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Substantial evidence from studies of English-speaking dyslexic children's spelling suggests that these individuals have a persistent impairment in representing the phonological structure and content of words in writing. In contrast, several studies of German dyslexic children (Landerl & Wimmer, 2000) suggest that, among learners of transparent orthographies, the above impairment is transient and resolves by the end of grade 2; instead dyslexic spelling is characterised by a persistent impairment in learning inconsistent spelling patterns. In order to determine whether phonological spelling difficulties are transient among dyslexic spellers of other transparent orthographies, we analysed phonological accuracy in the spellings of 43 dyslexic children, 43 age-matched control and 43 spelling-matched control children attending primary schools in Prague. Czech dyslexic children presented an interesting test case because Czech has a transparent orthography. Czech dyslexics as old as 11 years (grade 5) continued to produce high rates of phonologically inaccurate spellings relative to their age peers; thus their difficulties with phonological representation in spelling had not resolved. This pattern is consistent with findings from studies of English-speaking dyslexics, and it suggests that orthographic depth may impact less dramatically on the manifestation of dyslexia than has been proposed previously.

Words like yeah, okay and (al)right are fairly unspecific in their lexical semantics, and not least for this reason there is a general tendency for them to occur with highly varied and expressive prosodic patterns across languages. Here we examine in depth the prosodic forms that express eight pragmatic functions of the Czech discourse marker jasně, including resignation, reassurance, surprise, indifference or impatience. Using a collection of 172 tokens from a corpus of scripted dialogues by 30 native speakers, we performed acoustic analyses, applied classification algorithms and solicited judgments from native listeners in a perceptual experiment. There appeared to be multi-parametric differences between jasně realizations in terms of their F0, timing and intensity patterns, which gave rise to generally consistent form-function mappings. For example, resignation seems to be realized with a falling intonation contour, relatively slow tempo, long wordinitial consonant and a short word-final vowel. Although the most significant prosodic parameters used for clustering analysis involved segment durations, all pragmatic functions were expressed by patterns of multiple features.

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