The development of L2 utterance fluency has been extensively researched, whereas that of cognitive fluency has rarely been examined. This study investigated the longitudinal development of L2 utterance and cognitive fluency and their relationship. Thirty-one Chinese learners of English completed speaking tasks and a set of tasks for cognitive…

This study examines associations between writing instruction with a focus on explicit sentence syntax and reading comprehension in a sample of students receiving special education services. While the outcome data does not show direct causation between student enrollment in a treatment writing course using Systemic Functional Linguistics and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

Purpose: The study sought to determine whether the onset of canonical vocalizations in children with cochlear implants (CIs) is related to speech perception skills and spoken vocabulary size at 24 months postactivation. Method: The vocal development in 13 young CI recipients (implanted by their third birthdays; mean age at activation = 20.62…

Purpose: Individuals with primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS) have apraxia of speech (AOS) in which disruptions in articulation or prosody predominate the speech pattern, referred to, respectively, as phonetic or prosodic subtypes. Many develop aphasia and/or dysarthria. Past research has demonstrated that simple temporal acoustic…

Individual variability in infant's language processing is partly explained by environmental factors, like the quantity of parental speech input, as well as by infant-specific factors, like speech production. Here, we explore how these factors affect infant word segmentation. We used an artificial language to ensure that only statistical…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and…

To communicate, children must discriminate and identify speech sounds. Because visual speech plays an important role in this process, we explored how visual speech influences phoneme discrimination and identification by children. Critical items had intact visual speech (e.g. baez) coupled to non-intact (excised onsets) auditory speech (signified…

Purpose: Rapid maximum performance repetition tasks have increasingly demonstrated their utility as clinimetric markers supporting diagnosis and monitoring of bulbar disease in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). A recently developed protocol uses novel real-word repetitions instead of traditional nonword/syllable sequences in hopes of improving…

Rhetorical word stress has been identified as a feature of public, presentational, and didactic speech styles in Spanish through theoretical descriptions, intuitive accounts, and laboratory-based empirical research. Most scholars agree that non-primary stress is acoustically marked by pitch and primary stress is marked by segment lengthening. The…

Purpose: To date, the literature on perception of affective, pragmatic, and grammatical prosody abilities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been sparse and contradictory. It is interesting to note that the primary perception of syllable stress within the word structure, which is crucial for all prosody functions, remains relatively unexplored…

Supra-segmental features refer to various forms of intonation and how words and sentences are uttered. Such features challenge meaning and comprehension, too. Despite the importance of these features and their reported association with phonological awareness and linguistic comprehension, their effects on reading comprehension have not been…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…

Purpose: The authors compared articulatory contact pressure (ACP), oral air pressure (Po), and speech acoustics for conversational versus clear speech. They also assessed the relationship of these measures to listener perception. Method: Twelve adults with normal speech produced monosyllables in a phrase using conversational and clear speech.…

This study examined unisensory and multisensory speech perception in 8-17 year old children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing controls matched on chronological age, sex, and IQ. Consonant-vowel syllables were presented in visual only, auditory only, matched audiovisual, and mismatched audiovisual ("McGurk")…