Right from the beginning it must be noted that English spelling is confusing and bothersome both for native speakers and nonnative speakers. In learning a foreign language, accurate pronunciation is an important part of learning any foreign language. Accurate pronunciation is especially important when non-native students are trained to be English…

We present a neural network model of referent identification in a visual world task. Inputs are visual representations of item pairs unfolding with sequences of phonemes identifying the target item. The model is trained to output the semantic representation of the target and to suppress the distractor. The training set uses a 200-word lexicon…

Children with autism spectrum disorders have been reported to be less influenced by a speaker's face during speech perception than those with typically development. To more closely examine these reported differences, a novel visual phonemic restoration paradigm was used to assess neural signatures (event-related potentials [ERPs]) of audiovisual…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

The same-different task is a classic paradigm that requires participants to judge whether two successively presented stimuli are the same or different. While this task is simple, with results that have been replicated many times, response times (RTs) and accuracy for both same and different decisions remain difficult to model. The biggest obstacle…

We assessed nonword repetition (NWR) skills in 7-9 year-old children with dyslexia (dyslexia-only), developmental language disorder (DLD-only), co-occurring DLD+dyslexia, and typical development (TD) with a norm-referenced and an experimental task. The experimental task manipulated phonemic variability (dissimilarity among consonant phonemes…

Featural approaches to second language phonetic acquisition posit that the development of new phonetic norms relies on sub-phonemic features, expressed through a constellation of articulatory gestures and their corresponding acoustic cues, which may be shared across multiple phonemes. Within featural approaches, largely supported by research in…

Purpose: When speakers retrieve words, they do so extremely quickly and accurately--both speed and accuracy of word retrieval are compromised in persons with aphasia (PWA). This study examined the contribution of two domain-general mechanisms: processing speed and cognitive control on word retrieval in PWA. Method: Three groups of participants,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which phonological competition and semantic priming influence lexical access in school-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with normal acoustic hearing. Method: Participants included children who were 5-10 years of age with either normal hearing (n = 41) or…

Purpose: It is generally accepted that adults use visual cues to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments, but findings regarding visual speech benefit in children are mixed. We explored factors that contribute to audiovisual (AV) gain in young children's speech understanding. We examined whether there is an AV benefit to…

Research Findings: The study investigated whether preschool code-related home literacy experiences had direct associations with regular and irregular word reading in the first year of primary school as well as exploring whether there were indirect associations between these experiences and later word reading via children's language skills or…