The objective of the study was to analyze the pragmatic competence of children with cochlear implants (CIs). The researchers explored whether children with CIs participated in communicative exchanges in a similar way to children with typical hearing (TH), as well as how the participation of children with CIs was regulated by the activity they…

In this research, our objective is to characterize the problem-solving procedures of primary and lower secondary students when they solve problems in real class conditions. To do so, we rely first on the concept of heuristics. As this term is very polysemic, we exploit the definition proposed by Rott (2014) to develop a coding manual and thus…

Purpose: Verbal fluency tasks assess the ability to quickly and efficiently retrieve words from the mental lexicon by requiring subjects to rapidly generate words within a phonological or semantic category. This study investigated differences between cochlear implant users and normal-hearing peers in the clustering and time course of word…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Visual-verbal serial recall is disrupted when task-irrelevant background speech has to be ignored. Contrary to previous suggestion, it has recently been shown that the magnitude of disruption may be accentuated by the semantic properties of the irrelevant speech. Sentences ending with unexpected words that did not match the preceding semantic…

Purpose: This study compares responses of children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) who use spoken language with responses of children who have typical hearing on a repeated word association task to evaluate lexical-semantic organization. Method: This study included 109 participants in early kindergarten or who had completed first grade. The…

Purpose: Processing narrow focus (NF), the stressed word in the sentence, includes both the perceptual ability to identify the stressed word in the sentence and the pragmatic-semantic ability to comprehend the nonexplicit linguistic message. NF and its underlying meaning can be conveyed only via the auditory modality. Therefore, NF can be…

The long-term objective of this project was to better understand how shorter auditory experience and spectral degradation of the cochlear implant (CI) signal impact spoken language processing in deaf children with CIs. The specific objective of this research was to utilize psycholinguistic methods to investigate the mechanisms underlying observed…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have less experience accessing spoken language. Mandarin Chinese uses pitch information to contrast word meaning, and the signal that the CI devices provide is degraded. Thus, Mandarin-speaking children with CIs may face more challenges in the development of language skills. This study examines…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which semantic context and F[subscript 0] contours affect speech recognition by Mandarin-speaking, kindergarten-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: The experimental design manipulated two factors, that is, semantic context, by comparing the intelligibility of…

Purpose: The main goal of this study was to investigate the minimum amount of sensory information required to recognize spoken words (isolation points [IPs]) in listeners with cochlear implants (CIs) and investigate facilitative effects of semantic contexts on the IPs. Method: Listeners with CIs as well as those with normal hearing (NH)…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which phonological competition and semantic priming influence lexical access in school-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with normal acoustic hearing. Method: Participants included children who were 5-10 years of age with either normal hearing (n = 41) or…

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or rightlateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization.…

Purpose: Speech recognition relies upon a listener's successful pairing of the acoustic--phonetic details from the bottom-up input with top-down linguistic processing of the incoming speech stream. When the speech is spectrally degraded, such as through a cochlear implant (CI), this role of top-down processing is poorly understood. This study…