The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be…

This study investigated the developmental time course of spoken word recognition in older children using eye tracking to assess how the real-time processing dynamics of word recognition change over development. We found that 9-year-olds were slower to activate the target words and showed more early competition from competitor words than…

Using an identification task, we examined lexical effects on the perception of vowel duration as a cue to final consonant voicing in 12 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 13 age-matched (6;6-9;6) peers with typical language development (TLD). Naturally recorded CVtsets [word-word (WW), nonword-nonword (NN), word-nonword (WN) and…