Purpose: Spontaneous speech tasks are critically important for characterizing spoken language production deficits in aphasia and for assessing the impact of therapy. The utility of such tasks arises from the complex interaction of linguistic demands (word retrieval, sentence formulation, articulation). However, this complexity also makes…

Purpose: Despite known motor and spoken language impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the motor skills underlying speech production and their relationship with language skills have rarely been directly investigated in this population. Method: Thirty-nine autistic children (14 minimally verbal [MV], 25 verbal [V]) and 11 non-autistic…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between language load and articulatory variability in children with language and speech sound disorders, including childhood apraxia of speech. Method: Forty-six children, ages 48-92 months, participated in the current study, including children with speech sound disorder,…

The auditory scaffolding hypothesis states that early experience with sound underpins the development of domain-general sequence processing abilities, supported by studies observing impaired sequence processing in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. To test this hypothesis, we administered a sequence processing task to 77 DHH children who use…

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD), an unexplained problem using and understanding spoken language, has been hypothesized to have an underlying auditory processing component. Auditory feedback plays a key role in speech motor control. The current study examined whether auditory feedback is used to regulate speech production in a…

Purpose: Brain imaging has provided puzzle pieces in the understanding of language. In neurologically healthy populations, the structure of certain brain regions is associated with particular language functions (e.g., semantics, phonology). In studies on focal brain damage, certain brain regions or connections are considered sufficient or…

The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e.,…

Purpose: General language abilities of children with cochlear implants have been thoroughly investigated, especially at young ages, but far less is known about how well they process language in real-world settings, especially in higher grades. This study addressed this gap in knowledge by examining recognition of sentences with complex syntactic…

Background: Phonological difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are well documented. However, abilities regarding prosody, the rhythmic and melodic characteristics of language, have been less widely studied, particularly in Spanish. Moreover, the scant research findings that have been reported are contradictory. These…

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that results in language-related symptoms at various discourse levels, ranging from semantics (e.g. inventing words and producing nonsensical strands of similar-sounding words) to pragmatics and higher-level functioning (e.g. too little or too much information given to interlocutors, and tangential…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

This mixed two-way experimental, cross-sectional study investigated fast-mapping (FM) of novel nouns and verbs in 63 Persian-speaking toddlers aged 30 months, including 31 late-talking (LT) and 32 typically developing (TD) matched with respect to age and maternal education. Toddlers were classified as LT if they had limited expressive vocabulary…

Listening has been widely characterised as a multifaceted process encompassing a range of linguistic and psycholinguistic components (see Rubin, 1994). However, for learners at different levels of L2 proficiency, there is uncertainty over the relative importance of the various sub-skills. To address this issue, a number of linguistic and…

It is well established that speech, language and phonological skills are closely associated with literacy, and that children with a family risk of dyslexia (FRD) tend to show deficits in each of these areas in the preschool years. This paper examines what the relationships are between FRD and these skills, and whether deficits in speech, language…

Adult humans process communicative interactions by recognizing that information is being communicated through speech (linguistic ability) and simultaneously evaluating how to respond appropriately (social-pragmatic ability). These abilities may originate in infancy. Infants understand how speech communicates in social interactions, helping them…