Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children with and without speech sound disorders (SSDs), analyzing the data both by group and continuously. Method: Sixty-one Australian English--speaking children aged 48-69 months participated in this…

Recent work has shown significant sublexical effects of long-term memory in nonword repetition (NWR) using a dichotomous consonant age of acquisition (CAoA) variable (Moore, 2018; Moore, Fiez, and Tompkins, 2017). Performance consistently decreased when stimuli comprised consonants acquired later versus earlier in speech development. To address…

Models of L2 pronunciation learning have hypothesized that accurate speech perception promotes accurate speech production. This claim can be evaluated longitudinally by examining the extent to which changes in stop consonant perception predict changes in stop consonant production. Taking a time-sensitive view of the perception-production link,…

Purpose: Temporal interruption limits the perception of speech to isolated temporal glimpses. An analysis was conducted to determine the acoustic parameter that best predicts speech recognition from temporal fragments that preserve different types of speech information--namely, consonants and vowels. Method: Young listeners with normal hearing…

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non-signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between…

Purpose: Aging is known to influence temporal processing, but its relationship to speech perception has not been clearly defined. To examine listeners' use of contextual and phonetic information, the Revised Speech Perception in Noise test (R-SPIN) was used to develop a time-gated word (TGW) task. Method: In Experiment 1, R-SPIN sentence lists…

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty…

Language and literacy skills are instrumental to success at school and early success with writing is a key factor in literacy development. By eight years of age, children spend up to half of their school day engaged in writing tasks suggesting that those who find learning to write difficult may be disadvantaged. The ability to hear and record…

This dissertation investigates the effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Phonological neighbors are defined as words that are different in one and only one phoneme by addition, deletion and substitution. Phonological neighborhood density refers to the number of neighbors a certain word has. …

We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second language (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurrence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux,…

Purpose: This study investigated formant frequencies for their role as acoustic and perceptual correlates to the place of articulation of Cantonese final stops produced by profoundly hearing impaired speakers. Method: Speakers were 10 Cantonese adolescents (mean age = 13;5 [years;months]) who were profoundly hearing impaired (HI). Control speakers…

Research on reading has tried, and failed, to account for wide disparities in reading skill even among children taught by the same method. Why do some children learn to read easily and quickly while others, in the same classroom and taught by the same teacher, don't learn to read at all? In "Language Development and Learning to Read", Diane…