Language is a unique skill used by humans to communicate thoughts and feelings. For most individuals, language is understood through different sensory modalities--for instance, hearing auditory words relies on audition, while perceiving visual speech via lipreading and reading written text both utilize the visual system. Although these different…

The current study examined to what extent face and speech processing interact with each other and whether they enhance or impair the processing of the other in 5-year-olds (n = 51) and adults (n = 34). Using a computer-based speeded sorting task allowed to directly test the influence of auditory speech on face processing and the influence of face…

Background: Word retrieval skills change across the lifespan. Permanent alterations in the form of decreased accuracy or increased response time can be a consequence of both normal ageing processes or the presence of acquired and neurodegenerative disorders (e.g., aphasia and dementia). Despite the extensive literature exploring the…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a multifaceted disorder. Recently, interest has grown in prosodic aspects of DLD, but most investigations of possible prosodic causes focus on speech perception tasks. Here, we focus on speech production from a speech amplitude envelope (AE) perspective. Perceptual studies have indicated a role for…

Background and aims: Humans communicate primarily through spoken language and speech perception is a core function of the human auditory system. Among the autistic community, atypical sensory reactivity and social communication difficulties are pervasive, yet the research literature lacks in-depth self-report data on speech perception in this…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate how hearing loss affects (a) spoken language processing and (b) processing of faster speech in school-age children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Method: Spoken language processing was compared in thirty-six 7- to 12-year-olds who are DHH and 31 peers with normal hearing using a word detection…

In this study we asked whether nonwords created by transposing two phonemes (/biks[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) are perceived as being more similar to their base words (/bisk[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) than nonwords created by substituting two phonemes (/bipf[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/). Using the short-term phonological priming and a…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

The spoken word production process includes four identifiable stages: conceptualization, lexical selection, form encoding, and articulation. This dissertation studies the spoken word production process of producing Mandarin monosyllabic words, focusing on lexical selection and form encoding. The Chinese languages, including Mandarin, differ from…

Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers…

Research has indicated that school aged (6-16 years) versions of cognitive assessment instruments have varying levels of linguistic demand, which could impact assessment results for placement purposes. However, a significant limitation to this research is the fact that it has not been replicated with cognitive assessment instruments used in…

This paper explores the development of an intelligent translation system for spoken English using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models. The fundamental principles of RNNs and their advantages in processing sequential data, particularly in handling time-dependent natural language data, are discussed. The methodology for constructing the…

The question of whether lexical decomposition is driven by semantic transparency in the lexical processing of morphologically complex words, such as compounds, remains controversial. Prior research on compound processing has predominantly examined visual processing. Focusing instead on spoken word word recognition, the present study examined the…

We examined what causes L1-L2 differences in sensitivity to prominence cues in discourse processing. Participants listened to recorded stories in segment-by-segment fashion at their own pace. Each story established a pair of contrasting items, and one item from the pair was rementioned and manipulated to carry either a contrastive or…

This research examined how linguistic differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children process sentences and learn new information. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these linguistic differences adversely impact how AAE-speaking children use contrastive inflectional verb…