This article reviews research studies on the efficacy of cochlear implants for children's auditory communication skills, including speech perception, speech production, and language. It offers suggestions for building auditory skill development in children with cochlear implants. Four classic levels of auditory skill development (awareness,…

Examined the possibility that auditory stimuli with properties of adult-to-infant speech are more detectable in a noisy ambient environment than ones that resemble adult-to-adult speech. Findings suggests that properties that characterize adult-to-infant speech may compensate for young infants' low-frequency deficits and therefore facilitate the…

Voice programing for preschool children with communication disabilities is discussed, including suggestions for enriching the child's auditory environment, selecting target goals, and providing consistency of target presentations by caregivers. Sample vocal awareness and production goals and strategies are offered. (Author/DB)

This study examined spoken-word recognition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing children matched separately for age and receptive language ability. Accuracy and reaction times on an auditory lexical decision task were compared. Children with SLI were less accurate than both control groups. Two subgroups of…

In speech perception, children give particular patterns of weight to different acoustic cues (their cue weighting). These patterns appear to change with increased linguistic experience. Previous speech perception research has found a positive correlation between more analytical cue weighting strategies and the ability to consciously think about…

A study explored whether cues given in advance of messages presented through noise were effective for increasing comprehension. Specifically, the study examined whether (1) relevant cues increased overall listening accuracy and (2) irrelevant cues impaired listening by introducing distortions into the processing of messages or simply decreased the…

The similarity between the antecedents of listening and the consequences of speaking have long led theorists to believe in their intimate and even natural relationship. A tendency to conflate the two processes is found in articles on speech communication, automatic speech recognition, foreign language learning, and child language. Once this…

This study treats the child's vocal and rhythmic development immediately subsequent to birth and forward, and shows how this development relates to musical learning. (Author)

The early and continued use of semantic, syntactic and contextual clues in recognizing mispronounced words was demonstrated in an experiment involving preschoolers, grade school students and college students. Errors in highly predictable words and contexts were most easily recognized by all regardless of reading ability. (PMJ)

Research presented in this paper on the character of infant-directed speech and the nature of infant speech perception abilities from 6 to 12 months suggests that prosody contributes significantly to early analyses of child languages and assists infants in developing root processes of parsing. (104 references) (Author/CK)

The articulator positions of a man with deafness who had a cochlear implant were measured with an electromagnetic midsagittal articulometer system with and without auditory feedback via his implant. Findings suggest that the cochlear implant was providing important auditory cues that can be used to monitor speech and maintain phonemic contrasts.…

This study examined cognitive ability, short-term verbal memory, and speech perception in relation to phonological awareness in 42 gifted and 49 regular 3rd and 4th graders and in 61 prereading kindergartners. Those with higher cognitive reasoning skills scored higher on tasks of phonological awareness than those with lower reasoning skills.…

An error analysis of the word recognition responses of 20 adult cochlear implant users and 19 typical listeners was conducted to determine the types of partial information used when they identified spoken words under auditory-alone and audiovisual conditions. Results indicate there were no significant interactions with hearing status. (Contains…