Previous evidence suggests that grammatical constraints have a rapid influence during language comprehension, particularly at the level of word categories (noun, verb, preposition). These findings are in conflict with a recent study from Angele, Laishley, Rayner, and Liversedge (2014), in which sentential fit had no early influence on word…

Purpose: The effects of neighborhood density (ND) and lexical frequency on word recognition and the effects of phonotactic probability (PP) on nonword repetition (NWR) were examined to gain insight into processing at the lexical and sublexical levels in typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental language problems. Method:…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) consistently show poor nonword repetition (NWR) performance. However, the reason for these difficulties remains a matter of intensive debate. Nonword repetition is a complex psycholinguistic task that heavily relies upon phonological segmentation and phonological knowledge, and even lexical…

Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at…

Although developmental dyslexia is often referred to as a cross-modal disturbance, tests of different modalities using the same stimuli are lacking. We compared the performance of 23 children with dyslexia and 42 chronologically matched control readers on reading versus repetition tasks and visual versus auditory lexical decision using the same…

Stuttering is a disorder of speech production that typically arises in the preschool years, and many accounts of its onset and development implicate language and motor processes as critical underlying factors. There have, however, been very few studies of speech motor control processes in preschool children who stutter. Hearing novel nonwords and…

Using nonword repetition tasks as an experimental approach with both adults and children has become quite common in the past 10 to 15 years for studying lexical learning and phonological processing (e.g., Bailey & Hahn, 2001; Gathercole, Frankish, Pickering & Peaker, 1998; Munson, Edwards, & Beckman, 2005; Storkel, 2001; Vitevich & Luce, 2005). In…