Search

Purpose: The diagnosis of auditory processing disorder (APD) is controversial particularly due to the influence of higher order factors of language and cognition on the diagnostic APD testing. As a result, there might be a need for testing for other domains (e.g., cognition) along with conducting the diagnostic APD testing to rule out the influence of other domains. In order to make recommendations on whether cognitive testing is needed along with the auditory processing testing, as a starting point, the current study was conducted to examine the relationship between cognitive abilities and basic auditory processing in young adults. Method: A total of 38 young adults with normal audiometric thresholds between 250 and 8000 Hz participated in this study. They were tested on their executive function, language, processing speed, working memory, and episodic memory components of cognitive testing and tests for temporal fine structure and spectrotemporal sensitivity for auditory processing testing. Results: No significant correlation was found between the cognitive tests and the tests for basic auditory processing in young adults. Conclusions: These findings present contrast to the existing findings in children and older adults where a stronger correlation between cognitive abilities and auditory processing has been found. The current findings suggest that testing for cognitive abilities may not be needed when testing for basic auditory processing in young adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Anomia, or word-finding difficulty, is a prevalent and persistent feature of aphasia, a neurogenic language disorder affecting millions of people in the United States. Anomia assessments are essential for measuring performance and monitoring outcomes in clinical settings. This study aims to evaluate the reliability of response time (RT) annotation based on spectrograms and assess the predictive utility of proxy RTs collected during computerized naming tests. Method: Archival data from 10 people with aphasia were used. Trained research assistants phonemically transcribed participants’ responses, and RTs were generated from the onset of picture stimulus to the initial phoneme of the first complete attempt. RTs were measured in two ways: hand-generated RTs (from spectrograms) and proxy RTs (automatically extracted online). Interrater agreement was evaluated based on interclass correlation coefficients and generalizability theory tools including variance partitioning and the ϕ-coefficient. The predictive utility of proxy RTs was evaluated within a linear mixed-effects framework. Results: RT annotation reliability showed near-perfect agreement across research assistants (ϕ-coefficient = .93), and the variance accounted for by raters was negligible. Furthermore, proxy RTs significantly and strongly predicted handannotated RTs (R² = ~0.82), suggesting their utility as an alternative measure. Conclusions: The study confirms the reliability of RT annotation and demonstrates the predictive utility of proxy RTs in estimating RTs during computerized naming tests. Incorporating proxy RTs can enhance clinical assessments, providing additional information for cognitive measurement. Further research with larger samples and exploring the impact of using proxy RTs in different psychometric models could optimize clinical protocols and improve communication interventions for individuals with aphasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Shared reading provides preschool-age children with the opportunity to learn novel, low-frequency words. Abundant empirical evidence demonstrates that children can learn the meanings of such words during shared reading, referred to as “semantic learning.” However, less is known about whether children learn the spellings of words during shared reading, referred to as “orthographic learning,” and whether this learning is related to early word reading. The present study tested relations between individual differences in 4- to 6-year-old children’s semantic and, critically, orthographic learning during shared reading and their early word reading skill. Method: In an adaptation of the self-teaching paradigm, children listened to a storybook about novel inventions referred to with nonword names. Children then completed orthographic and semantic choice tests, as well as standardized measures of early word reading and phonological awareness. Results: Individual differences in orthographic, but not semantic, learning during shared reading were related to early word reading, after controls for age and phonological awareness. Conclusions: This study provides a novel test of learning during shared reading, helping to specify the relation between orthographic and semantic learning and early word reading skill. These findings hold implications for theoretical perspectives on relations between learning during shared reading and early word reading, as well as implications for educational practice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: We provide a novel application of psycholinguistic theories and methods to the field of auditory training to provide preliminary data regarding which minimal pair contrasts are more difficult for listeners with typical hearing to distinguish in real-time. Design: Using eye-tracking, participants heard a word and selected the corresponding image from a display of four: the target word, two unrelated words, and a word from one of four contrast categories (i.e., voiced-initial [e.g., peachbeach], voiced-final [e.g., back-bag], manner-initial [e.g., talk-sock], and mannerfinal [e.g., bat-bass]). Results: Fixations were monitored to measure how strongly words compete for recognition depending on the contrast type (voicing, manner) and location (word-initial or final). Manner contrasts competed more for recognition than did voicing contrasts, and contrasts that occurred in word-final position were harder to distinguish than word-initial position. Conclusion: These results are an important initial step toward creating an evidence-based hierarchy for auditory training for individuals who use cochlear implants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch processing. Its linguistic consequences have been examined separately for speech intonations and lexical tones. However, in a tonal language such as Chinese, the processing of intonations and lexical tones interacts with each other during online speech perception. Whether and how the musical pitch disorder might affect linguistic pitch processing during online speech perception remains unknown. Method: We investigated this question with intonation (question vs. statement) and lexical tone (rising Tone 2 vs. falling Tone 4) identification tasks using the same set of sentences, comparing behavioral and event-related potential measurements between Mandarin-speaking amusics and matched controls. We specifically focused on the amusics without behavioral lexical tone deficits (the majority, i.e., pure amusics). Results: Results showed that, despite relative to normal performance when tested in word lexical tone test, pure amusics demonstrated inferior recognition than controls during sentence tone and intonation identification. Compared to controls, pure amusics had larger N400 amplitudes in question stimuli during tone task and smaller P600 amplitudes in intonation task. Conclusion: These data indicate that musical pitch disorder affects both tone and intonation processing during sentence processing even for pure amusics, whose lexical tone processing was intact when tested with words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aimed to explore how well persons with anomic aphasia communicate information during discourse regarding quantity, quality, and efficiency compared to neurotypical controls, to investigate the influence of discourse tasks on informativeness and efficiency and to examine impact factors like aphasia severity and cognitive ability. Method: Language samples of four discourse tasks from 31 persons with anomic aphasia and 31 neurotypical controls were collected from Mandarin AphasiaBank. Correct information unit (CIU) analysis measures including the total number of CIUs, percentage of CIUs, CIUs per minute, and words per minute were calculated. Group differences and the effects of discourse tasks on informativeness and efficiency were investigated. Correlations of CIU analysis measures with aphasia severity and cognitive ability were examined. Results: Persons with anomic aphasia showed lower efficiency in conveying information than controls. They underperformed controls on all CIU analysis measures when executing story narrative tasks. Discourse tasks influenced the informativeness and efficiency of both groups. Neurotypical controls delivered the greatest quantity of information most efficiently when narrating stories. Persons with anomic aphasia exhibited reduced quantity of information during procedural discourse and displayed superior information quality in sequential-picture descriptions. Discourse information may be impacted by aphasia severity and cognitive ability, with varying effects depending on the task. Conclusions: Persons with anomic aphasia are inefficient in communicating discourse messages and perform poorly on all measures in story narratives. When measuring discourse information, the effects of discourse tasks and factors like aphasia severity and cognitive ability should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study was designed to examine the hypothesis that discourse task types influence language performance in Mandarin Chinese--speaking people and to reveal the discourse task-specific linguistic properties of persons with anomic aphasia compared to neurotypical controls. Method: Language samples from persons with aphasia (n = 31) and age- and education-matched controls (n = 31) across four discourse tasks (sequential-picture description, single-picture description, story narrative, and procedural discourse) were collected from Mandarin