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…

Purpose: Although children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are known to have difficulties with emergent literacy skills, few available studies have examined emergent literacy skills in Arabic-speaking children with DLD. Even though Arabic language characteristics, such as diglossia and orthographic structure, influence the acquisition…

Purpose: Processing narrow focus (NF), the stressed word in the sentence, includes both the perceptual ability to identify the stressed word in the sentence and the pragmatic-semantic ability to comprehend the nonexplicit linguistic message. NF and its underlying meaning can be conveyed only via the auditory modality. Therefore, NF can be…

Purpose: The study aims to test whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) show weaknesses in word retrieval and cognitive control and to find out whether impairments in the 2 domains are associated. Method: Thirty-one children with SLI (age: M = 8;11 years;months, SD = 1;1) and 31 age- and IQ-matched typically developing children…

Purpose: We investigated developmental differences in a dual task involving rhyming and tone judgment/decisions and the effects of varying cognitive demands on task performance. Method: Participants were 7- to 11-year-olds, 12- to 15-year-olds, and adults between 18 and 40 years (n = 19 per group). The rhyming task consisted of three stimuli…

Purpose: This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to use an established model of working memory in children to predict an established model of word learning to determine whether working memory explained word learning variance over and above the contributions of expressive vocabulary and nonverbal IQ. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second…

Purpose: This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating French-speaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of…

Purpose: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and the amnestic variant of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are neurodegenerative conditions characterized by a profound loss of functional communication abilities. Communicative impairment in AD and PPA is especially apparent in the domain of naming common objects and familiar faces. We evaluated the…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine the effects of cognitive and linguistic skills on masked speech recognition for children with normal hearing in three different masking conditions: (a) speech-shaped noise (SSN), (b) amplitude-modulated SSN (AMSSN), and (c) two-talker speech (TTS). We hypothesized that children with better working…

Purpose: Language production, a dynamic process involving real-time language processing, is crucial for children's language and communication development. To explore the early development of children's real-time language production, this study investigated Chinese preschool children's pausing strategies in narratives and their associations with…

Purpose: We employed a time-gated word recognition task to investigate how children who are hard of hearing (CHH) and children with normal hearing (CNH) combine cognitive-linguistic abilities and acoustic--phonetic cues to recognize words in sentence-final position. Method: The current study included 40 CHH and 30 CNH in 1st or 3rd grade.…

Purpose: This study compared performance on the Syllable Repetition Task (SRT) by preschoolers with diverse speech and language abilities to identify underlying impairments in speech processes. Method: Three groups of 13 children ages 4 and 5 years with (a) typically developing (TD) speech and language, (b) speech sound disorder (SSD), and (c)…

Purpose: The current study adopts a systematic approach to the examination of working memory components in pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users by separately assessing contributions of encoding, storage, and retrieval. Method: Forty-nine long-term CI users and 56 typically hearing controls completed forward and backward span tasks with 3 stimulus…