Purpose: This study examines the effects of the levels of speech practice on fast mapping in monolingual and bilingual speakers. Method: Participants were 30 English-speaking monolingual and 30 Spanish-English bilingual young adults. Each participant was randomly assigned to 1 of 3 practice conditions prior to the fast-mapping task: (a) intensive…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed at gaining understanding on the associations of different types of early language and communication profiles with later self-regulation skills by using longitudinal data from toddler age to kindergarten age. Method: Children with early language profiles representing expressive delay, broad delay (i.e.,…

Purpose: Percentage of syllables stuttered (%SS) and severity rating (SR) scales are measures in common use to quantify stuttering severity and its changes during basic and clinical research conditions. However, their reliability has not been assessed with indices measuring both relative and absolute reliability. This study was designed to provide…

Purpose: The present study aimed at comparing the effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and the caudal zona incerta (cZi) on the proficiency in achieving oral closure and release during plosive production of people with Parkinson's disease. Method: Nineteen patients participated preoperatively and…

Purpose: This study investigated how listeners' native language affects their weighting of acoustic cues (such as vowel quality, pitch, duration, and intensity) in the perception of contrastive word stress. Method: Native speakers (N = 45) of typologically diverse languages (English, Russian, and Mandarin) performed a stress identification…

Purpose: Auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, or ANSD, can be a confusing diagnosis to physicians, clinicians, those diagnosed, and parents of children diagnosed with the condition. The purpose of this review is to provide the reader with an understanding of the disorder, the limitations in current tools to determine site(s) of lesion, and…

Purpose: This study examined whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are deficient in detecting cognitive conflict between competing response tendencies in a GO/No-GO task. Method: Twelve children with SLI (ages 10--12), 22 children with typical language development matched group-wise on age (TLD-A), and 16 younger children with…

Purpose: The authors examined whether school-age children with a history of specific language impairment (H-SLI), their peers with typical development (TD), and adults differ in sensitivity to audiovisual temporal asynchrony and whether such difference stems from the sensory encoding of audiovisual information. Method: Fifteen H-SLI children, 15…

Purpose: To assess autonomic arousal associated with speech and nonspeech tasks in school-age children and young adults. Method: Measures of autonomic arousal (electrodermal level, electrodermal response amplitude, blood pulse volume, and heart rate) were recorded prior to, during, and after the performance of speech and nonspeech tasks by twenty…

Purpose: This study examined African American English--speaking children's use of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries. Method: The data were based on language samples obtained from 48 three-year-olds. Analyses examined rates of marking by auxiliary type, auxiliary surface form, succeeding element, and syntactic construction and by a number of child…

Purpose: To determine how increased vocal loudness and reduced speech rate affect listeners' cognitive-perceptual processing of hypokinetic dysarthric speech associated with Parkinson's disease. Method: Fifty-one healthy listener participants completed a speech perception experiment. Listeners repeated phrases produced by 5 individuals…

Purpose: The authors examined sentence imitation as a potential clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in Czech and its use to identify grammatical markers of SLI. Method: Children with SLI and the age-and language-matched control groups (total N = 57) were presented with a sentence imitation task, a receptive vocabulary task, and…

Purpose: This study examined listening levels and duration of portable listening devices (PLDs) used by people with diversity of ethnicity, education, music genre, and PLD manufacturer. The goal was to estimate participants' PLD noise exposure and identify factors influencing user behavior. Method: This study measured listening levels of 160…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare the biomechanics of the effortful pitch glide (EPG) with swallowing using dynamic MRI. The EPG is a combination of a pitch glide and a pharyngeal squeeze maneuver for targeting laryngeal and pharyngeal muscles. The authors hypothesized that the EPG would elicit significantly greater structural…

Purpose: This study used meta-analysis to investigate the difference in nonverbal cognitive test performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. Method: The meta-analysis included studies (a) that were published between 1995 and 2012 of children with SLI who were age matched (and not…