Purpose: This study explored the use of assessment tasks to examine underlying phonological representations in preschool children with speech impairment. The study also investigated the association between performance on phonological representation tasks and phonological awareness development. Method: The performance of 9 children (aged 3;09…

This study examines whether two frequently reported causes of dyslexia, phonological processing problems and verbal memory impairments, represent a double-deficit or whether they are two expressions of the same deficit. Two-hundred-and-sixty-seven Dutch children aged 10-14 with dyslexia completed a list-learning task and several phonological…

The current study addresses the debate between so-called "structural" and "processing limitation" accounts of aphasia, i.e., whether language impairments reflect the "loss" of linguistic knowledge or its representations, or instead reflect a limitation in processing resources. Confrontation-naming task and category-judgment tasks were used to…

Two experiments investigated the effect of kanji morphemic homophony on lexical decision and naming. Effects were examined from both the left-hand and right-hand positions of Japanese two-kanji compound words. The number of homophones affected the processing of compound words in the same way for both tasks. For left-hand kanji, fewer morphemic…

Sequences of notes contain several different types of pitch cues, including both absolute and relative pitch information. What factors determine which of these cues are used when learning about tone sequences? Previous research suggests that infants tend to preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, while other…

Using nonword repetition tasks as an experimental approach with both adults and children has become quite common in the past 10 to 15 years for studying lexical learning and phonological processing (e.g., Bailey & Hahn, 2001; Gathercole, Frankish, Pickering & Peaker, 1998; Munson, Edwards, & Beckman, 2005; Storkel, 2001; Vitevich & Luce, 2005). In…

In this project, the hypothesis of an auditory temporal processing deficit in dyslexia was tested by examining auditory processing in relation to phonological skills in two contrasting groups of five-year-old preschool children, a familial high risk and a familial low risk group. Participants were individually matched for gender, age, non-verbal…

In many languages, the production of noun phrases requires the selection of gender-marked elements like determiners or inflectional suffixes. There is a recent debate as to whether the selection of freestanding gender-marked elements, such as determiners, follows the same processing mechanisms as the selection of bound gender-marked morphemes,…

As children develop, they process information more rapidly. The primary aim of this study was to determine whether processing speed in the language domain develops at the same rate as global processing speed. A second aim was to determine the stability of processing speed throughout childhood and adolescence. Children (N = 116) were tested on 10…

Investigated the influence of morphologically complex and simple words on the production of morphologically complex and simple picture names in five picture-word interference studies. Two variants of picture-word interference were employed to separate morphological from semantic and phonological effects. (Author/VWL)

In two masked priming experiments with Chinese characters, orthographic priming effects were observed in lexical decision and naming tasks despite the fact that the primes were phonologically unrelated to the target characters. Data suggest that the recovery of lexical information for Chinese characters does not depend on the prior activation of…

A group with closed head injury was compared to neurologically intact controls regarding the referential cohesion and logical coherence of narrative production. A sample of six stories was obtained with tasks of cartoon-elicited story-telling and auditory-oral retelling. We found deficits in the clinical group with respect to referential cohesion,…

We assessed the effect of additional tasks on language perception in second-language and native speakers. The N400 component of the event-related potential was recorded to spoken nouns that had to be judged for synonymity with a preceding word, while additional choice responses were required to visual stimuli. In both participant groups N400 was…

The effects of age of acquisition (AoA) in the first (L1) and second (L2) languages of Spanish--English bilinguals were explored using a translation judgement task in which participants decided whether or not pairs of words in the two languages were translations of each other (i.e., had the same meaning). Experiment 1 found an effect of second…

We report two studies on rapid serial naming (RSN). Study 1 addressed the relations among RSN tasks comprising different stimuli. Separate components for RSN of alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric stimuli, as well as for tasks in which the stimuli alternated between categories were identified. In Study 2, phonological skills, processing speed, motor…