Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of consistent hearing aid (HA) use on outcomes in children with mild hearing loss (HL). Method: Five- or 7-year-old children with mild HL were separated into 3 groups on the basis of patterns of daily HA use. Using analyses of variance, we compared outcomes between groups on speech and language tests and a…

Language learners have to acquire the phonological grammar of their native language, and different levels of representations on which the grammar operates. Developmental dyslexia is associated with a phonological deficit, which is commonly assumed to stem from degraded phonological representations. The present study investigates one aspect of the…

In adults, native language phonology has strong perceptual effects. Previous work has shown that Japanese speakers, unlike French speakers, break up illegal sequences of consonants with illusory vowels: they report hearing "abna" as "abuna". To study the development of phonological grammar, we compared Japanese and French infants in a…

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This…

The Katzenberger Hebrew Language Assessment for Preschool Children (henceforth: the KHLA) is the first comprehensive, standardized language assessment tool developed in Hebrew specifically for older preschoolers (4;0-5;11 years). The KHLA is a norm-referenced, Hebrew specific assessment, based on well-established psycholinguistic principles, as…

In this article, we hypothesize that "invariance detection," a general perceptual phenomenon whereby organisms attend to relatively stable patterns or regularities, is an important means by which infants tune in to various aspects of spoken language. In so doing, we synthesize a substantial body of research on detection of regularities across the…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

This study investigated neural activation patterns during verb processing in children, using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Preschool children (aged 4-6) passively listened to lists of verbs and adjectives while neural activation was measured. Findings indicated that verbs were processed differently than adjectives, as the verbs…

Background: Much remains unknown about grammatical morpheme (GM) acquisition by children with moderate hearing impairment (HI) acquiring spoken English. Aims: To investigate how moderate HI impacts on the use of GMs in speech and to provide an explanation for the pattern of findings. Methods & Procedures: Elicited and spontaneous speech data were…

Truscott and Sharwood Smith (henceforth T&SS) propose a novel theory of language acquisition, "Acquisition by Processing Theory" (APT), designed to account for both first and second language acquisition, monolingual and bilingual speech perception and parsing, and speech production. This is a tall order. Like any theoretically ambitious…

This article provides a discussion of current topics in psycholinguistics and of the current research on these problems. The author discusses current thought on the biological foundations of language and the problem of universals. If human language is a species-particular achievement contingent upon a biological endowment, there should be certain…

The ten papers in this collection are based on presentations given during a colloquium held November 14-15, 1969, at the University of Toronto. The papers, written in either English or French, cover various topics related to prosodic feature analysis in general; several concern the analysis of specific languages. General topics include discussions…

This document is the seventh report in the Language Research in Progress (LRIP) series, and lists a wide variety of language-related research projects current between April 1968 and November 1968. Research projects terminated in the six months prior to publication are included as well. Approximately 250 projects in the U.S. and abroad are…