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…

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…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained as…

German plural formation appears unsystematic and largely arbitrary to many second language (L2) learners. While some approaches have attempted to identify patterns and rules to help L2 learners (e.g., Anton et al., 2017; Di Donato & Clyde, 2020; Kraiss, 2014), one central observation from linguistic analysis has been absent from pedagogical…

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: To better understand the role of tongue visibility in speech, this study compared the spatiotemporal patterns of silent versus audible speech for lingual consonants of American English. Kinematic data were obtained for articulatory features assumed to be visually salient, including tongue movement (anterior displacement and midsagittal…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

Purpose: We examined how consonant perception is affected by a preceding speech carrier simulated in the same or a different room, for different classes of consonants. Carrier room, carrier length, and carrier length/target room uncertainty were manipulated. A phonetic feature analysis tested which phonetic categories are influenced by the…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of electrolaryngeal (EL) speech among untrained speakers to aid in its effective introduction and to identify syllables and words that are easy or difficult to pronounce. Method: A total of 21 healthy individuals who had never used an EL were included. The participants were…

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

Purpose: Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is hypothesized to arise from deficits in speech motor planning and programming, but the influence of abnormal speech perception in CAS on these processes is debated. This study examined speech perception abilities among children with CAS with and without language impairment compared to those with…

The present study explored whether phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA) and visual attention (VA) independently predict word and pseudoword reading accuracy in native Arabic-speaking children from grades 4 and 5. A total of 141 participants took part in the study, and were divided into two groups of readers with (n = 30) and…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Purpose: The purpose of this research note is to provide a performance comparison of available algorithms for the automated evaluation of oral diadochokinesis using speech samples from patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Method: Four different algorithms based on a wide range of signal processing approaches were tested on a…

Objective: We aimed to investigate the production of contrastive emphasis in French-speaking 4-year-olds and adults. Based on previous work, we predicted that, due to their immature motor control abilities, preschool-aged children would produce smaller articulatory differences between emphasized and neutral syllables than adults. Method: Ten…