanish
2021
Lexical stress in multisyllabic words is consistent in some languages (e.g., first syllable in Finnish), but it is variable in others (e.g., Spanish, English). To help lexical processing in a transparent language like Spanish, scholars have proposed a set of rules specifying which words require an accent mark indicating lexical stress in writing. However, recent word recognition using that lexical decision showed that word identification times were not affected by the omission of a word’s accent mark in Spanish. To examine this question in a paradigm with greater ecological validity, we tested whether omitting the accent mark in a Spanish word had a deleterious effect during silent sentenc…
Scientific abstracts and plain language summaries in psychology: A comparison based on readability indices.
2020
Findings from psychological research are usually difficult to interpret for non-experts. Yet, non-experts resort to psychological findings to inform their decisions (e.g., whether to seek a psychotherapeutic treatment or not). Thus, the communication of psychological research to non-expert audiences has received increasing attention over the last years. Plain language summaries (PLS) are abstracts of peer-reviewed journal articles that aim to explain the rationale, methods, findings, and interpretation of a scientific study to non-expert audiences using non-technical language. Unlike media articles or other forms of accessible research summaries, PLS are usually written by the authors of th…
La definizione di sillaba della poetica di Aristotele
2013
This paper is an attempt to reconsider the definition of syllable in Aristotle’s Poetics. The problems arising from this text can be solved, in my opinion, by reading it in the full context of the twentieth chapter of the Poet- ics, and by comparing it with what Aristotle wrote about syllables and phonet- ic unities in the whole Corpus Aristotelicum. The definition of ‘syllable’ (syl- labé) must thus be read in close connection with the definition of ‘element’ (stoicheion). For Aristotle, the syllable cannot be reduced to its elements (Met. Z 17), because the syllable has a prosodic and metrical structure which de- fines it as minimal linguistic unity. A vocal expression is a prosodic confi…
Syllabic composition and use frequency: how do they affect stress assignment? A comparison between slow readers and fluent readers
2013
Italian words can be stressed either on penultimate or antepenultimate syllables. In both cases, stress assignment is not predictable by rules, but requires a lexical check. Italian words with stress on the penultimate syllable are defined as regular because the proportion of these words is much larger than words with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, defined as irregular. We propose to investigate the influence (in terms of correct stress positioning) of different syllabic and stress structures during "decoding” by both slow readers and fluent readers. Forty-eight children, twenty-four slow and twenty-four fluent readers, decoded “target words” selected on the basis of frequency (hig…
GreekLex 2: A comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information
2017
Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stre…