Background and Aims: This longitudinal study investigated the language skills, phonological working memory and lexical-tone perception of Mandarin-speaking late-talkers (LTs) and those with typical language development (TLD) at 27 months, while also examining their connections with novel word-referent mapping (W-R mapping) through eye-tracking at…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which phonological competition and semantic priming influence lexical access in school-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with normal acoustic hearing. Method: Participants included children who were 5-10 years of age with either normal hearing (n = 41) or…

Cross-situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word-referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach,…

We investigated toddlers' phonological representations of common vowel-initial words that can take on multiple surface forms in the input. In French, liaison consonants are inserted and are syllabified as onsets in subsequent vowel-initial words, for example, petit /t/ éléphant [little elephant]. We aimed to better understand the impact on…

Researchers disagree as to the importance for infant language learning of isolated words, which occur relatively rarely in input speech. Brent and Siskind (2001) showed that the first words infants "produce" are words their mothers used most frequently in isolation. Here we investigate the long-term effects of presentation mode on…

The present study investigated whether the ability to encode the sounds of difficult second-language (L2) contrasts into novel nonnative lexical representations is modulated by the phonological form of the words to be learned. In 3 experiments, German learners of English were trained on word-picture associations with either novel minimal pairs…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of written cues on the second- language (L2) language perception, processing, and word learning, especially when the person's first language (L1) belongs to a different rhythmic type of language than L2. The first objective was to examine whether late bilinguals as L2 learners can benefit more from…

Recent work has demonstrated that the addition of multiple talkers during habituation improves 14-month-olds' performance in the switch task (Rost & McMurray, 2009). While the authors suggest that this boost in performance is due to the increase in acoustic variability (Rost & McMurray, 2010), it is also possible that there is…

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in a Vocabulary I and Reading I courses, participated in the study. Before instruction, both groups took a recognition (vocabulary) and a production (oral reading) pre-test. Comparisons of the pre-test scores showed no significant differences between the experimental and control group in decoding skills…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of intervention for developing deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers' phonological awareness (PA) skills. Thirty children (mean age 57 months) with aided, bilateral hearing loss (and who primarily communicated using spoken English) were recruited in the year prior to commencing formal schooling. The…

In fall of 2019, the EdWeek Research Center set out to gain a clearer sense of nationwide teacher and teacher education perceptions and practices by sending out two surveys about topics related to early reading instruction, especially as it related to phonics. One survey was taken by 674 K-2 and elementary special education teachers who indicated…

Recent efforts to motivate parents' involvement in their child's literacy development involve informing parents about how to incorporate literacy development into daily routines. Teacher leadership and communication are critical--the more teachers encourage and assist parents and caregivers in supporting their child's literacy development, the…

Toddlers' discrimination of native phonemic contrasts is generally unproblematic. Yet using those native contrasts in word learning and word recognition can be more challenging. In this article, we investigate perceptual versus phonological explanations for asymmetrical patterns found in early word recognition. We systematically investigated the…

Many studies have shown that French Cued Speech (CS) can enhance lipreading and the development of phonological awareness and literacy in deaf children but, as yet, there is little evidence that these findings can be generalized to English CS. This study investigated the possible effects of English CS on the speech perception, phonological…

The DAPPLE (Dynamic Assessment of Preschoolers' Proficiency in Learning English) is currently being developed in response to a clinical need. Children exposed to English as an additional language may be referred to speech and language therapy because their proficiency in English is not the same as their monolingual peers. Some, but not all, of…