Our goals are to understand the phonological component of language, biologically specialized for speaking and listening, serves those functions and adapts to reading and writing. Projects I and II offer complementary foci on speaking and listening. Project I investigates the public phonological activities of speaker/listeners. We test our unique claim that phonetic gestures are the elemental components of words, of speech plans, ov focal tract actions, and of speech percepts.. Project II explores brain mechanisms that support speaking and listening. Project I investigates the public phonological activities of speaker/listeners. We test our unique claim that phonetic gestures are the elemental components of words, of speech plans, of vocal tract actions, and of speech percepts. Project II explores brain mechanisms that support speaking and listening. Two goals are to test claims of our motor theory.: that perception is achieved by a phonetic module and that the module recruits control structures for production in perceptual processing. Project III addresses the remarkable fact that, although humans evolved to speak and listen, they can access phonological forms efficiently from print, speaking faces, pictures, and sign language. Project III explores, compares and contrasts these routes to the phonology. Project IV-VI focus on reading. The link from speech to reading is this. Skill reading requires rapid and reliable access to phonological information from print. To learn to read, children must develop """"""""phoneme awareness,"""""""" an appreciation that spoken words are composed of the for language early in processing print; reading is parasitic on speech. In Project IV, we use fMRI, behavioral tests and simulations to explore brain systems that underlie beginning and skilled word recognition. Project V explores the different pathways by which the alphabetic principle can be learned and how beginning readers develop skill. We investigate awareness and decoding and we study the shift from unskilled decoding to fluency (presumably as the ventral route develops). Project VI investigates skilled word recognition in a variety of orthographies. Studies test the phonological coherence hypothesis that phonological representations achieve resolution faster, and reach states of greater stability than other representations and so provide the earliest and the primary influence on lexical dynamics. We also test an emergent morphology hypothesis that morphological representations arise from, and then constrain, the dynamics of orthographic, phonological and semantic activations. We expect our research to contribute substantially to our understanding of the phonological basis of spoken language and the role of the phonology in language use by ear and by eye.
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