To talk about space, spoken languages rely on arbitrary and categorical forms (e.g., left, right). In sign languages, however, the visual-spatial modality allows for iconic encodings (motivated form-meaning mappings) of space in which form and location of the hands bear resemblance to the objects and spatial relations depicted. We assessed whether…

Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents' immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or…

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: Relative to normally hearing (NH) peers, the speech of children with cochlear implants (CIs) has been found to have deviations such as a high fundamental frequency, elevated jitter and shimmer, and inadequate intonation. However, two important dimensions of prosody (temporal and spectral) have not been systematically investigated. Given…

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…

An increasing number of deaf children with additional disabilities receive a cochlear implant (CI). International studies on cochlear implantation in deaf children with additional disabilities show less and slower speech and language gains, but improvement in overall quality of life. In order to qualify the concept of quality of life this study…

Theories of verbal self-monitoring generally assume an internal (pre-articulatory) monitoring channel, but there is debate about whether this channel relies on speech perception or on production-internal mechanisms. Perception-based theories predict that listening to one's own inner speech has similar behavioural consequences as listening to…

Purpose: Researchers have used the distortion-sensitivity approach in the psychoacoustical domain to investigate the role of auditory processing abilities in speech perception in noise (van Schijndel, Houtgast, & Festen, 2001; Goverts & Houtgast, 2010). In this study, the authors examined the potential applicability of the…

Research in the field of speech production pathology is dominated by describing deficits in output. However, perceptual problems might underlie, precede, or interact with production disorders. The present study hypothesizes that the level of the production disorders is linked to level of perception disorders, thus lower-order production problems…

The goal of the present study was to examine the precursors of verbal working memory in 52 children with cerebral palsy with varying degrees of speech impairments in the first grade of special education. Following Baddeley's model of working memory, children's verbal working memory was measured by means of a forced-recognition task. As precursors…

We describe two experiments on signaling and detecting uncertainty in audiovisual speech by adults and children. In the first study, utterances from adult speakers and child speakers (aged 7-8) were elicited and annotated with a set of six audiovisual features. It was found that when adult speakers were uncertain they were more likely to produce…

Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…

In the present study, language development of Dutch children with a cochlear implant (CI) in a bilingual educational setting and Flemish children with a CI in a dominantly monolingual educational setting is compared. In addition, we compared the development of spoken language with the development of sign language in Dutch children. Eighteen…

The speech perception system must be flexible in responding to the variability in speech sounds caused by differences among speakers and by language change over the lifespan of the listener. Indeed, listeners use lexical knowledge to retune perception of novel speech (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). In that study, Dutch listeners made…

The relationship between speech perception and speech production was investigated, by comparing five six and seven-year-old Dutch children who misarticulated the final consonant cluster /-ts/ with three control groups. Results indicate that the poorer the articulation proficiency of a group, the more variability there was in both production and…