Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction…

Data on disfluencies in the speech of non-stuttering adults are relevant to several aspects of the assessment and treatment of adults who stutter. Currently, very few sources provide relevant data. In the existing literature on normally fluent speakers, there is no consistency in sample length or topic or in which types of disfluency are counted.…

Examines theoretical issues concerning the development of and the unity or diversity underlying private speech and studies the developmental progression of private speech in a low-income, culturally different sample. The effects of age, sex, environmental context, and the relationship of social speech to varieties of private speech are also…

This study, with 161 children with and without language learning problems, tested the hypothesis that as children's language development matures, factor-analytic structural changes occur that are associated with measurements of fine-grained auditory discrimination, receptive vocabulary, receptive language, speech production, and 3 performance…

Stimuli used in research on the perception of the speech signal have often been obtained from simple filtering and distortion of the speech waveform, sometimes accompanied by noise. However, for more complex stimulus generation, the parameters of speech can be manipulated, after analysis and before synthesis, using various types of algorithms to…

This literature-based review examines the relationship between the acquisition of segmental awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy. Cited studies show that the segmental analysis ability of most dyslexics is very poor and suggest one factor may be related to the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity…

This study investigated whether phonological working memory was associated with spoken language development in 38 preschool children. Significant differences were found, with children who had good phonological memory abilities producing language that was more grammatically complex, contained a richer array of words, and included longer utterances…

A theory of neurolinguistic function is proposed to explain fluency and the production of stuttered speech disruptions. Stuttering results when the speaker is under time pressure and is unaware of the cause of dyssynchrony between the linguistic and paralinguistic components of speech which are processed by different neural systems but converge on…

Discusses the phonetic module that increases the rate of information flow, establishes the parity between sender and receiver, and provides for the natural development of phonetic structures in the individual. Cites evidence and function of this specialization and architectural relations between the two classes of modules. (Author/RT)