AphasiaBank. Task-specific distributions of parts of speech were analyzed using mosaic plots. The main effects of tasks in each group and the between-group differences within each task for several typical linguistic variables were evaluated, including the mean length of utterance, tokens, moving-average type-token ratio, words per minute, propositional density, noun--verb ratio, noun percentage, and verb percentage. Results: The results revealed an impact of discourse tasks on most language variables in both groups. In the healthy controls, story narratives yielded the highest total words and lowest verb percentage. In the aphasia group, procedural discourse elicited the fewest total words and densest expressions, whereas their single-picture descriptions had the highest noun--verb ratio. For all tasks, the aphasia group performed worse than the control group in the mean length of utterance, tokens, moving-average type-token ratio, and words per minute. For noun--verb ratio, noun percentage, and verb percentage, only one task (i.e., single-picture description) showed significant between-group differences. Conclusion: The selection of discourse tasks should be addressed in assessments and interventions for Mandarin Chinese--speaking individuals with aphasia to obtain more accurate and feasible outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study focuses on 7- to 9-year-old children attending primary school in Swedish areas of low socioeconomic status, where most children's school language is their second language. The aim was to better understand what factors influence these children's narrative listening comprehension both in an ideal listening condition (in quiet) and for the primary school classroom, a typical listening condition (with multitalker babble noise). Method: A total of 86 typically developing 7- to 9-year-olds performed a narrative listening comprehension test (Lyssna, Förstå och Minnas [LFM]; English translation: Listen, Comprehend, and Remember) in two listening conditions: quiet and multitalker babble noise. They also performed the crosslinguistic nonword repetition test and a digit span backwards (DSB) test. A predictive statistical model including these factors, the children's degree of school language exposure, parental education level, and age was derived. Results: Listening condition had the strongest predictive value for LFM performance, followed by school language exposure and nonword repetition accuracy. Parental education level was also a significant predictor. There was a significant three-way interaction effect between listening condition, age, and DSB performance. Conclusions: Multitalker babble noise has a negative effect on children's narrative listening comprehension. The effect of multitalker babble noise could be explained by age differences in the ability to allocate working memory capacity during the narrative listening comprehension task, suggesting that younger children may be more vulnerable for missing information when listening in background noise than their older peers. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25209248 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We examined which measures of complexity are most informative when studying language produced in interaction. Specifically, using these measures, we explored whether native and nonnative speakers modified the higher level properties of their production beyond the acoustic–phonetic level based on the language background of their conversation partner. Method: Using a subset of production data from the Wildcat Corpus that used Diapix, an interactive picture matching task, to elicit production, we compared English language production at the dyad and individual level across three different pair types: eight native pairs (English–English), eight mixed pairs (four English–Chinese and four English–Korean), and eight nonnative pairs (four Chinese–Chinese and four Korean–Korean). Results: At both the dyad and individual levels, native speakers produced longer and more clausally dense speech. They also produced fewer silent pauses and fewer linguistic mazes relative to nonnative speakers. Speakers did not modify their production based on the language background of their interlocutor. Conclusions: The current study examines higher level properties of language production in true interaction. Our results suggest that speakers’ productions were determined by their own language background and were independent of that of their interlocutor. Furthermore, these demonstrated promise for capturing syntactic characteristics of language produced in true dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This is the first study to investigate the combined effects of processing-based factors (i.e., clause length and clause order) and discourse-pragmatic factors (i.e., information structure) on children's and adults' production of adverbial when-clauses. Method: In a sentence repetition task, 16 three-year-old and 16 five-year-old children as well as 17 adults listened to and watched an animated story and then were asked to repeat what they had just heard and seen. Each story contained an adverbial when-clause and its main clause. The sentences were manipulated for their clause order, information structure, and clause length. Results: Adults tended to change main--when clause orders to when--main in their repetitions, and they showed a strong preference for the given--new order of information. In contrast, 3-year-olds tended to change when--main clause orders to main--when, and they showed a preference for the new--given order of information. In addition, 3-year-olds tended to produce short--long clause orders irrespective of what they had heard, whereas adults produced both short--long and long--short orders in line with the input. In general, 5-year-olds were more adultlike in their production compared to 3-year-olds. Conclusions: Young children were strongly affected by processing-based factors in their production of complex sentences. They tended to order main and when-clauses in a way that requires less planning and processing load. However, they have not yet attained an adultlike sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic factors. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24422635 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Lexical processing impairments such as delayed and reduced activation of lexical-semantic information have been linked to syntactic processing disruptions and sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia (IWAs). Lexical-level deficits can also preclude successful lexical encoding during sentence processing and amplify the processing costs of similarity-based interference during syntactic retrieval. We investigate whether two manipulations to engage attention and pre-activate semantic features of a target (to-be-retrieved) noun will (a) boost lexical activation during initial lexical encoding and (b) facilitate syntactic dependency linking through improved resolution of interference in IWAs and neurologically unimpaired age-matched controls (AMCs). Method: Eye-tracking-while-listening with a visual world paradigm was used to investigate whether semantic and attentional manipulations modulated initial lexical processing and downstream syntactic retrieval of the direct-object noun in object-relative sentences. Results: In the attention and semantic manipulations, the AMC group showed no changes in initial lexical access levels; however, gaze patterns revealed clear facilitations in dependency linking and interference resolution. In the IWA group, the attentional cue increased and maintained activation of N1 with modest facilitations in dependency linking. In the semantic condition, IWA results showed a greater degree of facilitation during dependency linking. Conclusions: The results suggest that attention and semantic activation are parameters that may be manipulated to strengthen encoding of lexical representations to facilitate retrieval (i.e., dependency linking) and mitigate similaritybased interference. In IWAs, these manipulations may help to reduce lexical processing deficits that can preclude successful encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Language sampling is a critical component of language assessments. However, there are many ways to elicit language samples that likely impact the results. The purpose of this study was to examine how different discourse types and elicitation tasks affect various language sampling outcomes. Method: A diverse group of K-3 students (N = 1,037) contributed eight spoken language samples in four elicitation conditions: (a) expository generation, (b) expository retell, (c) narrative generation, and (d) narrative retell. Samples were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded for number of total words, number of different words, mean length of utterance in words (MLUW), and number of clauses per communication unit (i.e., Subordination Index [SI]). Results: Narrative retell and expository generation conditions yielded the largest samples with the greatest lexical diversity when compared to narrative generation and expository retell. MLUW was higher in expository conditions, but mean SI was higher in narrative conditions. For both measures of syntax, narrative retell and expository generation yielded the highest mean scores. For each outcome, there were expected increases corresponding to grades; however, the differences faded between second and third grade. Conclusion: As a component of language assessments, clinicians' selection of language sampling procedures will impact the sample length, lexical diversity, utterance length, and syntactical complexity of the samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This prospective, single-blinded, parallel, stratified, randomized clinical trial via telehealth aimed to investigate the impact of Startle Adjuvant Rehabilitation Therapy (START) on aphasia, apraxia of speech (AOS), and quality of life in individuals with