Generalization in motor control is the extent to which motor learning affects movements in situations different than those in which it originally occurred. Recent data on orofacial speech movements indicates that motor sequence learning generalizes to novel syllable sequences containing phonotactically illegal, but previously practiced, consonant…

Purpose: One of the central questions in speech production research is to what degree certain structures have an inherent difficulty and to what degree repeated encounter and practice make them easier to process. The goal of this article was to determine the extent to which frequency and sonority distance of consonant clusters predict production…

We examined the role of morphological processing in the reading of inflections and derivations in Arabic, a morphologically-rich language, among 228 first-graders and 230 second-graders. All words were morphologically complex, with differences in number of morphemes and morphological transparency. Inflections consisted of three morphemes, with…

Purpose: Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) interferes with speech output. DAF causes distorted and disfluent productions and errors in the serial order of produced sounds. Although DAF has been studied extensively, the specific patterns of elicited speech errors are somewhat obscured by relatively small speech samples, differences across studies,…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…