This study examined the speech perception, speech, and language developmental progress of 25 children with hearing loss (mean Pure-Tone Average [PTA] 79.37 dB HL) in an auditory verbal therapy program. Children were tested initially and then 21 months later on a battery of assessments. The speech and language results over time were compared with…

English has become the medium for communication in so many areas, and children are the hope of the future and shoulder the duties to structure the future. Children's English becomes more important and spreads all over the world, especially in recent years. The children's English is not perfect and it exists its own disadvantages, so this paper…

This study evaluated whether age effects on second language (L2) speech learning derive from changes in how the native language (L1) and L2 sound systems interact. According to the "interaction hypothesis" (IH), the older the L2 learner, the less likely the learner is able to establish new vowel categories needed for accurate L2 vowel production…

Spoken language consists of a complex, sequentially arrayed signal that contains patterns that can be described in terms of statistical relations among language units. Previous research has suggested that a domain-general ability to learn structured sequential patterns may underlie language acquisition. To test this prediction, we examined the…

A major focus of research on language acquisition in infancy involves experimental studies of the infant's ability to discriminate various kinds of speech or speech-like stimuli. This research has demonstrated that infants are sensitive to many fine-grained differences in the acoustic properties of speech utterance. Furthermore, these empirical…

The relationship between perception and production remains an unresolved issue within the study of phonological acquisition. Recent developments in optimality theory offer potentially new solutions to this long-standing problem; but thus far, the proposals that have been advanced are in the absence of actual perception-production data from a given…

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech…

Recent brain mapping studies have provided new insights into the cortical systems that mediate human speech perception. Electrocortical stimulation mapping (ESM) is a brain mapping method that is used clinically to localize cortical functions in neurosurgical patients. Recent ESM studies have yielded new insights into the cortical systems that…

Auditory discrimination of voiceless fricatives was studied in 200 Ss between the ages of four and six and one-half years. (Author)

Over the past couple of decades, research has established that infants are sensitive to the predominant stress pattern of their native language. However, the degree to which the stress pattern shapes infants' language development has yet to be fully determined. Whether stress is merely a cue to help organize the patterns of speech or whether it is…

Background: Much remains unknown about grammatical morpheme (GM) acquisition by children with moderate hearing impairment (HI) acquiring spoken English. Aims: To investigate how moderate HI impacts on the use of GMs in speech and to provide an explanation for the pattern of findings. Methods & Procedures: Elicited and spontaneous speech data were…

Down syndrome (DS) is associated with abnormalities in multiple organ systems and a characteristic phenotype that includes numerous behavioral features. Language, however, is among the most impaired domains of functioning in DS and, perhaps, also the greatest barrier to independent meaningful inclusion in the community. In this article, we review…

Mildly mentally retarded adolescents (N=14) and mental age-matched nonretarded children participated in three experiments examining language processing efficiency. Results suggested that the retarded and nonretarded differ in the speed with which the semantic-analytic processes are executed but not necessarily the phonological encoding processes…

Confusion is cited regarding the meaning and nature of central auditory dysfunction, and types of tests composing a central auditory test battery are described. Tests focus on auditory closure, auditory figure-ground, and dichotic listening. (CL)

Two studies examined the ability of typically developing children and children with phonological disorders to discriminate consonant-vowel- consonant words that differ only in the final consonant in whole word and gated conditions. Results suggest there is a complex relationship among word learning skills, ability to attend to fine phonetic…