Purpose: Preschool children often have difficulties in word classification, despite good speech perception and production. Some researchers suggest that they represent words using phonetic features rather than phonemes. In this study, the authors examined whether there is a progression from feature-based to phoneme-based processing across age…

Purpose: Specific language impairment (SLI) is known to aggregate in families. Debate exists on whether the male sex presents an additional risk for SLI. This meta-analysis examined whether there is a sex ratio difference in the risk for impairment among family members of an SLI proband and whether this is mediated by assessment method (direct…

Purpose: To determine if lower global self-esteem, shyness, and low sociability are outcomes associated with SLI in adolescence. Possible concurrent predictive relationships and gender differences were also examined. Method: Fifty-four adolescents with SLI, aged between 16 and 17 years, were compared with a group of 54 adolescents with typical…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated speech rhythm acquisition by bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children, comparing their performance with functionally monolingual peers in both languages and to monolingual and bilingual adults. Method: Participants included younger children (3;9 [years;months] to 4;5.15 [years;months.days]),…

Purpose: To compare speech intelligibility in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker in younger and older listeners and to relate performance to recovery from forward masking. Method: The signal-to-noise ratio required to achieve 50% sentence identification in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker was obtained for each of the…

Purpose: To assess the effects of short- and long-term changes in auditory feedback on vowel and sibilant contrasts and to evaluate hypotheses arising from a model of speech motor planning. Method: The perception and production of vowel and sibilant contrasts were measured in 8 postlingually deafened adults prior to activation of their cochlear…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine in listeners with normal hearing and listeners with sensorineural hearing loss the within- and between-group differences obtained with 4 commonly available speech-in-noise protocols. Method: Recognition performances by 24 listeners with normal hearing and 72 listeners with sensorineural hearing…

Purpose: The ontogeny of mandibular control is important for understanding the general neurophysiologic development for speech and alimentary behaviors. Prior investigations suggest that mandibular control is organized distinctively across speech and nonspeech tasks in 15-month-olds and adults and that, with development, these extant forms of…

This study explored the relationship between articulator movement and prosody in children at different developmental ages. Jaw, lower lip, and upper lip kinematics were examined in 4-, 7-, and 11-year-old children as they produced the declarative and interrogative forms of utterances "Show Bob a bot" and "Show Pop a pot." Articulator movement…

Visual perceptual skills of deaf and normal hearing adults were measured using the Eriksen flanker task. Participants were seated in front of a computer screen while a series of target letters flanked by similar or dissimilar letters was flashed in front of them. Participants were instructed to press one button when they saw an "H," and another…

The purpose of this study was to compare listener processing demands when decoding alaryngeal compared to laryngeal speech. Fifty-six listeners were presented with single words produced by 1 proficient speaker from 5 different modes of speech: normal, tracheosophageal (TE), esophageal (ES), electrolaryngeal (EL), and synthetic speech (SS).…

Purpose: To examine age-related differences in auditory speech recognition and visual text recognition performance for parallel sets of stimulus materials in the auditory and visual modalities. In addition, the effects of variation in rate of presentation of stimuli in each modality were investigated in each age group. Method: A mixed-model design…

In this article, the authors examined the genetic and environmental factors influencing expressive language development in a sample of 386 toddler twin pairs participating in the Wisconsin Twin Project. Expressive language was assessed using 2 measures from the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories-Short Form: Total Vocabulary and…

The purpose of this study was to explore individual differences in children's tense onset growth trajectories and to determine whether any within- or between-child predictors could account for these differences. Twenty-two children with expressive vocabulary abilities in the low-average to below-average range participated. Sixteen children were at…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the stability over time of low-frequency auditory thresholds to better determine if the new technique of using a short-electrode cochlear implant that preserves residual low-frequency acoustic hearing can be a long-term solution for those with severe-to-profound hearing loss at high frequencies. The…