Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop and validate a large Korean sentence set with varying degrees of semantic predictability that can be used for testing speech recognition and lexical processing. Method: Sentences differing in the degree of final-word predictability (predictable, neutral, and anomalous) were created with words selected…

Purpose: This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in…

Purpose: Brain imaging has provided puzzle pieces in the understanding of language. In neurologically healthy populations, the structure of certain brain regions is associated with particular language functions (e.g., semantics, phonology). In studies on focal brain damage, certain brain regions or connections are considered sufficient or…

Purpose: Speech perception in noise becomes difficult with age but can be facilitated by audiovisual (AV) speech cues and sentence context in healthy older adults. However, individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) may present with deficits in AV integration, potentially limiting the extent to which they can benefit from AV cues. This study…

Negative priming in free recall is the finding of impaired memory performance when previously ignored auditory distracters become targets of encoding and retrieval. This negative priming has been attributed to an aftereffect of deploying inhibitory mechanisms that serve to suppress auditory distraction and minimize interference with learning and…

Introduction: Baddeley's model of working memory establishes the basis for identifying components that intervene in immediate repetition verbal tasks. Based on this model, the overall aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between auditory sequential memory and verbal memory in students with intellectual disabilities and thereby…

In this study, we investigated which componential skills can be distinguished in the second language (L2) development of 140 bilingual children with specific language impairment in the Netherlands, aged 6-11 years, divided into 3 age groups. L2 development was assessed by means of spoken language tasks representing different language skills…

This Event Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates auditory processing of sentences with so-called code-switches in Russian learners of German. It has often been argued that switching between two languages results in extra processing cost, although it is not completely clear yet what exactly causes these costs. ERP presents a good method to…

Purpose: The authors determined the accuracy of younger and older adults in identifying vocal emotions using the Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS; Dupuis & Pichora-Fuller, 2010a) and investigated the possible contributions of auditory acuity and suprathreshold processing to emotion identification accuracy. Method: In 2 experiments, younger…

This article describes an innovation in the teaching and learning of vocabulary in English as a Foreign Language classes. Whereas vocabulary coverage in classrooms and textbooks traditionally focuses on lists of target words in printed form, this article promotes the notion of "aural vocabulary" as an important part of…

Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where…

During reading acquisition children learn to recognize orthographic stimuli and link them to phonology and semantics. The present study investigated neurocognitive processes of learning to read after one year of schooling. We aimed to elucidate the cognitive processes underlying neural tuning for print that has been shown to play an important role…

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were…

The advantage for real words over nonwords in serial recall--the "lexicality effect"--is typically attributed to support for item-level phonology, either via redintegration, whereby partially degraded short-term traces are "cleaned up" via support from long-term representations of the phonological material or via the more…

The relevance of the investigated problem is caused by the fact that most children who start to study do not have a good level of higher mental functions. It leads to difficulties at school and health problems. The article aims at estimating the level of higher mental functions and the degree of educational motivation development among…