There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first language listeners handle function words differently from content words. This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener to access a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not. A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to…

Everyday parent-child conversations may support children's scientific understanding. The types and frequency of parent-child science talk may vary with the cultural and schooling background of the participants, and yet most research in the USA focuses on highly schooled European-American families. This study investigated 40 Mexican-descent…

Purpose: To examine reductions in performance on auditory tasks by aphasic and neurologically intact individuals as a result of concomitant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner noise. Method: Four tasks together forming a continuum of linguistic complexity were developed. They included complex-tone pitch discrimination, same-different…

Purpose: This study compared the conversational discourse skills of boys who have fragile X syndrome with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with those of boys with Down syndrome and boys who are typically developing. Method: Participants were boys who have fragile X syndrome with (n = 26) and without (n = 28) ASD, boys with Down syndrome…

This study was designed to investigate the development of articulatory timing from mid-childhood to late adolescence. Productions of sentences containing /t/, /l/, /s/, and /k/ were produced by 48 children and adults (aged 6-38 years) and captured using the Reading Electropalatography3 (EPG3) system. Mean duration of the sentences and the…

Although there is a strong link between the right hemisphere and understanding emotional prosody in speech, there are few data on how the right hemisphere is implicated for understanding the emotive "attitudes" of a speaker from prosody. This report describes two experiments which compared how listeners with and without focal right hemisphere…

The nature and origin of the human capacity for acquiring language is not yet fully understood. Here we uncover early roots of this capacity by demonstrating that humans are born with a preference for listening to speech. Human neonates adjusted their high amplitude sucking to preferentially listen to speech, compared with complex non-speech…

Infant-directed maternal speech is an important component of infants' linguistic input. However, speech from other speakers and speech directed to others constitute a large amount of the linguistic environment. What are the properties of infant-directed speech that differentiate it from other components of infants' speech environment? To what…

This article presents the author's message during a graduation ceremony at the University of Pennsylvania. The author talks about the identity of education and stresses that education not only fosters conversation, but it is itself a form of conversation. The author challenges people to engage in conversation about education from multiple…

In this article, we describe our efforts as project coordinators to negotiate directions and meanings at the initial stages of a childcare curriculum development project for children from birth to age five in the Province of New Brunswick, Canada. Understanding curriculum as a complex relational dynamic that is shaped by the multiple social and…

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) holds the potential to enable people with severe oral communication impairments to participate more fully in society. However, despite the development of increasingly sophisticated communication aids, as well as recent UK policy initiatives aimed at improving access to them, some major obstacles…

Children's evaluations of what people communicate about themselves were examined in three studies with a total of 296 participants (aged four to 12). Participants heard scenarios in which characters' motivations to reveal truthful information were systematically manipulated to examine (1) children's understanding that people do not always reveal…

Purpose: This study examined the independent and combined effects of two sources of linguistic knowledge (alphabet cues and semantic predictability) on the intelligibility of speakers with dysarthria. The study also examined the extent to which each source of knowledge accounted for variability in intelligibility gains. Method: Eight speakers with…

This study investigated the ability of the English and Spanish versions of the "Get Ready to Read!" Screener (E-GRTR and S-GRTR) administered at the beginning of the preschool year to predict the oral language and phonological and print processing skills of Spanish-speaking English-language learners (ELLs) and English-only speaking children (EO)…

Keeping debate communicative is a great and recurring concern. A study investigated whether debate format may influence debaters' communicative behavior, by comparing behavior in Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Lincoln-Douglas debate (LD) and in CEDA Team debate. Videotapes of the two first affirmative speeches of each, at the…