chronic stroke. The study hypothesized that START would have a greater effect on AOS-related measures and more severe individuals. Method: Forty-two participants with poststroke aphasia, AOS, or both were randomly assigned to the START or control group. Both groups received 77-dB GET READY and GO cues during a word repetition task for three 1-hr sessions on consecutive days. The START group additionally received 105-dB white noise GO cues during one third of trials. The Western Aphasia Battery--Revised, Apraxia Battery for Adults, Stroke Impact Scale, and Communication Outcomes After Stroke scale were administered at Day 1, Day 5, and 1-month follow-up. Results: START improved performance on some subtests of the Western Aphasia Battery (Comprehension, Repetition, Reading) and measures of AOS (Diadochokinetic Rate, Increasing Word Length) in individuals with moderate/ severe aphasia, whereas moderate/severe controls saw no changes. Individuals with mild aphasia receiving START had improved Reading, whereas mild controls saw improved Comprehension. The START group had increased mood and perceived communication recovery by Day 5, whereas controls saw no changes in quality of life. Conclusions: This study is the first to evaluate the impact of training with startling acoustic stimuli on clinical measures of aphasia and AOS. Our findings suggest START can enhance both nontrained speech production and receptive speech tasks in moderate/severe aphasia, possibly by reducing poststroke cortical inhibition. Our findings should be considered carefully, as our limitations include small effect sizes, within-group variability, and low completion rates for quality-of-life assessments and follow-up visits. Future studies should explore a mechanism of action, conduct larger and longer Phase 2 clinical trials, and evaluate long-term retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: It is often assumed that phonological awareness only reflects children’s phonological skill. However, orthographic representations have been found to be automatically involved during phonological awareness tasks, which we refer to as automatic orthographic activation. Although previous longitudinal neural studies have addressed how phonological processing during phonological awareness tasks is bidirectionally related to reading skill in developing children, we do not know how automatic orthographic activation plays a role in reading skill. Method: To address this gap, we measured 40 children’s reading skill and brain activity during an auditory phonological task at two time points using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Children were 5.5 to 6.5 years old at the first time point and were followed up approximately 1.5 years later when they were 7 to 8 years old. Results: We found that earlier reading skill predicted children’s later functional connectivity during onset processing between the left superior temporal gyrus, a phonological region, and the left posterior ventral occipitotemporal cortex, an orthographic region representing letters. Conclusion: This finding, together with previous studies, suggests that learning to read influences phonological awareness not only by refining phonological representations but also via strengthening the automatic mapping between phonemes and letters during spoken language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Repetition priming can lead to improved naming ability in people with aphasia, but concerns have arisen from prior research about using only a single picture exemplar for each target. Specifically, it is unclear whether the observed improvements were due to learning simple correspondences between particular words and pictures rather than changes at a deeper level of lexical– semantic processing. In addition, implications for generalization after training with single exemplars were unclear. This study replicated and extended previous work to address these questions. Method: Five participants with chronic aphasia participated in this repeatedmeasures design study, which repeatedly paired words and pictures with no feedback provided. Two participants engaged in a single-exemplar condition, with a single picture exemplar of each target used for every presentation of that target. The remaining three participants engaged in a multiple-exemplar condition, with several different pictures used for each target. Half of these targets used training pictures during naming probes, whereas half did not. Results: Primed items led to greater improvements in naming than items that were practiced but not primed. The data indicate that improvements may extend beyond stimulus-specific correspondences. Maintenance and generalization effects were mixed. Conclusions: These data provide further support for the efficacy of repetition priming treatment for anomia. Implications and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: To overcome variability in spoken language, listeners utilize various types of context information for disambiguating speech sounds. Context effects have been shown to be affected by cognitive load. However, previous results are mixed regarding the influence of cognitive load on the use of context information in speech perception. Purpose: We tested a population characterized by an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to better understand the relationship between attention (or internal cognitive load) and context effects. Method: The use of acoustic versus lexical properties of the surrounding signal to disambiguate speech sounds was examined in listeners with ADHD and neurotypical listeners. Results: Compared to neurotypicals, individuals with ADHD relied more strongly on lexical context for speech perception; however, reliance on acoustic context information from speech rate did not differ. Conclusion: These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the use of highlevel but not low-level context information in speech and imply that speech recognition deficits in ADHD likely arise due to impaired higher order cognitive processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study tested the hypotheses that (a) motor speech activities are temporally organized around the nuclei into vowel-centric units that hold both stability and flexibility and (b) such temporal organization is impacted by motor speech impairment. Method: Thirteen individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and 10 healthy controls read a sentence 3 times at each of the following rates: habitual, fast, and slow. Articulatory gestures and phonatory event were assessed in two vowel-centric units, as operationally defined within and across the boundaries of two target words--cat and must--to accommodate common coda omission and coarticulation. Twelve absolute and relative timing measures centering on the nucleus were derived to characterize the temporal organization of each unit. These measures were evaluated in terms of (a) their relations with global duration across rate conditions and (b) between-groups differences for the habitual rate condition. Results: Both vowel-centric units remained stable in relative timing between the articulatory gestures approaching and moving away from the nucleus across rate conditions. Relative timing between the articulatory gestures and phonatory event at smaller temporal granularities varied with global duration, but in different ways for neurologically impaired and healthy speakers. Disease impacts on relative timing were only detected across word boundaries. All absolute timing measures revealed consistent temporal scaling effects and disease-related prolongations. Conclusions: The findings provide preliminary support for vowel-centric temporal organization of motor speech activities. Such temporal organization holds some extent of both stability and flexibility, which may facilitate the parsing of syllabic events during auditory processing, while accommodating task-specific suprasegmental variations. The timing impairments in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis are likely attributed to the disease-imposed dynamic constraints, reducing the entrainment of the related motor speech activities to the underlying linguistic elements. These findings have potential implications in guiding the assessment and management of temporal speech deficits in ALS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: For voice perception, two voice cues, the fundamental frequency (fo) and/or vocal tract length (VTL), seem to largely contribute to identification of voices and speaker characteristics. Acoustic content related to these voice cues is altered in cochlear implant transmitted speech, rendering voice perception difficult for the implant user. In everyday listening, there could be some facilitation from top-down compensatory mechanisms such as from use of linguistic content. Recently, we have shown a lexical content benefit on just-noticeable differences (JNDs) in VTL perception, which was not affected by vocoding. Whether this observed benefit relates to lexicality or phonemic content and whether additional sentence information can affect voice cue perception as well were investigated in this study. Method: This study examined lexical benefit on VTL perception, by comparing words, time-reversed words, and nonwords, to investigate the contribution of lexical (words vs. nonwords) or phonetic (nonwords vs. reversed words) information. In addition, we investigated the effect of amount of speech (auditory) information on fo and VTL voice cue perception, by comparing words to sentences. In both experiments, nonvocoded and vocoded auditory stimuli were presented. Results: The outcomes showed a replication of the detrimental effect reversed words have on VTL perception. Smaller JNDs were shown for stimuli containing lexical and/or phonemic information. Experiment 2 showed a benefit in processing full sentences compared to single words in both fo and VTL perception. In both experiments, there was an effect of vocoding, which only interacted with sentence information for fo. Conclusions: In addition to previous findings suggesting a lexical benefit, the current results show, more specifically, that lexical and phonemic information improves VTL perception. fo and VTL perception benefits from more sentence information compared to words. These results indicate that cochlear implant users may be able to partially compensate for voice cue perception difficulties by relying on the linguistic content and rich acoustic cues of everyday speech. