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…

Purpose: To examine the impact of language background and language-related disorders (LRDs--dyslexia and/or language impairment) on performance in English speech and nonspeech tests of auditory processing (AP) commonly used in the clinic. Method: A clinical database concerning 133 multilingual children (mostly with English as an additional…

How are languages learned, and to what extent are learning mechanisms similar in infant native-language (L1) and adult second-language (L2) acquisition? In terms of vocabulary acquisition, we know from the infant literature that the ability to discriminate similar-sounding words at a particular age does not guarantee successful word-meaning…

Purpose: Parental reports of communication, listening, and behavior in children receiving a clinical diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) or auditory processing disorder (APD) were compared with direct tests of intelligence, memory, language, phonology, literacy, and speech intelligibility. The primary aim was to identify whether there…

Nonword repetition skills were examined in 24 pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users and 18 normal-hearing (NH) adult listeners listening through a CI simulator. Two separate groups of NH adult listeners assigned accuracy ratings to the nonword responses of the pediatric CI users and the NH adult speakers. Overall, the nonword repetitions of…

The role of memory factors in the vowel discrimination of normal and at-risk 8-week-old infants was examined by studying the categorical versus continuous discrimination of very brief vowels in a nonnutritive sucking paradigm. Discrimination of the silent delay interval between the last familiar and the first novel stimulus was also examined.…

Seventy-six children with cochlear implants completed a nonword repetition task. The children were presented with 20 nonword auditory patterns over a loudspeaker and were asked to repeat them aloud to the experimenter. The children's responses were recorded on digital audiotape and then played back to normal-hearing adult listeners to obtain…

Four experiments involving 42 Harvard University students and 35 subjects addressing the role of attention in phonetic perception demonstrate that attention influences the signal-to-noise ratio in the phonetic encoding of acoustic cues. Implications for understanding speech perception and general theories of the role of attention in perception are…

Examined persistence of sensory memory by studying developmental differences in recall of attended and ignored lists of digits for second-graders, fifth-graders, and adults. Found developmental increase in the persistence of memory only for the final item in an ignored list, which is the item for which sensory memory is thought to be the most…

This report on speech research contains 21 papers describing research conducted on a variety of topics concerning speech perception, processing, and production. The initial two reports deal with brain function in speech; several others concern ear function, both in terms of perception and information processing. A number of reports describe…

Paraphrase, as it reflects the processes of remembering rather than those of forgetting, implies that language is best transmitted in one form and stored in another. The dual representation of linguistic information that is implied by paraphrase is important for storing information that has been received and for transmitting information that has…