Background: It is already known that preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) tend to stutter on function words at the beginning of sentences. It is also known that phonological errors potentially resulting in part-word repetitions tend to occur on content words. However, the precise relation between word class and repetition type in preschool-age…

Purpose: The acquisition of literacy skills influences the perception and production of spoken language. We examined if orthography influences implicit processing in speech production in child readers and in adult readers with low and high reading proficiency. Method: Children (n = 17), adults with typical reading skills (n = 17), and adults…

Purpose: We investigated whether impaired acoustic processing is a factor in developmental language disorders. The amplitude envelope of the speech signal is known to be important in language processing. We examined whether impaired perception of amplitude envelope rise time is related to impaired perception of lexical and phrasal stress in…

Blind people can learn to understand speech at ultra-high syllable rates (ca. 20 syllables/s), a capability associated with hemodynamic activation of the central-visual system. To further elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying this skill, magnetoencephalographic (MEG) measurements during listening to sentence utterances were cross-correlated…

This study investigated fast mapping in late-talking (LT) toddlers and toddlers with normal language (NL) development matched on age, nonverbal cognition, and maternal education. The fast-mapping task included novel object labels and familiar words. The LT group scored significantly lower than the NL group on novel word comprehension and…

The role of speech production mechanisms in difficult speech comprehension is the subject of on-going debate in speech science. Two Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) analyses were conducted on neuroimaging studies investigating difficult speech comprehension or speech production. Meta-analysis 1 included 10 studies contrasting comprehension…

In a previous study a group of children with cerebral palsy (CP) were found to have considerable difficulties with narratives, performing several standard deviations below the criteria for the Information score of the Bus Story Test (BST). To examine in depth the performance of children with CP and a control group with typically developing (TD)…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

This study investigated links between working memory and speech processing systems. We used delayed pseudoword repetition in fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of sublexical structure in phonological working memory (pWM). We orthogonally varied the number of syllables and consonant clusters in auditory pseudowords and measured the neural…

In the process of language learning, individuals must acquire different types of linguistic knowledge, such as the sounds of the language (phonemes), how these may be combined to form words (phonotactics), and morphological rules. Early and late bilinguals tend to perform like natives on second language phonological tasks that involve pre-lexical…

In a corpus analysis of spontaneous speech Jaeger and Snider (2007) found that the strength of structural priming is correlated with verb alternation bias. This finding is consistent with an implicit learning account of syntactic priming: because the implicit learning model implemented by Chang (2002), Chang, Dell, and Bock (2006), and Chang,…

Speakers are faster and more accurate at processing certain sound sequences within their language. Does this reflect the fact that these sequences are frequent or that they are phonetically less complex (e.g., easier to articulate)? It has been difficult to contrast these two factors given their high correlation in natural languages. In this…

High-density ERPs were recorded in eight adults with persistent developmental stuttering (PERS) and eight matched normally fluent (CONT) control volunteers while participants either repeatedly uttered the vowel "ah" or listened to their own previously recorded vocalizations. The fronto-central N1 auditory wave was reduced in response to spoken…

Individual differences in abilities to form, access, and hone phonological representations of words are implicated in the development of oral and written language. This study addressed two important gaps in the literature concerning measurement of individual differences in phonological representation. First, we empirically examined the…

Research using online comprehension measures with monolingual children shows that speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition are correlated with lexical development. Here we examined speech processing efficiency in relation to vocabulary development in bilingual children learning both Spanish and English (n=26 ; 2 ; 6). Between-language…