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23796405 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Lexical characteristics of speech stimuli can significantly impact intelligibility. However, lexical characteristics of the widely used Speech Intelligibility Test (SIT) are unknown. We aimed to (a) define variation in neighborhood density, word frequency, grammatical word class, and type-token ratio across a large corpus of SIT sentences and tests and (b) determine the relationship of lexical characteristics to speech intelligibility in speakers with multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson's disease (PD), and neurologically healthy controls. Method: Using an extant database of 92 speakers (32 controls, 30 speakers with MS, and 30 speakers with PD), percent correct intelligibility scores were obtained for the SIT. Neighborhood density, word frequency, word class, and type-token ratio were calculated and summed for each of the 11 sentences of each SIT test. The distribution of each characteristic across SIT sentences and tests was examined. Linear mixed-effects models were performed to assess the relationship between intelligibility and the lexical characteristics. Results: There was large variability in the distribution of lexical characteristics across this large corpus of SIT sentences and tests. Modeling revealed a relationship between intelligibility and the lexical characteristics, with word frequency and word class significantly contributing to the model. Conclusions: Three primary findings emerged: (a) There was considerable variability in lexical characteristics both within and across the large corpus of SIT tests; (b) there was not a robust association between intelligibility and the lexical characteristics; and (c) findings from a study demonstrating an effect of neighborhood density and word frequency on intelligibility were replicated. Clinical and research implications of the findings are discussed, and three exemplar SIT tests systematically controlling for neighborhood density and word frequency are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Using a novel parent report measure, this study investigated whether asking parents to rate their certainty when reporting on child vocabulary skills provided additional insight into parent report and emerging language abilities in young autistic children. Specifically, we investigated whether parent certainty varied based on whether the child was reported to understand, understand and say, or neither understand nor say the word and whether standardized measures of expressive and receptive language abilities and/or autistic traits predicted parent certainty. Lastly, we investigated whether certainty was associated with inconsistency in parent report of child word knowledge. Method: Twenty-one parents and their autistic children ages 2–5 years participated. One parent per child completed the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MCDI) Words and Gestures form and a custom vocabulary checklist including 24 object nouns from the MCDI. Within the custom form, parents indicated whether their child understood, understood and said, or neither understood nor said 24 target nouns and reported how certain they were about their responses using a 5-point scale. Expressive language, receptive language, and autistic traits were measured via direct assessment using standardized measures. Results: Parent certainty varied widely and was higher for words the parents reported the children understood and said compared to that for words children either understood or neither understood nor said. Certainty ratings were higher when a child had higher standardized receptive and expressive language scores. Lastly, parent certainty was associated with reporting consistency, clarifying previous findings of inconsistencies in parent report of child vocabulary. Conclusion: Findings from this study indicate that measuring parent certainty provides critical information when assessing early vocabulary skills in autistic children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Learning to read is a complex, multifaceted process that relies on several speech and language–related subskills. Individual differences in word reading outcomes are indicated among children with inaccurate speech sound productions, with some of these children developing later reading difficulties. There are inconsistent reports as to whether phonological deficits and/or weaknesses in oral language explain these subsequent reading difficulties. Thus, it remains unclear how variability in speech production accuracy in early childhood may impact reading development. Therefore, the present longitudinal study seeks to clarify the relation between speech sound production accuracy in kindergarten and subsequent reading outcomes with a focus on additional potential mediating factors. Method: Speech accuracy, core preliteracy skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, and letter–name knowledge), and additional potential mediators (phonological memory and oral language abilities) were characterized at the start of formal reading instruction. Word reading, decoding, reading fluency, and comprehension were assessed at the end of second grade. Mediation analyses were conducted to examine factors that mediate the relation between speech accuracy in kindergarten and subsequent reading outcomes. Results: Initial associations between early speech sound production accuracy and subsequent reading outcomes were indicated; however, mediation effects of preliteracy skills (phonological awareness and letter–name knowledge) were identified for word reading, decoding, and reading fluency outcomes. For reading comprehension, mediation effects of preliteracy and vocabulary skills were observed. Conclusions: The relation between speech sound production accuracy and subsequent word reading, decoding, reading fluency, and comprehension was observed to be mediated by preliteracy skills, specifically phonological awareness and letter–name knowledge. For reading comprehension only, vocabulary knowledge were of additional importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic–speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study employed a cross-sectional research design and enrolled 96 monolingual speakers of Kuwaiti Arabic. Four groups of children aged 4;0–7;11 (years; months) were randomly recruited from public schools across Kuwait. The groups consisted of 22 four-year-olds (Kindergarten 1), 24 five-year-olds (Kindergarten 2), 25 six-year-olds (Grade 1), and 25 seven-year-olds (Grade 2). Two sets of sequential pictures from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument were used to elicit storytelling from all participants: a one-episode story and a more complex three-episode story. Results: The children’s stories were analyzed to determine if there were differences in narrative microstructure as a function of age and task complexity. The data indicated that productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic structures increased with task complexity. The length of communication units, the average mean length of the three longest utterances, and the amount and variety of words in the children’s productions were all significantly larger in the more complex story. Only one syntactic structure showed age as well as task effects. Conclusion: Clinical recommendations include adapting the coding scheme to fit Arabic data, using the more complex narrative alone for microstructure analysis, and calculating only a few measures for productivity and syntactic complexity to save time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In the last decade, psychology and other sciences have implemented numerous reforms to improve the robustness of our research, many of which are based on increasing transparency throughout the research process. Among these reforms is the practice of preregistration, in which researchers create a timestamped and uneditable document before data collection that describes the methods of the study, how the data will be analyzed, the sample size, and many other decisions. The current article highlights the benefits of preregistration with a focus on the specific issues that speech, language, and hearing researchers are likely to encounter, and additionally provides a tutorial for writing preregistrations. Conclusions: Although rates of preregistration have increased dramatically in recent years, the practice is still relatively uncommon in research on speech, language, and hearing. Low rates of adoption may be driven by a lack of understanding of the benefits of preregistration (either generally or for our discipline in particular) or uncertainty about how to proceed if it becomes necessary to deviate from the preregistered plan. Alternatively, researchers may see the benefits of preregistration but not know where to start, and gathering this information from a wide variety of sources is arduous and time consuming. This tutorial addresses each of these potential roadblocks to preregistration and equips readers with tools to facilitate writing preregistrations for research on speech, language, and hearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The clinical use of event-related potentials in patients with language disorders is increasingly acknowledged. For this purpose, normative data should be available. Within this context, healthy aging and gender effects on the electrophysiological correlates