Individual speakers' speech patterns differ from one another, despite presumably similar language input. What are the sources of this individual variability? In this dissertation, I explore sources of individual differences in pronunciation of coronal obstruents (/s/, /t[superscript h]/, /c[superscript h]/, /c/) at the ends of nouns in Korean.…

Children can only develop spoken language through consistent exposure to the acoustic cues that comprise speech and language. Until recently, hearing levels from the clinical audiogram were the primary measure used to define typical hearing and the presence or degree of a child's hearing loss. While the clinical audiogram remains an important…

Developing spoken grammar awareness is a crucial first step in fostering noticing habits (Schmidt, 1990) in second language learners. Classroom instruction using corpus-informed materials is an ideal way to assist this development, given that these materials are based on research which informs us about the most frequent forms and uses of spoken…

While our perceptual experience seems to unfold continuously over time, episodic memory preserves distinct events for storage and recollection. Previous work shows that stability in encoding context serves to temporally bind individual items into sequential composite events. This phenomenon has been almost exclusively studied using visual and…

This article discusses the positioning of "wh" words in Modern Laos Sign Language. Research indicates that there are two common patterns for the position of "wh" words in spoken languages: the initial position and in situ (Dryer 2013). However, in some sign languages, it seems that "wh" word positioning is…

Rhythm perception helps young infants find structure in both speech and music. However, it remains unknown whether categorical perception of suprasegmental linguistic rhythm signaled by a co-variation of multiple acoustic cues can be modulated by prior between- (music) and within-domain (language) experience. Here we tested 6-month-old…

Speech recognition technology (SRT) is now widely used in education because of its potential to aid learning, particularly language learning. Nevertheless, SRT has received only limited attention in earlier review studies. The present research aimed to address this gap in the field. To this end, 26 articles published in SSCI journals between 2014…

Background: One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can…

We report three experiments that assess whether structural priming in a question-answer dialogue context is affected by the use of direct requests, conventional indirect requests, and nonconventional indirect requests. In Experiments 1 and 2, experimenters made phone calls to businesses and asked either "Can you tell me (at) what time you…

Background: In residential youth care, group care workers and teachers often serve as a mentor for individual adolescents. Although favorable mentoring relationships are associated with positive adolescent outcomes, few studies examined the role of mentoring in residential youth care. Objective: The present study aims to assess adolescents', care…

Purpose: The spatiotemporal index (STI) is a widely used approach for measuring speech pattern stability across multiple repetitions of a stimulus. In this study, we examine how methodological choices in the implementation of the STI (including the number of repetitions, length of stimuli, and parsing procedure) can affect its value. Method: To…

The Internet has evolved as an important source of information and children like to search for information of their interest on the Internet. This study assessed the interest and ability of 90 children aged between 4 and 10 years to use Google voice search and if it can foster informal learning. We interviewed the children to know how many times…

For the current study, a multi-measure, micro-analytic approach was used to prospectively explore the role of preliminary symbolic play with single and multi-objects in language milestone development and vice versa. Fourteen infants followed up in monthly one hour sessions between the ages of 8 and 16 months. Their spontaneous play acts and vocal…

A child's ability to comprehend speech in the mainstream classroom is vital for intellectual and social development. However, listening conditions are often sub-optimal; the presence of multiple talkers, high noise levels, and long reverberation times add to the challenge of listening with a developing auditory system. An assessment that captures…

Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing…