Numerous studies suggest that audiovisual speech influences lexical processing. However, it is not clear which stages of lexical processing are modulated by audiovisual speech. In this study, we examined the time course of the access to word representations in long-term memory when they were presented in auditory-only and audiovisual modalities.…

Purpose: Psychoacoustic data indicate that infants and children are less likely than adults to focus on a spectral region containing an anticipated signal and are more susceptible to remote masking of a signal. These detection tasks suggest that infants and children, unlike adults, do not listen selectively. However, less is known about children's…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to assess speech understanding in quiet and in diffuse noise for adult cochlear implant (CI) recipients utilizing bimodal hearing or bilateral CIs. Our primary hypothesis was that bilateral CI recipients would demonstrate less effect of source azimuth in the bilateral CI condition due to symmetric…

Prior research in England has indicated that, unlike prereaders, young children who have learned to decode simple words view print-based information as a more authoritative source of knowledge than purely oral information. We predicted that children in Norway--who start to receive formal reading instruction at a relatively late age--would be…

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of lexical characteristics on the intelligibility of speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Intelligibility was compared for listening in a quiet versus a noisy environment. Method: A total of 192 young listeners participated in the study, with 96 listeners listening in quiet and 96 listening in noise…

This study is concerned with comparing the pronunciation in Southern Welsh, a Celtic language, and Cockney, an English dialect, regarding the place of articulation. The study uses a comparative method to shed light on the similarities and differences between the two accents. The data were collected from YouTube videos of speakers of Southern Welsh…

The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between four to five year old children's social competence levels and their ability to communicate with their mothers. Social competence has an important role in developing positive relationships in children's lives. One of the most important factors in the development of social competence in…

Prosodic sensitivity--the rhythmic patterning of speech--is theorized to influence reading and spelling via vocabulary knowledge, phonological, and morphological awareness. Previously this conceptual model has been evidenced with children who can already read, however as orthographic knowledge can be used to complete phonological awareness tasks…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…

Purpose: The extant literature suggests that individual differences in speech perception can be linked to broad receptive language phenotype. For example, a recent study found that individuals with a smaller receptive vocabulary showed diminished lexically guided perceptual learning compared to individuals with a larger receptive vocabulary. Here,…

Purpose: Liquids are among the last sounds to be acquired by English-speaking children. The current study considers their acquisition from an articulatory timing perspective by investigating anticipatory posturing for /l/ versus /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ in child and adult speech. Method: In Experiment 1, twelve 5-year-old, twelve…

This paper analyzes metalinguistic comments of two young Hmong Americans in the Minneapolis-St Paul area regarding their identity negotiation using tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2004a, 2004b, 2005), the notion of brought-along identity (Williams 2008) and Zhang's (2017) sociohistorical perspectives in analyzing linguistic…

Japanese learners of English are often described as having good English grammar but lacking in fluency. However, with the changes to a more communication-focused English curriculum in the last few decades, this is no longer the norm. This paper will first review the reactions to communication-focused English instructions in Japan and other parts…

Computer-assisted pronunciation teaching (CAPT) for second-language learners has made great strides in recent years. While once small in number and confined to desktop computers, a great variety of CAPT resources are available online today. These resources provide instructional activities of various types, utilize different sensory modalities, and…

Metadiscourse, a linguistic means that is used in the production and organization of ideas, is vital in achieving successful communication. In language studies, metadiscourse in writing and speaking have been disparately investigated, where the former received more attention than the latter. Thus, the present study analyzes metadiscourse in the…