of semantic sentence comprehension were investigated. Method: One hundred and ten healthy subjects (55 men and 55 women), divided among three age groups (young, middle aged, and elderly), performed a semantic sentence congruity task in the visual modality during electroencephalographic recording. Results: The early visual complex was affected by increasing age as shown by smaller P2 amplitudes in the elderly compared to the young. Moreover, the N400 effect in the elderly was smaller than in the young and was delayed compared to latency measures in both middle-aged and young subjects. The topography of age-related amplitude changes of the N400 effect appeared to be gender specific. The late positive complex effect was increased at frontal electrode sites from middle age on, but this was not statistically significant. No gender effects were detected regarding the early P1, N1, and P2, or the late positive complex effect. Conclusion: Especially aging effects were found during semantic sentence comprehension, and this from the level of perceptual processing on. Normative data are now available for clinical use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The absence of culture- and language-specific aphasia assessment in Bangla underscores a critical problem in communication sciences and disorders. Aphasia occurs in ~41% of Bangla-speaking stroke survivors. In the past 40 years, stroke incidence has doubled in low- and middle-income countries, such as Bangladesh and India, where there are ~250 million native Bangla speakers. This study aims to initiate the first step toward identifying an appropriate picture stimulus for the Bangla picture description task (PDT) intended for inclusion in a Bangla aphasia assessment. Researchers have reported the importance of cultural relevance and three visuographic variables of a picture (high-context, color, and photograph vs. black-and-white line drawing) for faster comprehension and comprehensive language production in people with aphasia and neurologically healthy adults. Method: Ninety-six neurologically healthy native Bangla speakers of three age groups (young 19–30, middle age 40–55, and older 65–89 years) were recruited to compare spontaneous language production for four selected culturally related and nonrelated picture stimuli with and without the three visuographic variables. Five linguistic variables were used to analyze the language samples. Results: The results demonstrated a significant (a) picture type effect for moving-average type–token ratio, words per minute (WPM), and mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU) and (b) age group effect for WPM, MLU, and complexity index. Conclusions: This study suggests that a culturally related high-context color photograph is the optimal choice for the Bangla PDT. This study also indicates reduced fluency, grammatical complexity, and syntactic complexity in healthy Bangla-speaking adults aged 65 years and above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) often struggle with forming early representations for phonemes and words, which could impact their speech production as well as their lexical access. This difficulty may limit their ability to accurately identify nonexemplar productions of words, such as develop)mental misarticulations produced by peers. The purpose of this study was to examine word interpretation of misarticulated words by children with SSD. Method: Seventeen monolingual English-speaking preschoolers were assessed for language, phonological processing, and articulation skills. Participants heard three types of words: accurate productions (e.g., “leaf”), common misarticulated productions (e.g., “weaf”), uncommon misarticulated productions (e.g., “yeaf”), and unrelated nonwords (e.g., “gim”). Children were presented with these words aurally and asked to select the picture that matched what they heard—either a real object or a blank square. Results: The proportion of real object picture selections was calculated for each word type and compared within subjects. The findings indicate that children with SSD reliably associated common misarticulated words with pictured objects more frequently than they did in the uncommon misarticulation condition. These results were compared between subjects to typically developing (TD) peers’ responses using a one-way analysis of variance. The results indicate that children with SSD identified common substitutions as real object pictures more often than TD peers. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that children with SSD are sensitive to the commonness of misarticulations; however, they accept common substitutions as real object pictures significantly more often than TD peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by dysprosody, yet the literature is mixed with respect to how dysprosody affects the ability to mark lexical stress, possibly due to differences in speech tasks used to assess lexical stress. The purpose of this study was to compare how people with and without PD modulate acoustic dimensions of lexical stress—fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration—to mark lexical stress across three different speech tasks. Method: Twelve individuals with mild-to-moderate idiopathic PD and 12 age- and sex-matched older adult controls completed three speech tasks: picture description, word production in isolation, and word production in lists. Outcome measures were the fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration of the vocalic segments of two trochees (initial stress) and two iambs (final stress) spoken in all three tasks. Results: There were very few group differences. Both groups marked trochees by modulating intensity and fundamental frequency and iambs by modulating duration. Task had a significant impact on the stress patterns used by both groups. Stress patterns were most differentiated in words produced in isolation and least differentiated in lists of words. Conclusions: People with PD did not demonstrate impairments in the production of lexical stress, suggesting that dysprosody associated with PD does not impact all types of prosody in the same way. However, there were reduced distinctions in stress marking that were more apparent in trochees than iambs. In addition, the task used to assess prosody has a significant effect on all acoustic measures. Future research should focus on the use of connected speech tasks to obtain more generalizable measures of prosody in PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigates whether crosslinguistic effects on auditory word recognition are modulated by the quality of the auditory signal (clear and noisy). Method: In an online experiment, a group of Spanish-English bilingual listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task, in their second language, English. Words and pseudowords were either presented in the clear or were embedded in white auditory noise. Target words were varied in the degree to which they overlapped in their phonological form with their translation equivalents and were categorized according to their overlap as cognates (form and meaning) or noncognates (meaning only). In order to test for effects of crosslinguistic competition, the phonological neighborhood density of the targets' translations was also manipulated. Results: The results show that crosslinguistic effects are impacted by noise; when the translation had a high neighborhood density, performance was worse for cognates than for noncognates, especially in noise. Conclusions: The findings suggest that noise increases lexical competition across languages, as it does within a language, and that the crosslinguistic phonological overlap for cognates compared with noncognates can further increase the pool of competitors by co-activating crosslinguistic lexical candidates. The results are discussed within the context of the bilingual word recognition literature and models of language and bilingual lexical processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to investigate the relationship between speech error variability and phonological awareness. Method: This article begins with a narrative review of the theoretical interpretation of speech error variability. The post hoc exploratory analysis of the relationship between speech error variability and phonological awareness included 40 children: 20 with typical speech and language and 20 with speech sound disorder and typical language. Groups were matched on gender, age, maternal education, receptive and expressive vocabulary, nonverbal intelligence, and expressive morphosyntax. Multiple regression was used to identify the best fit model for the relationship between vocabulary, speech errors, and phonological awareness. Results: Segmental variability was associated with poor phonological awareness in preschool-aged children. Conclusion: Children with high levels of segmental variability have poor phonological awareness, likely due to unstable phonological representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Recent work suggests that speech perception is influenced by the somatosensory system and that oral sensorimotor disruption has specific effects on the perception of speech both in infants who have not yet begun to talk and in older children and adults with ample speech production experience; however, we do not know how such disruptions affect children with speech sound disorder (SSD). Response to disruption of would-be articulators during speech perception could reveal how sensorimotor linkages work for both typical and atypical speech and language development. Such linkages are crucial to advancing our knowledge on how both typically developing and atypically developing children produce and perceive speech. Method: Using a looking-while-listening task, we explored the impact of a sensorimotor restrictor on the recognition of words whose onsets involve late-developing sounds (s, ʃ) for both children with typical development (TD) and their peers with SSD. Results: Children with SSD