Purpose: This study investigated the impact of lexical characteristics on the intelligibility of speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Intelligibility was compared for listening in a quiet versus a noisy environment. Method: A total of 192 young listeners participated in the study, with 96 listeners listening in quiet and 96 listening in noise…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the short-term effect of 2 semi-occluded vocal tract training programs, "resonant voice training using nasal consonants" versus "straw phonation," on the vocal quality of vocally healthy future occupational voice users. Method: A multigroup pretest--posttest randomized control…

Purpose: The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to establish a baseline of the vowel and consonant identification scores in prelingually and postlingually deaf users of multichannel cochlear implants (CIs) tested with consonant-vowel-consonant and vowel-consonant-vowel nonsense syllables. Method: Six electronic databases were…

The perception and production of emotional and linguistic (focus) prosody were compared in children with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) peers. Thirteen CI and thirteen hearing-age-matched school-aged NH children were tested, as baseline, on non-verbal emotion understanding, non-word repetition, and stimulus identification and…

While previous research has shown that processing instruction (PI) can more effectively facilitate the acquisition of target structures than traditional drill practice, the processing mechanism of PI has not been adequately examined because most assessment tasks have been offline. Using eye-tracking, this two-experiment study compared changes in…

Children with reading difficulties and children with a history of repeated ear infections (Otitis Media, OM) are both thought to have phonological impairments, but for quite different reasons. This paper examines the profile of phonological and morphological awareness in poor readers and children with OM. Thirty-three poor readers were compared to…

The purpose of this article is to report results of an investigation into the production of a covert contrast by native speakers of Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish in the acquisition of the English distinction between the high front vowels /i/ and /?/. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable acoustic distinction made by a language learner…

Purpose: Despite the apparent primacy of syntactic deficits, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often also evidence lexical impairments. In particular, it has been argued that this population have difficulty forming lexical representations that are detailed enough to support effective spoken word processing. In order to better…

Purpose: Perceptual learning paradigms involving written feedback appear to be a viable clinical tool to reduce the intelligibility burden of dysarthria. The underlying theoretical assumption is that pairing the degraded acoustics with the intended lexical targets facilitates a remapping of existing mental representations in the lexicon. This…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit alterations in sensory processing, including changes in the integration of information across the different sensory modalities. In the current study, we used the sound-induced flash illusion to assess multisensory integration in children with ASD and typically-developing (TD) controls.…

The research study was conducted for the purpose of examining the influence of mild bilateral sensorineural hearing loss (MBSNHL) on developmental abilities of younger school-age children. The sample encompassed 144 children with MBSNHL, aged 7.5-11 (M = 8.85). MBSNHL (20-40 dB HL) was identified by pure tone audiometry. The control group…

South Africa consists of developed and developing contexts. This article reports on a study undertaken to determine the effect of a Perceptual--motor Intervention Programme in learning readiness of Grade R learners from deprived environments. Le Roux's Group Test for School Readiness was used as baseline assessments to establish the school…

We designed a working memory (WM) training programme in game framework for mild intellectually disabled students. Twenty-four students participated as test and control groups. The auditory and visual-spatial WM were assessed by primary test, which included computerised Wechsler numerical forward and backward sub-tests and secondary tests, which…

This study investigated the development of tense markers (e.g., past tense -ed) in children with cochlear implants (CIs) over a 3-year span. Nine children who received CIs before 30 months of age participated in this study at three, four, and five years postimplantation. Nine typical 3-, 4-, and 5-year- olds served as control groups. All children…

Using a non-speech-specific measure of prosody, rise time perception, Goswami and her colleagues have found that individuals with dyslexia perform significantly worse than nonimpaired readers. Studies have also found that children and adults with specific language impairment were impaired on these tasks. Despite the high comorbidity of these…