Project III examines the remarkable flexibility of phonological behavior that allows its transmission by various optical signals, extending our primary claims that reading is founded on extracting phonological form from print and that phonological structure is gestural. Talking faces, printed words, pictures, and signaling hands are all optical signals that provide access to phonological information, but they differ in the completeness and directness with which they reveal it. Whereas Projects I-II focus primarily on acoustic speech signals, Project III begins with the observation that the articulatory gestures of speech also have consequences in dynamic facial movements, which directly but incompletely reflect focal tract movements. Our first specific aim examines how speech perceivers extract phonological form from those dynamic facial patterns. Printed words, by contrast, provide relatively complete phonological information, but it is conveyed indirectly via an arbitrary, learned code. While Projects IV-VI probe the phonological basis for reading per se, our second specific aim here is to evaluate whether the phonological form extracted from print is in common with that of speech and whether both are gestural. Pictures offer access (albeit indirect and imprecise) to words as phonological forms via semantic association rather than orthographic encoding. Their inadequacies differ from those of faces. Our third specific aim compares phonological access via picture, printing, face and speech. If there is a common phonology, individual performance differences should co-vary across perception of speech and these various optical signals. Our four specific aim explores co-variation in performance in accessing phonological forms from speech, print and faces. Sign languages use a very different optical signal offering direct and complete information about the phonological structure of signs. Yet no written are in wide use, so within-sign literacy cannot interact with its phonological structure. Our fifth specific aim tests how signers extract phonological information from signs, in tasks similar to those used for spoken languages. The results will inform us about the multiple instantiations of phonological behavior beyond the acoustic speech signal. Such knowledge of central theoretical and clinical significance.
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