showed a decrement in performance when they held a restrictor in their mouths during the task, but this was not the case for children with TD. This effect on performance was only observed for the specific speech sounds blocked by the would-be articulators. Conclusion: We argue that these findings provide evidence for altered perceptual motor pathways in children with SSD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: There is a long-standing debate about how written words are recognized. Central to this debate is the role of phonology. The objective of this study is to contribute to our collective understanding regarding the role of phonology in written word recognition. Method: A total of 30 monolingual adults were tested using a novel written word version of the visual world paradigm (VWP). We compared activation of phonological anadromes (words that are matched for sounds but not letters, e.g., JAB-BADGE) and orthographic anadromes (words that are matched for letters but not sounds, e.g., LEG-GEL) to determine the relative role of phonology and orthography in familiar single-word reading. Results: We found that activation for phonological anadromes is earlier, more robust, and sustained longer than orthographic anadromes. Conclusions: These results are most consistent with strong phonological theories of single-word reading that posit an early and robust role of phonology. This study has broad implications for larger debates regarding reading instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and comprehension of three prosodic cues (f0 range, final lengthening, and pause) at structural boundaries in coordinate sequences in participants with right hemisphere brain damage (RHDP) and participants with left hemisphere brain damage (LHDP). Method: Twenty RHDP and 15 LHDP participated in our study. Comprehension experiment: Participants and a control group listened to coordinate name sequences with internal grouping by a prosodically marked structural boundary (grouped condition, e.g., “(Gabi und Leni) # und Nina”) or without internal grouping (ungrouped condition, e.g., “Gabi und Leni und Nina”) and had to identify the target condition. The strength and combinations of prosodic cues in the stimuli were manipulated. Production experiment: Participants were asked to produce coordinate sequences in the two conditions (grouped, ungrouped) in two different tasks: a Reading Aloud and a Repetition experiment. Accuracy of participants' productions was subsequently assessed in a rating study and productions were analyzed with respect to use of prosodic cues. Results: In the Comprehension experiment, RHDP and LHDP had overall lower identification accuracies than unimpaired control participants and LHDP were found to have particular problems with boundary identification when the pause cue was reduced. In production, LHDP and RHDP employed all three prosodic cues for boundary marking, but struggled to clearly mark prosodic boundaries in 28% of all productions. Both groups showed better performance in reading aloud than in repetition. LHDP relied more on using f0 range and pause duration to prosodically mark structural boundaries, whereas RHDP employed final lengthening more vigorously than LHDP in reading aloud. Conclusions: We conclude that processing of linguistic prosody is affected in RHDP and LHDP, but not completely impaired. Therefore, prosody can serve as a relevant communicative resource. However, it should also be considered as a target area for assessment and treatment in both groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Previous research has indicated the beneficial effects of musical training on speech perception in children. However, little has been known about whether musical training exerts transfer effects on fine-grained perception of linguistic pitch and time information. This study aimed to investigate the effects of different musical training programs and training duration on preschoolers’ categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones and voice onset time (VOT) in Mandarin Chinese, which utilize pitch and time changes, respectively, to convey phonemic contrasts. Method: Sixty-one Mandarin-speaking children aged 4 years were randomly assigned to pitch-based musical training (carillon group), rhythm-based musical training (drum group), or handcraft learning (control group). Children completed the tests designed to assess their musical abilities, CP of lexical tones and VOT, IQ, and working memory at three time-points. Repeated-measures analyses of variance were conducted to evaluate the training-related effects in various tasks. Correlation analyses were used to infer the relationships between musical abilities and CP performance of speech. Results: The carillon group demonstrated advantages over the drum and control groups in music pitch processing and CP of lexical tones; besides, the drum group performed better in the music time processing and CP of VOT than the control group. Moreover, positive correlations were found between musical gains and improvements on CP of speech. Conclusions: These results provide evidence that transfer effects occur in CP of lexical tones and VOT in preschoolers. Our findings highlight the selectivity of musical advantages driven by different components of training programs and suggest that long-term musical training could be a means of early speech rehabilitation in children with communication disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: There is limited access to audiology services for the growing population of Spanish--English bilinguals in the United States. Online auditory testing can potentially provide a cost-effective alternative to in-person visits. However, even for bilinguals with high English proficiency, age of English acquisition may affect speech perception accuracy. This study used a comprehensive test battery to assess speech perception and spectrotemporal processing abilities in Spanish--English bilinguals and to evaluate susceptibility of different tests to effects of native language. Method: The online battery comprised three tests of speech in quiet (vowel and consonant identification and words in sentences), four tests of speech perception in noise (two for intelligibility and two for comprehension), and three tests of spectrotemporal processing (two tests of stochastically modulated pattern discrimination and one test of spectral resolution). Participants were 28 adult Spanish--English bilinguals whose English acquisition began either early (≤ 6 years old) or late (≥ 7 years old) and 18 English monolingual speakers. Results: Significant differences were found in six of the 10 tests. The differences were most pronounced for vowel perception in quiet, speech-in-noise test, and two tests of speech comprehension in noise. Late bilinguals consistently scored lower than native English speakers or early bilinguals. In contrast, no differences between groups were observed for digits-in-noise or three tests of spectrotemporal processing abilities. Conclusion: The findings suggest initial feasibility of online assessment in this population and can inform selection of tests for auditory assessment of Spanish--English bilinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We explored the intervention characteristics and language outcomes of children with unilateral hearing loss (UHL) in Taiwan after the implementation of universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) to highlight changes in attitudes and actions toward hearing-related treatments. Method: Data of 132 children with UHL in birth cohorts from 2012 to 2019 were included. This retrospective study examined differences in age at identification, hearing aid (HA) fitting, and seeking supportive services. Commonly requested attributes of services, reasons for HA rejection, and children's language performance were investigated. Results: The age at identification decreased from 50.3 months in 2012 to 2.6 months in 2019. Similar trends of declining age were obtained for the age at HA fitting and age at first service contact. In addition, 40% of the parents did not seek support until the child became older (M = 30.5 months) and showed more noticeable behaviors related to hearing loss, and only 64% of the children were consistent HA users. Children with UHL enrolled in the intervention programs approximated the average language performance of the assessment norm; however, they showed depressed language levels when compared to the norm group at the 75th percentile. Conclusions: UNHS had a positive impact on early identification and intervention in children with UHL. Compared to parents of children with all types of hearing loss, parents of children with UHL seemed to be more uncertain about aural habilitation at the early stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Speech recognition in noise is a ubiquitous problem in older listeners. Speech, the most commonly encountered noise in the real world, causes greater masking than noise maskers, a phenomenon called informational masking (IM). This is due to the lexical-semantic and/or acoustic-phonetic information present in speech maskers. In this study, we aimed to observe the age-related differences in speech recognition and the magnitudes of IM when the maskers varied in the type of linguistic information. Method: In 30 young and 30 older individuals, we measured the signal-to-noise ratio required to obtain 50% correct identification under four-talker babble (lexicalsemantic and acoustic-phonetic information), four-talker reverse babble (predominantly acoustic-phonetic information), and speech-shaped noise (SSN; energetic). Results: In both groups, the four-talker babble caused the greatest masking effect (worst performances), whereas the SSN resulted in the least masking effect (best performances). The effectiveness of IM due to the lexical-semantic information was comparable between the two groups. However, the effectiveness of IM due to the acoustic-phonetic information was