The present study explores phonetic processing in deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) when they have to learn phonetically similar words. Forty-six 34-to-78-month-old French-speaking deaf children with CIs were tested on 16 different trials. In each trial, they were first trained with two word-object pairings, and then a third object was…

Speech recognition is an active process that involves some form of predictive coding. This statement is relatively uncontroversial. What is less clear is the source of the prediction. The dual-stream model of speech processing suggests that there are two possible sources of predictive coding in speech perception: the motor speech system and the…

There is a substantial amount of literature reporting the incidence of phonological difficulties to be higher for children who stutter when compared to normally fluent children, suggesting a link between stuttering and phonology. In view of this, the purpose of the investigation was to determine whether, among children who stutter, there are…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of four types of utterances in preschool children who stutter: perceptually fluent, containing normal disfluencies (OD utterance), containing stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD utterance), and containing both normal and stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD+OD utterance).…

We compared the processing of natural language quantifiers in a group of patients with schizophrenia and a healthy control group. In both groups, the difficulty of the quantifiers was consistent with computational predictions, and patients with schizophrenia took more time to solve the problems. However, they were significantly less accurate only…

The brain mechanisms of hearing include large regions of the anterior temporal, prefrontal, and inferior parietal cortex, and an extensive network of descending connections between the cortex and sub-cortical components of what is presently known as the auditory system. One important function of these additional ("top-down") mechanisms for hearing…

Slowed speed of processing and impaired rapid temporal processing (RTP) have been proposed to underlie specific language impairment (SLI), but it is not clear that these dysfunctions are unique to SLI. We considered the contribution of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which frequently co-occurs with language impairments, to…

We first review the mirror-system hypothesis on the evolution of the language-ready brain, stressing the important role of imitation and protosign in providing the scaffolding for protospeech. We then assess the role of social interaction and non-specific knowledge of language in the emergence of new sign languages in deaf communities (focusing on…

Two experiments investigated the ability of adults with a history of language-based learning disability (hLLD) and their normal language (NL) peers to learn prosodic patterns of a novel language. Participants were exposed to stimuli from an artificial language and tested on items that required generalization of the stress patterns and the…

The purpose of the study was to investigate speed of processing in college students with a history of problems with language. Affected individuals (n = 16) were identified through a self-reported history of language and/or reading difficulties, and compared to a group of 16 unaffected individuals. Measures of language ability and a battery of…

Purpose: This study was designed to test the word learning abilities of adults with typical language abilities, those with a history of disorders of spoken or written language (hDSWL), and hDSWL plus attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (+ADHD). Methods: Sixty-eight adults were required to associate a novel object with a novel label, and then…

In this study we investigated the recovery patterns of language and cognitive functions in patients with post-traumatic language processing deficits and in patients with aphasia following a stroke. The correlation of specific language functions and cognitive functions was analyzed in the acute phase and 6 months later. Significant recovery of the…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of adults with language-based learning disorders (L/LD) and normal language controls on verbal short-term and verbal working memory tasks. Eighteen adults with L/LD and 18 normal language controls were compared on verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory tasks under low,…

The lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with chronic nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions following stroke (n=6) were investigated using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) picture description task [Kertesz, A. (1982). "The Western aphasia battery." New York: Grune and Stratton] and compared with those of a…

A fundamental problem for those interested in human communication is to determine how ideas and the various units of language structure are communicated through speaking. The physiological concepts involved in the control of muscle contraction and movement are theoretically distant from the processing levels and units postulated to exist in…