The overall goals of the research program are to understand how the language apparatus, biologically specialized for listening and speaking, serves those functions and how it becomes adapted to reading and writing. Projects by Fowler and Best speaking and listening. The Project by Carol Fowler explores the gestural basis of phonology. We propose research on speech production and perception designed to develop further Browman and Goldstein's articulatory phonology and to test directly our view that listeners achieve """"""""parity"""""""" in recovery of the talker's phonological message by perceiving phonetic gestures of the vocal tract. The Project Best explores now gestures affiliate to form phonological units or segments-the components of language that alphabetic orthographies represent- and how they function contrastively. It also examines the nature of phonological categories that develop as a function of language learning. The next four projects study the dependence of reading on the phonological processes of speaking and listening and their modification from experience with reading and writing. The Project Katz addresses directly a question of considerable importance to us, whether the phonological representations that readers access early in the process of written word recognition are the same ones (and presumably, the gestural ones) that they use to speak and that they access in listening to speech. The Project Anne Fowler tests the view that deficits in phonological representations or abilities limit the development of phonological awareness in young children and their success in learning to read and spell words and comprehend text. Experiments are designed, additionally, to explore the nature of the phonological deficits that poor readers of all ages exhibit. The Project Turvey draws on skilled readers of different writing systems that vary in the transparency of the relation between letter and phonological segment to explore the universality of findings that readers extract phonological information from print very early int he process of word recognition. A network model in which phonological representations have primacy in word recognition is contrasted experimentally with the latest version of th """"""""dual route"""""""" model of word recognition, in which orthographic representations of words have primacy. The Project by Feldman draws on readers of a variety of writing systems, and, additionally, of a variety of morphological types, to explore readers' analysis of written words into their component stems and affixes. A network model in which morphological analysis is an emergent consequence of the consistent form-to-(orthographic/phonological)-meaning associations characteristic of morphologically related words is contrasted experimentally with a dual route model of morphological analysis. Overall, we expect our research to contribute substantially to our understanding of the phonological basis of spoken language and its role in speaking, listening and reading.
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