significantly higher in the older listeners, causing worse performances. Conclusions: The greater effectiveness of IM due to the acoustic-phonetic information (worse performance) could be due to the minimal-to-mild highfrequency hearing loss and the consequent temporal processing deficits observed in the older listeners. However, it is possible that the older listeners can employ compensatory mechanisms (such as life experiences, contextual cues, employing higher listening efforts, among many possible other mechanisms) to overcome some of these deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study examined language group differences in English syntactic knowledge based on performance on a sentence repetition task. Method: Fourth and sixth grade students who were monolinguals (n = 30), early bilinguals (i.e., simultaneous; n = 27), or late bilinguals (i.e., sequential; n = 29) completed an English sentence repetition task. Their responses were analyzed as a function of sentence length (short vs. long), sentence type (active vs. passive), phrase type (noun, verb, and prepositional), and word type (content vs. function). Results: Overall, early bilinguals' performance did not differ significantly from that of the monolinguals. However, these bilinguals recalled significantly more content words than function words on the long sentences. At each level of analysis, the late bilinguals' performance was less accurate than the other groups. The magnitude of these group differences was larger for passive sentences and prepositional phrases. Conclusion: Findings highlight areas of syntactic development that differ among groups and should be targeted for additional instruction with English language learners in elementary school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify and describe latent dual language profiles in a large sample of school-age Spanish-English bilingual children designated as English learners (ELs) by their school district. Method: Data for this study include 847 Spanish-speaking ELs from kindergarten to third grade. Spanish and English narrative retell language samples were collected from all participants. Four oral language measures were calculated in Spanish and English, including the subordination index, moving average type-token ratio, narrative structure scheme (NSS), and words per minute using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcript. These indicator measures were used in a latent profile analysis to identify dual language profiles. Results: The optimal model represents a four-profile solution, including a Spanish-dominant group (average Spanish, low English), an English-dominant group (low Spanish, average English), and two balanced groups (a balancedaverage group and a balanced-high group). Additionally, participants displayed uneven performance across language domains and distinct patterns of unique strength or weakness in a specific domain in one of their two languages. Conclusions: Findings from this study highlight the large variability in English and Spanish oral language abilities in school-age Spanish-speaking ELs and suggest that a dichotomous classification of ELs versus English-proficient students may not be sufficient to determine the type of educational program that best fits a specific bilingual child's need. These findings highlight the need to assess both languages across multiple language domains to paint a representative picture of a bilingual child's language abilities. The dual language profiles identified may be used to guide the educational program selection process to improve the congruence among the linguistic needs of an individual child, teachers' use of instructional language, and the goals of the educational program (i.e., improving English proficiency vs. supporting dual language development). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The primary aim was to assess whether children have difficulty distinguishing similar-sounding novel words. The secondary aim was to assess what task characteristics might hinder or facilitate perceptual discrimination. Method: Three within-subjects experiments tested ninety-nine 3- to 5-year-old children total. Experiment 1 presented two cartoon characters each saying a novel word. Children were asked to report whether they said the same word or different words. Words were identical (e.g., deev/deev), were dissimilar (deev/vush), differed in onset consonant voicing (deev/teev), or differed in vowel tenseness (deev/div). Experiment 2 added accuracy feedback after each trial to remind children of task instructions. Experiment 3 interspersed many "same" trials containing a repeating standard word to assess the role of bottom-up stimulus support on difference detection. Results: The d' scores were highest for dissimilar words, next highest on different-vowel pairs, and lowest on different-consonant pairs. Performance was better with repeated standard stimuli (Experiment 3) than without (Experiment 1). Benefits for repeated task instructions (Experiment 2) were marginal. Exploratory analyses comparing these results to findings in a word-learning study using the same stimuli suggest an imperfect match to how easily children can learn similarsounding words. Conclusions: Overall, similar-sounding novel words are challenging for children to discriminate perceptually, although discrimination scores exceeded chance for all levels of similarity. Clinically speaking, same/different tests may be less sensitive to sound discrimination than change/no-change tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine the change in specific English microstructure features according to language ability in preschool Spanish-English dual language learners. Method: We collected English narratives from 22 Spanish-English dual language learners with typical language development (TD) and 22 Spanish-English dual language learners with developmental language disorder (DLD) at the beginning and end of their first year in Head Start. Children came from Spanishspeaking homes and were exposed to English and Spanish in their preschool classrooms. We analyzed children's use of English microstructure across time using the Narrative Assessment Protocol. Results: Both groups showed improvement in overall English microstructure use, although children with TD made greater gains than children with DLD. Phrase structure (noun phrases, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositional phrases) increased in both groups, but more so in children with TD than with DLD. Sentence structure (compound, complex, negative, and interrogative sentences) increased in both groups. Verb use, noun use (Tier 2 nouns and nouns marked with plural and possessive endings), and modifiers (adverbs and adjectives) neither changed across time nor differed between groups. Conclusions: Spanish-English dual language learners who attend Head Start and come from Spanish-speaking homes, regardless of language ability, may not readily acquire verbs, nouns, and modifiers during their first year of formal English exposure, suggesting that they would benefit from explicit instruction in these areas. Preschool Spanish-English dual language learners with DLD may make less progress than their peers with TD in phrase structure use, indicating that explicit instruction in this microstructure feature may be beneficial for children with DLD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of a linguistic characteristic, typicality, and a processing variable, working memory on the abilities of people with aphasia (PWA) and neurologically intact adults to process semantic representations. This was accomplished using a newly developed assessment task, the Category Typicality Test, which was created for the Temple Assessment of Language and Short-Term Memory in Aphasia. Method: A post hoc quasi-experimental design was used. Participants included 27 PWA and 14 neurologically intact adults who completed the picture and word versions of the Category Typicality Test, which required them to determine if two items are in the same category. Memory load was altered by increasing the number of items to be compared, and the typicality of items was altered to increase linguistic complexity. Results: A four-way mixed analysis of covariance was conducted. There was a significant interaction between working memory load and category typicality with performance accuracy decreasing as working memory load increased and category typicality decreased. There was also a significant interaction for typicality and stimuli with better performance in the picture condition and a significant interaction for working memory and group with lower performance accuracy for PWA. Post hoc pairwise comparisons revealed differences between memory load, typicality, stimuli conditions, and group. PWA also showed greater magnitude of change than neurologically intact adults when comparing high and low working memory load conditions, but not typicality conditions. Discussion: Increasing working memory load had the most substantial impact on the accuracy of category judgments in PWA, but the interaction between increased working memory load and decreased category typicality of items to be compared resulted in reduced accuracy in both groups. These findings suggest that manipulation of processing and linguistic variables in assessment will provide insight into the nature of linguistic breakdown in aphasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Research on the typical and impaired grammatical acquisition of Arabic is limited. This study systematically examined the morphosyntactic abilities of Arabic-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) using a novel sentence repetition task. The usefulness of the task as an indicator of DLD in Arabic was determined. Method: A LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) sentence repetition task was developed in Palestinian Arabic (LITMUS-SR-PA-72) and administered to 30 children with DLD (M = 61.50 months, SD = 11.27) and 60 agematched typically developing (TD) children (M = 63.85 months, SD = 10.16). The task targeted grammatical structures known to be problematic for Arabicspeaking children with DLD (language specific) and children with DLD across languages (language independent). Responses were scored using binary, error, and structural scoring methods. Results: Children with DLD scored below TD children on the LITMUS-SR-PA-72, in general, and in the repetition of language-specific and language-independent structures. The frequency of morphosyntactic errors was higher in the DLD group relative to the TD group. Despite the large similarity of the type of morphosyntactic errors between the two groups, some atypical errors were exclusively produced by the DLD group. The three scoring methods showed good diagnostic power in the discrimination between children with DLD and children without DLD. Conclusions: Sentence repetition was an area of difficulty for Palestinian Arabic-speaking children with DLD. The DLD group demonstrated difficulties with language-specific and language-independent structures, particularly complex sentences with noncanonical word order. Most grammatical errors made by the DLD group resembled those of the TD group and were mostly omissions or substitutions of grammatical affixes or omissions of function words. SR appears to hold promise as a good indicator for the presence or absence of DLD in Arabic. Further validation of these findings using population-based studies is warranted. