The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group.…

This exploratory study quantitatively assesses the behavioral components of listening as enacted through silence and grounds that analysis in the framework of culture as shared listening cognitive constructs. We analyzed the listening practices in video-recorded focus group interactions to determine whether quantifiable listening behaviors…

Purpose: Current models of speech development argue for an early link between speech production and perception in infants. Recent data show that young infants (at 4-6 months) preferentially attend to speech sounds (vowels) with infant vocal properties compared to those with adult vocal properties, suggesting the presence of special "memory…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

Purpose: Envelope following responses (EFRs) could be useful for objectively evaluating audibility of speech in children who are unable to participate in routine clinical tests. However, relative to adults, the characteristics of EFRs elicited by frequency-specific speech and their utility in predicting audibility in children are unknown. Method:…

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…

According to the Gricean Maxim of Quantity, speakers provide the amount of information listeners require to correctly interpret an utterance, and no more (Grice in Logic and conversation, 1975). However, speakers do tend to violate the Maxim of Quantity often, especially when the redundant information improves reference precision (Degen et al. in…

Data on orienting and habituation to irrelevant sound can distinguish between task-specific and general accounts of auditory distraction: Distractors either disrupt specific cognitive processes (e.g., Jones, 1993; Salamé & Baddeley, 1982), or remove more general-purpose attentional resources from any attention-demanding task (e.g., Cowan,…

Individual differences in face identification ability range from prosopagnosia to super-recognition. The current study examined whether face identification ability predicts voice identification ability (participants: N = 529). Superior-face-identifiers (exceptional at face memory and matching), superior-face-recognisers (exceptional at face memory…

The "Star Trek" franchise presents a hopeful vision of the future that is free from many of the social issues that plague our current society. This research explores "Star Trek's" utopian vision through a disabled lens, presenting a critical content analysis examining the representation of mobility disability in the "Star…

Purpose: Prelingual deaf children with cochlear implants show lower digit span test scores compared to normal-hearing peers, suggesting a working memory impairment. To pinpoint more precisely the subprocesses responsible for this impairment, we designed a sequence reproduction task with varying length (two to six stimuli), modality (auditory or…

People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often report difficulty remembering information in their everyday lives. Recent findings suggest that such difficulties may be due to PTSD-related deficits in parsing ongoing activity into discrete events, a process called "event segmentation." Here, we investigated the causal…

This article reports on findings from a qualitative case study that explored teacher voice in the context of educational change in implementing the Curriculum and Assessment Policy reform in South Africa. The study uses the meta-theoretical paradigm of social constructivism and the conceptual framework of "resistance as good sense" to…

Purpose: Secretion bubbling on the superior aspect of the velopharyngeal (VP) valve typically occurs with a small VP opening during production of oral pressure consonants. The use of high-speed nasopharyngoscopy has shown correlation between the bubbling frequency and the acoustics captured with the nasal microphone of the nasometer. The purpose…

The goal of this study was to investigate the development of mental lexicon organization among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers. The participants included 271 students, divided into dyslexic readers, age-matched typical readers, and typical readers 2 years younger. The lexical status of root and pattern morphemes was examined using two…