Although the ability to understand speech in adverse listening conditions is paramount for effective communication across the life span, little is understood about how this critical processing skill develops. This study asks how the dynamics of spoken word recognition (i.e., lexical access and competition) change during soft speech in 8- to…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effect of sentence length on speech rate and its characteristics, articulation rate and pauses, in typically developing children. Method: Sixty-two typically developing children between the ages of 10 and 14 years repeated sentences varying in length from two to seven words. Dependent…

What role does the presence of facial speech play for children with dyslexia? Current literature proposes two distinctive claims. One claim states that children with dyslexia make less use of visual information from the mouth during speech processing due to a deficit in recruitment of audiovisual areas. An opposing claim suggests that children…

Being able to see a talking face confers a considerable advantage for speech perception in adulthood. However, behavioural data currently suggest that children fail to make full use of these available visual speech cues until age 8 or 9. This is particularly surprising given the potential utility of multiple informational cues during language…

The goals of the current study were (a) to assess differences in child and adult pausing and (b) to determine whether characteristics of child and adult pausing can be explained by the same language variables. Spontaneous speech samples were obtained from 10 5-year-olds and their accompanying parent using a storytelling/retelling task. Analyses of…

Whilst enhanced perception has been widely reported in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs), relatively little is known about the developmental trajectory and impact of atypical auditory processing on speech perception in intellectually high-functioning adults with ASD. This paper presents data on perception of complex tones and…

Although the development of spoken language is dependent on the emergence of cognitive, language, and speech motor skills, knowledge about how these domains interact during the early stages of communication development is currently limited. This exploratory investigation examines the strength of associations between longitudinal changes in…

Everyday conversation is both an auditory and a visual phenomenon. While visual speech information enhances comprehension for the listener, evidence suggests that the ability to benefit from this information improves with development. A number of brain regions have been implicated in audiovisual speech comprehension, but the extent to which the…

Speech perception and speech production were examined in 3-year-old Dutch children at familial risk of developing dyslexia. Their performance in speech sound categorisation and their production of words was compared to that of age-matched children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls. We found that speech…

Two alternative accounts have been proposed to explain the role of gestures in thinking and speaking. The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) claims that gestures are important for the conceptual packaging of information before it is coded into a linguistic form for speech. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996)…

Although it is commonly accepted that dyslexic children have auditory phonological deficits, the precise nature of these deficits remains unclear. This study examines potential pitch processing deficit in dyslexic children, and recovery after specific training, by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioural responses to pitch…

Twenty-four children with dyslexia (aged 7;7 to 12;1) and twenty-four age-matched controls named pictures aloud while hearing nonsense syllables either phonologically related (i.e., part of) or unrelated to the target picture name. Compared with controls, dyslexics had slower reaction times overall and, for low frequency items, the degree of…

These papers were presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association in San Francisco, December 27-30, 1971. "Perspectives on Research in Speech and Cognitive Processes" was presented to a panel session on "Speech Communication Research of the '70s: Six Priority Areas," sponsored by the Research Board of SCA. It reviews…

Reports on experiments to determine effects of overt speech on children's use of inner speech in short-term memory. Word length and phonemic similarity had greater effects on older children and when pictures were labeled at presentation. Suggests that speaking or listening to speech activates an internal articulatory loop. (Author/GH)

Established the differential maturation of rapid-speaking durations and the durations of interword pauses in the memory-span-task responses of first, third and fifth graders. Found that a particular memory span is accompanied by different profiles of processing rates in children of different ages. (Author)