Purpose: General language abilities of children with cochlear implants have been thoroughly investigated, especially at young ages, but far less is known about how well they process language in real-world settings, especially in higher grades. This study addressed this gap in knowledge by examining recognition of sentences with complex syntactic…

Purpose: Child phonologists have long been interested in how tightly speech input constrains the speech production capacities of young children, and the question acquires clinical significance when children with hearing loss are considered. Children with sensorineural hearing loss often show differences in the spectral and temporal structures of…

Purpose: Models of speech recognition suggest that "top-down" linguistic and cognitive functions, such as use of phonotactic constraints and working memory, facilitate recognition under conditions of degradation, such as in noise. The question addressed in this study was what happens to these functions when a listener who has experienced…

Purpose: Children must develop optimal perceptual weighting strategies for processing speech in their first language. Hearing loss can interfere with that development, especially if cochlear implants are required. The three goals of this study were to measure, for children with and without hearing loss: (a) cue weighting for a manner distinction,…

Purpose: One task of childhood involves learning to optimally weight acoustic cues in the speech signal in order to recover phonemic categories. This study examined the extent to which spectral degradation, as associated with cochlear implants, might interfere. The 3 goals were to measure, for adults and children, (a) cue weighting with spectrally…

Purpose: Common wisdom suggests that listening in noise poses disproportionately greater difficulty for listeners with cochlear implants (CIs) than for peers with normal hearing (NH). The purpose of this study was to examine phonological, language, and cognitive skills that might help explain speech-in-noise abilities for children with CIs.…

Purpose: Several acoustic cues specify any single phonemic contrast. Nonetheless, adult, native speakers of a language share weighting strategies, showing preferential attention to some properties over others. Cochlear implant (CI) signal processing disrupts the salience of some cues: In general, amplitude structure remains readily available, but…