It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual…

Purpose: This study assessed whether a categorical speech perception (CP) deficit is associated with dyslexia or familial risk for dyslexia, by exploring a possible cascading relation from speech perception to phonology to reading and by identifying whether speech perception distinguishes familial risk (FR) children with dyslexia (FRD) from those…

How does phonological development differ in children exposed to one versus two variants of a single language? If children receive mixed evidence for a phonological contrast (i.e., one language variant in the environment maintains a contrast while another neutralizes it), will they treat this contrast as noncontrastive (i.e., as allophonic)? Or…

Background: The spoken language difficulties of children with moderate or severe to profound hearing loss are mainly related to limited auditory speech perception. However, degraded or filtered auditory input as evidenced in children with cochlear implants (CIs) may result in less efficient or slower language processing as well. To provide insight…

Lexical access is a core component of word processing. In order to produce or comprehend a word, language users must access word forms in their mental lexicon. However, despite its involvement in both tasks, previous research has often studied lexical access in either production or comprehension alone. Therefore, it is unknown to which extent…

The artificial language learning paradigm was used to investigate to what extent the use of prosodic features is universally applicable or specifically language driven in learning an unfamiliar language, and how nonnative prosodic patterns can be learned. Listeners of unrelated languages--Dutch (n = 100) and Korean (n = 100)--participated. The…

Dutch listeners were exposed to the English theta sound (as in "bath"), which replaced [f] in /f/-final Dutch words or, for another group, [s] in /s/-final words. A subsequent identity-priming task showed that participants had learned to interpret theta as, respectively, /f/ or /s/. Priming effects were equally strong when the exposure…

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, "staat" "nation" simply combines with "kunde" "art" ("staatkunde" "political science, statesmanship"), but needs a linking element "s" or…