Purpose: The adaptation effect in stuttering, traditionally described as the reduction of stuttering moments over repeated readings, provides a context to investigate fluency facilitation as well as a relatively controlled means of comparing fluent speech in the immediate vicinity of words that were stuttered versus fluently produced. Acoustic…

Reading is one of the most important milestones a child achieves throughout development. Above the letter level, the syllable has been shown to play a relevant role at early stages of visual word recognition in adult skilled readers. However, studies aiming to examine when, during reading acquisition, the syllable emerges as a functional…

How does prior linguistic knowledge modulate learning in verbal auditory statistical learning (SL) tasks? Here, we address this question by assessing to what extent the frequency of syllabic co-occurrences in the learners' native language determines SL performance. We computed the frequency of co-occurrences of syllables in spoken Spanish through…

In this task-repetition intervention study, L2 learners' reuse of linguistic constructions was analyzed to investigate to what extent recurring reliance on specific constructions during the same task repetition predicts fluency development. English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners performed oral narrative tasks three times per day under two…

Statistical learning, the ability to extract regularities from input (e.g., in language), is likely supported by learners' prior expectations about how component units co-occur. In this study, we investigated how adults' prior experience with sublexical regularities in their native language influences performance on an empirical language learning…

This study investigated if the language profiles of prelingually deaf children with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) and children with typical hearing (TH) matched on their quantitative score on clinical spoken expressive language tasks differed in terms of sentence complexity, sentence length, and severity of grammatical errors. No significant…

The development of L2 utterance fluency has been extensively researched, whereas that of cognitive fluency has rarely been examined. This study investigated the longitudinal development of L2 utterance and cognitive fluency and their relationship. Thirty-one Chinese learners of English completed speaking tasks and a set of tasks for cognitive…

Purpose: This study investigated phonological and speech motor neural networks in children with residual speech sound disorder (RSSD) during an overt Syllable Repetition Task (SRT). Method: Sixteen children with RSSD with /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ errors (6F [female]; ages 8;0-12;6 [years;months]) and 16 children with typically developing…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

Purpose: Phonological awareness (PA) skills are critical for spoken language acquisition and literacy. PA manifests in various skills that can be identified based on task performance and speech sound unit size. This study compared the PA skills of children with early cochlear implantation (E-CI), children with late cochlear implantation (L-CI),…

In this study, we investigated effects of morphological processing on handwriting production in beginning writers of German. Children from Grades 3 and 4 were asked to copy words from a computer screen onto a pen tablet, while we recorded their handwriting with high spatiotemporal resolution. Words involved a syllable-congruent visual disruption…

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…

Purpose: Oral air pressure measurements during lip occlusion for /pVpV/ syllable strings are used to estimate subglottal pressure during the vowel. Accuracy of this method relies on smoothly produced syllable repetitions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the oral air pressure waveform during the /p/ lip occlusions and propose…

This study examined how lexical properties, such as word frequency, word length, and morphological features, affect the word recognition of Korean Hangul among adult readers. Ninety-four native Korean students performed a lexical decision task on disyllabic and trisyllabic words and nonwords. Results of cross-classified and hierarchical linear…

Purpose: Background noise has been categorized as energetic masking due to spectrotemporal overlap of the target and masker on the auditory periphery or informational masking due to cognitive-level interference from relevant content such as speech. The effects of masking on cortical and sensory auditory processing can be objectively studied with…