This study focused on the feasibility of a group-administered paper-and pencil lexical-decision test as a plausible alternative or supplementary tool for the assessment of reading skills. Lexical-decision tests and oral-reading tests were administered to 130 Dutch students from primary grades 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. Correlations were moderate to high…

Reports describing subcortical apraxia of speech (AOS) have received little consideration in the development of recent speech processing models because the speech characteristics of patients with this diagnosis have not been described precisely. We describe a case of AOS with aphasia secondary to basal ganglia hemorrhage. Speech-language symptoms…

The production of cohesive discourse, especially maintained reference, poses problems for early second language L2 speakers. This paper considers a communicative account of overexplicit L2 discourse by focusing on the interdependence between spoken and gestural cohesion, the latter being expressed by anchoring of referents in gesture space.…

Whereas some research on immediate recall of verbal lists has suggested that it is limited by the number of chunks that can be recalled (e.g., N. Cowan, Z. Chen, & J. N. Rouder, 2004; E. Tulving & J. E. Patkau, 1962), other research has suggested that it is limited by the length of the material to be recalled (e.g., A. D. Baddeley, N. Thomson, &…

When presented with several time-compressed sentences, young adults' performance improves with practice. Such adaptation has not been studied in older adults. To study age-related changes in perceptual learning, the authors tested young and older adults' ability to adapt to degraded speech. First, the authors showed that older adults, when equated…

Language outcome in children experiencing fluctuant hearing loss due to otitis media (OME) remains highly equivocal. In the current study, we assessed performance on highly sensitive verbal short-term memory (STM), new word learning and phonological processing tasks in 8-year-old children who had suffered from recurrent OME before the age of 3.…

This paper explores two related factors which influence variation in duration, prosodic structure and redundancy in spontaneous speech. We argue that the constraint of producing robust communication while efficiently expending articulatory effort leads to an inverse relationship between language redundancy and duration. The inverse relationship…

A comparative investigation of word reading efficiency indicates that different strategies may be used by English and Swedish early readers. In a first study, 328 native English speakers from UK Years 3 and 6 completed a pen-and-paper word recognition task (the "Wordchains" test). Results were analysed for frequency and type of errors…

A number of studies of second language (L2) sentence processing have investigated whether ambiguity resolution biases in the native language (L1) transfer to superficially similar cognate structures in the L2. When transfer effects are found in such cases, it is difficult to determine whether they reflect surface parallels between the languages or…

Truscott and Sharwood Smith (henceforth T&SS) propose a novel theory of language acquisition, "Acquisition by Processing Theory" (APT), designed to account for both first and second language acquisition, monolingual and bilingual speech perception and parsing, and speech production. This is a tall order. Like any theoretically ambitious…

Two reading experiments investigated the extent to which the presence of phonemic repetition in sentences influenced processing difficulty during syntactic ambiguity resolution. In both experiments, participants read sentences silently as reading time was measured. Reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity was compared…

We assessed 19-month-olds' appreciation of the conventional nature of object labels versus desires. Infants played a finding game with an experimenter who stated her intention to find the referent of a novel word (word group), to find an object she wanted (desire group), or simply to look in a box (control group). A 2nd experimenter then…

An adult developmental model of self-regulated language processing (SRLP) is introduced, in which the allocation policy with which a reader engages text is driven by declines in processing capacity, growth in knowledge-based processes, and age-related shifts in reading goals. Evidence is presented to show that the individual reader's allocation…

Fifteen children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) and 15 typically developing (TD) children were tested for identification performance on 2 synthetic speech continual varying in formant transition durations (FTDs). One continuum varied from /ba/ to /wa/, and the other varied from /da/ to /ja/. Various d'-related measures from…

Although developmental increases in the size of the position effect within a mispronunciation detection task have been interpreted as consistent with a view of the lexical restructuring process as protracted, the position effect itself might not be reliable. The current research examined the effects of position and clarity of acoustic-phonetic…