This paper reports on a rare phenomenon in language development--the production of words without consonants, and thus syllables without an onset. Such words, which are referred as Consonant-free words (CFWs), appeared for a short period in the early speech of hearing impaired Hebrew-speaking children, who produced words consisting of one or two…

Purpose: The authors examined the benefits of younger cochlear implantation, longer cochlear implant use, and greater pre-implant aided hearing to spoken language at 3.5 and 4.5 years of age. Method: Language samples were obtained at ages 3.5 and 4.5 years from 76 children who received an implant by their 3rd birthday. Hierarchical linear modeling…

This edited volume investigates the connections between the earliest human sounds and subsequent language development. With special attention to tracheostomies, Downs syndrome, deafness, and speech-motor impairments, the interaction between speech and language is examined in typical development as well as the effect that the interaction has on…

Twenty pediatric users of cochlear implants were administered three tests of speech intelligibility. Correlational analyses showed significant correlations among overall scores for contrast perception intelligibility, contrast production intelligibility, and production sentence intelligibility, however, relationships were more tenuous at finer…