This longitudinal investigation on Dutch children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) aimed at determining the predictive value of statistically uncorrelated language proficiencies on later reading and spelling skills in Dutch. Language abilities, tested with an extensive test battery at the onset of formal reading instruction, were…

Motor theories of speech perception have been re-vitalized as a consequence of the discovery of mirror neurons. Some authors have even promoted a strong version of the motor theory, arguing that the motor speech system is critical for perception. Part of the evidence that is cited in favor of this claim is the observation from the early 1980s that…

When learning object function, infants must detect relations among features--for example, that squeezing is associated with squeaking or that objects with wheels roll. Previously, Perone and Oakes (2006) found 10-month-old infants were sensitive to relations between object appearances and actions, but not to relations between appearances and…

Within a variationist approach for data collection and analysis, this study investigates the acquisition in perception of post-vocalic word-final stops (codas) by speakers of Brazilian Portuguese learning English as a foreign language in a classroom environment. Because codas are illicit in this variety of Portuguese, the hypothesis holds that…

This study used eye-tracking methodology to assess audiovisual speech perception in 26 children ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, half with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and half with typical development. Given the characteristic reduction in gaze to the faces of others in children with ASD, it was hypothesized that they would show reduced…

Purpose: Studies using speech stimuli to elicit electrophysiologic responses have found approximately 30% of children with language-based learning problems demonstrate abnormal brainstem timing. Research is needed regarding how these responses relate to performance on behavioral tests of central auditory function. The purpose of the study was to…

Purpose: To explore whether individuals with aphasia exhibit differences in the M350, an electrophysiological marker of lexical activation, compared with healthy controls. Method: Seven people with aphasia, 9 age-matched controls, and 10 younger controls completed an auditory lexical decision task while cortical activity was recorded with…

Individuals with aphasia have more problems detecting small differences between speech sounds than larger ones. This paper reports how phonemic processing is impaired and how this is influenced by speechreading. A non-word discrimination task was carried out with "audiovisual", "auditory only" and "visual only" stimulus display. Subjects had to…

Designers, teachers and administrators intuitively know that different students learn differently, but they rarely intentionally create learning environments for specific learning modalities--especially within traditionally academic spaces. The REFP workshop presented in September of 2009 at the CEFPI Annual World Conference and Expo provided…

According to one approach to speech perception, listeners perceive speech by applying general pattern matching mechanisms to the acoustic signal (e.g., Diehl, Lotto, & Holt, 2004). An alternative is that listeners perceive the phonetic gestures that structured the acoustic signal (e.g., Fowler, 1986). The two accounts have offered different…

Infants' speech perception abilities change through the first year of life, from broad sensitivity to a wide range of speech contrasts to becoming more finely attuned to their native language. What remains unclear, however, is how this perceptual change relates to brain responses to native language contrasts in terms of the functional…

Purpose: The current study was an attempt to provide initial evidence on how to predict the optimal language in which to conduct speech perception testing for Spanish/English (S/E) bilingual listeners. Method: Thirty normal-hearing S/E listeners differing in age of language acquisition, length of immersion, daily language use, self-rated listening…

Infants prefer native structures such as familiar faces and languages. Music is a universal human activity containing structures that vary cross-culturally. For example, Western music has temporally regular metric structures, whereas music of the Balkans (e.g., Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey) can have both regular and irregular structures. We…

Four pigeons were trained in a procedure in which concurrent-schedule food ratios changed unpredictably across seven unsignaled components after 10 food deliveries. Additional green-key stimulus presentations also occurred on the two alternatives, sometimes in the same ratio as the component food ratio, and sometimes in the inverse ratio. In eight…

This study investigated the relationship between speech perception, phonological processing and reading skills among school-aged children classified as "skilled" and "less skilled" readers based on their ability to read words, decode non-words, and comprehend short passages. Three speech perception tasks involving categorization of speech continua…