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…

Listening to speech in a noisy background is difficult for everyone. While such listening has historically been considered mainly in the context of auditory processing, the role of cognition has attracted considerable interest in recent years. This has been particularly true in the context of life-span research and the comparison of younger and…

Purpose: Cognitive screening tools to identify patients at risk for cognitive deficits are frequently used by clinicians who work with aging populations in hearing health care. Although some studies show improvements in performance on cognitive screening exams when hearing loss intervention is provided in the form of a hearing aid or cochlear…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to further evaluate an eight-step partner instructional model developed by Kent-Walsh and McNaughton that has been demonstrated to improve implementation quality and fidelity among adults in clinical and educational settings who support the use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for…

This article reviews research findings involving visual input in speech processing in the form of facial cues and co-speech gestures for second-language (L2) learners, and provides pedagogical implications for the teaching of listening and speaking. It traces the foundations of auditory-visual speech research and explores the role of a speaker's…

Profound hearing loss can have serious and irreversible consequences for oral language development in children, affecting spoken and written language acquisition. Auditory-verbal therapy has been widely applied to children with hearing loss with promising results, mainly in developed countries where cochlear implants are available. An evaluation…

Purpose: Depicting the development pattern of vowel perception for children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CIs) would be useful for clinicians and school teachers to monitor children's auditory rehabilitation. The study was to investigate the development of Mandarin Chinese vowel perception for Mandarin Chinese native-speaking…

Purpose: This study examined whether 2-year-olds are better able to acquire novel verb meanings when they appear in varying linguistic contexts, including both content nouns and pronouns, as compared to when the contexts are consistent, including only content nouns. Additionally, differences between typically developing toddlers and late talkers…

Portuguese language students in the United States typically also speak Spanish, and Portuguese programs, influenced by ideologies of linguistic purism, ceaselessly battle against its interference. This article describes a qualitative study of the treatment of Spanish utterances--called "taquitos" by participants--in a beginner-level…

Purpose: The speech motor system uses feedforward and feedback control mechanisms that are both reliant on prediction errors. Here, we developed a state-space model to estimate the error sensitivity of the control systems. We examined (a) whether the model accounts for the error sensitivity of the control systems and (b) whether the two systems…

Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…

Latinx students with hearing loss have been shown to be less academically successful when compared to their White peers, thereby limiting their opportunities to pursue post-secondary education. In some regions of the country, Latinx students make up 40.8% of the total population of students with hearing loss. As the Latinx ELL student population…

A large body of research suggests that spoken language processing is heavily influenced by social characteristics of the speaker, and conversely, that socio-cognitive processing is influenced by the language spoken by our interlocutors. However, little is known about the extent to which this interaction that is observed in adulthood has its roots…

The current study investigated the effects of repetition on the learning of second language (L2) spoken word forms. Japanese university students learning L2 English were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions (one, three, and six exposures) and learned 40 words while hearing them and viewing their corresponding pictures. A…

Discourse markers (DMs) as linguistic devices have a significant role in the coherence of conversation--a speakers' fluency. With the growing use of English worldwide, it is of great importance to focus on DMs as an essential part of communication which provides discourse coherence. This study was conducted to develop a description of spoken…