Background noise challenges auditory recognition of speech and may reveal the underlying deficits in auditory word recognition skills. Previous studies have reported an association between children's auditory skills and various linguistic skills, including phonology, although in some languages only. However, language-specific features influence…

Purpose: ?he lexical stress pattern (trochaic vs. iambic) may affect various aspects of word learning and word production in children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study aimed to investigate lexical stress effects in word learning by Greek-speaking children with CIs. Method: A word learning paradigm, consisting of a word production and a word…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to measure auditory comprehension performance in school-aged children with unilateral hearing loss (UHL) and with normal hearing (NH) in quiet and in the presence of child-produced two-talker babble (TTB). Method: Listeners were school-aged children (7-12 years) with permanent UHL (n = 25) or NH (n = 14).…

Purpose: The extant literature suggests that individual differences in speech perception can be linked to broad receptive language phenotype. For example, a recent study found that individuals with a smaller receptive vocabulary showed diminished lexically guided perceptual learning compared to individuals with a larger receptive vocabulary. Here,…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

Introduction: Baddeley's model of working memory establishes the basis for identifying components that intervene in immediate repetition verbal tasks. Based on this model, the overall aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between auditory sequential memory and verbal memory in students with intellectual disabilities and thereby…

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…

This study compared five research-based intelligibility measures as they were applied to six varieties of English. The objective was to determine which approach to measuring intelligibility would be most reliable for predicting listener comprehension, as measured through a listening comprehension test similar to the Test of English as a Foreign…

Purpose: The study investigated the prevalence of risk factors for auditory processing and language disorders among adolescents residing at a local juvenile detention center. Method: A total of 782 adjudicated adolescents with normal hearing were screened with the Randomized Dichotic Digits Test (Strouse & Wilson, 1999) and the Dichotic Words…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate how deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the caudal zona incerta (cZi) affects speech intelligibility in persons with essential tremor. Method: Thirty-five participants were evaluated: off stimulation, on chronic stimulation optimized to alleviate tremor, and during unilateral stimulation at increasing…

Stimuli that are fluently processed are more likely to be called "old" on a recognition memory test compared with less fluently processed stimuli. The goal of the current study was to investigate how the perceived diagnostic value of fluency is affected by a match between encoding and test conditions. During the encoding phase,…

Studies of the acquisition of the lenited allophones of Spanish voiced stops have traditionally focused on the production (Lord, 2010; Rogers & Alvord, 2014; Zampini, 1994), but not on the perception of these sounds. This pilot study examines relationships between (a) learner proficiency and perception of target sounds; (b) learner perception…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

This article describes an innovation in the teaching and learning of vocabulary in English as a Foreign Language classes. Whereas vocabulary coverage in classrooms and textbooks traditionally focuses on lists of target words in printed form, this article promotes the notion of "aural vocabulary" as an important part of…

A theoretical framework which considers the verbal functions of the brain under a multivariate and comprehensive cognitive model was statistically analyzed. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to verify whether some recognized aphasia constructs can be hierarchically integrated as latent factors from a homogenously verbal test. The Brief…