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…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate whether families of children with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) are organized similarly to those of typically developing, typically hearing (TH) children and whether the dimensions of family dynamics and environment are related to spoken language development similarly in children with and without…

Purpose: Verbal working memory (VWM) delays are commonly found in prelingually deaf youth with cochlear implants (CIs), albeit with considerable interindividual variability. However, little is known about the neurocognitive information-processing mechanisms underlying these delays and how these mechanisms relate to spoken language outcomes. The…

Purpose: This preliminary research examined (a) the perception of two common sources of indexical variability in speech--regional dialects and foreign accents, and (b) the relation between indexical processing and sentence recognition among prelingually deaf, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method: Forty-three…

Purpose: We sought to determine whether speech perception and language skills measured early after cochlear implantation in children who are deaf, and early postimplant growth in speech perception and language skills, predict long-term speech perception, language, and neurocognitive outcomes. Method: Thirty-six long-term users of cochlear…

Deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) are at risk for psychosocial adjustment problems, possibly due to delayed speech-language skills. This study investigated associations between a core component of spoken-language ability--speech intelligibility--and the psychosocial development of prelingually deaf CI users. Audio-transcription measures…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to report how "verbal rehearsal speed" (VRS), a form of covert speech used to maintain verbal information in working memory, and another verbal processing speed measure, perceptual encoding speed, are related to 3 domains of executive function (EF) at risk in cochlear implant (CI) users: verbal…

Listeners rapidly adapt to many forms of degraded speech. What level of information drives this adaptation, however, remains unresolved. The current study exposed listeners to sinewave-vocoded speech in one of three languages, which manipulated the type of information shared between the training languages (German, Mandarin, or English) and the…

Seventy-six children with cochlear implants completed a nonword repetition task. The children were presented with 20 nonword auditory patterns over a loudspeaker and were asked to repeat them aloud to the experimenter. The children's responses were recorded on digital audiotape and then played back to normal-hearing adult listeners to obtain…

In a cross-modal matching task, participants were asked to match visual and auditory displays of speech based on the identity of the speaker. The present investigation used this task with acoustically transformed speech to examine the properties of sound that can convey cross-modal information. Word recognition performance was also measured under…

This 21st annual progress report summarizes research activities on speech perception and spoken language processing carried out in the Speech Research Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Indiana University in Bloomington. As with previous reports, the goal is to summarize accomplishments during 1996 and 1997 and make them readily available. Some…

The results of three projects concerned with auditory word recognition and the structure of the lexicon are reported in this paper. The first project described was designed to test experimentally several specific predictions derived from MACS, a simulation model of the Cohort Theory of word recognition. The second project description provides the…

A study investigated perception of elliptical speech in an adult cochlear implant patient. Two experiments were conducted using sets of meaningful and anomalous English sentences: one set contained correct place of articulation cues, the other was transformed into elliptical speech. The patient and controls labeled the sentences as the same.…

An error analysis of the word recognition responses of 20 adult cochlear implant users and 19 typical listeners was conducted to determine the types of partial information used when they identified spoken words under auditory-alone and audiovisual conditions. Results indicate there were no significant interactions with hearing status. (Contains…