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16968043 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: It is generally accepted that adults use visual cues to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments, but findings regarding visual speech benefit in children are mixed. We explored factors that contribute to audiovisual (AV) gain in young children's speech understanding. We examined whether there is an AV benefit to speech-in-noise recognition in children in first grade and if visual salience of phonemes influences their AV benefit. We explored if individual differences in AV speech enhancement could be explained by vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, or general psychophysical testing performance. Method: Thirty-seven first graders completed online psychophysical experiments. We used an online single-interval, four-alternative forced-choice picturepointing task with age-appropriate consonant-vowel-consonant words to measure auditory-only, visual-only, and AV word recognition in noise at -2 and -8 dB SNR. We obtained standard measures of vocabulary and phonological awareness and included a general psychophysical test to examine correlations with AV benefits. Results: We observed a significant overall AV gain among children in first grade. This effect was mainly attributed to the benefit at -8 dB SNR, for visually distinct targets. Individual differences were not explained by any of the child variables. Boys showed lower auditory-only performances, leading to significantly larger AV gains. Conclusions: This study shows AV benefit, of distinctive visual cues, to word recognition in challenging noisy conditions in first graders. The cognitive and linguistic constraints of the task may have minimized the impact of individual differences of vocabulary and phonological awareness on AV benefit. The gender difference should be studied on a larger sample and age range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method: Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic phonology (speech) conditions included disyllabic pseudowords spoken in Chinese and in English matched for syllabic structure, duration, and intensity. The prosodic acoustic (nonspeech) conditions were hummed versions of the speech stimuli, which eliminated the phonetic content while preserving the acoustic prosodic features. Results: We observed language-specific effects on the ERP that native stimuli elicited larger late negative response (LNR) amplitude than nonnative stimuli in the prosodic phonology conditions. However, no such effect was observed in the phoneme-free prosodic acoustic control conditions. Conclusions: The results support the integration view that word-level linguistic prosody likely relies on the phonetic content where the acoustic cues embedded in. It remains to be examined whether the LNR may serve as a neural signature for language-specific processing of prosodic phonology beyond auditory processing of the critical acoustic cues at the suprasyllabic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This purpose of this study was to assess the frequency and types of phonological process errors in patients with velopharyngeal dysfunction (VPD) and the different types of palatal anomalies. Method: A total of 808 nonsyndromic patients with VPD, who underwent follow-up at the Center for Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Anomalies, from 2000 to 2016 were included. Patients were stratified into four age groups and five subphenotypes of palatal anomalies: cleft lip and palate (CLP), cleft palate (CP), submucous cleft palate (SMCP), occult submucous cleft palate (OSMCP), and non-CP. Phonological processes were compared among groups. Results: The 808 patients ranged in age from 3 to 29 years, and 439 (54.3%) were male. Overall, 262/808 patients (32.4%) had phonological process errors; 80 (59.7%) ages 3-4 years, 98 (40, 0%) ages 4.1-6 years, 48 (24.7%) 6.1-9 years, and 36 (15.3%) 9.1-29 years. Devoicing was the most prevalent phonological process error, found in 97 patients (12%), followed by cluster reduction in 82 (10.1%), fronting in 66 (8.2%), stopping in 45 (5.6%), final consonant deletion in 43 (5.3%), backing in 30 (3.7%), and syllable deletion and onset deletion in 13 (1.6%) patients. No differences were found in devoicing errors between palatal anomalies, even with increasing age. Phonological processes were found in 61/138 (44.20%) with CP, 46/118 (38.1%) with SMCP, 61/188 (32.4%) with non-CP, 70/268 (26.1%) with OSMCP, and 25/96 (26.2%) with CLP. Phonological process errors were most frequent with CP and least with OSMCP (p = .001). Conclusions: Phonological process errors in nonsyndromic VPD patients remained relatively high in all age groups up to adulthood, regardless of the type of palatal anomaly. Our findings regarding the phonological skills of patients with palatal anomalies can help clarify the etiology of speech and sound disorders in VPD patients, and contribute to general phonetic and phonological studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study compared performance on three-word fluency measures among individuals with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS), and examined the relationship between word fluency and other measures of language and speech. Method: This study included 106 adults with PPA and 30 adults with PPAOS. PPA participants were divided into three clinical subgroups: semantic (svPPA), logopenic (lvPPA), and nonfluent/agrammatic with or without apraxia of speech (nfPPA). Category fluency, letter fluency, and action/verb fluency tasks were administered to all participants. Results: The four clinical groups performed abnormally on the word fluency measures, although not to a degree that represented high sensitivity to their PPA or PPAOS diagnosis. All PPA subgroups produced fewer words compared to individuals with PPAOS on all word fluency measures. Moderate correlations were found between word fluency and aphasia severity and naming performance in some of the clinical groups. Conclusions: Word fluency measures are often challenging for individuals with PPA and PPAOS, but they are not of equal difficulty, with letter fluency being the most difficult. Differences among word fluency tests also vary to some degree as a function of the clinical group in question, with least impairment in PPAOS. However, the findings of this study do not support statistically significant differences in word fluency task performance among the PPA subgroups. Correlations suggest that word fluency performance in PPA is at least partly related to aphasia severity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Previous studies have shown enhanced pitch and impaired time perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether such deviated patterns of auditory processing depending on acoustic dimensions would transfer to the higher level linguistic pitch and time processing. In this study, we compared the categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones and voice onset time (VOT) in Mandarin Chinese, which utilize pitch and time changes, respectively, to convey phonemic contrasts. Method: The data were collected from 22 Mandarin-speaking adolescents with ASD and 20 age-matched neurotypical controls. In addition to the identification and discrimination tasks to test CP performance, all the participants were evaluated with their language ability and phonological working memory. Linear mixed-effects models were constructed to evaluate the identification and discrimination scores across different groups and conditions. Results: The basic CP pattern of cross-boundary benefit when perceiving both native lexical tones and VOT was largely preserved in high-functioning adolescents with ASD. The degree of CP of lexical tones in ASD was similar to that in typical controls, whereas the degree of CP of VOT in ASD was greatly reduced. Furthermore, the degree of CP of lexical tones correlated with language ability and digit span in ASD participants. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the unbalanced acoustic processing capacities for pitch and time can be generalized to the higher level linguistic processing in ASD. Furthermore, the higher degree of CP of lexical tones correlated with better language ability in Mandarin-speaking individuals with ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Our 1-year longitudinal study tracked the development of cognate awareness among second (L2) and third language (L3) learners of French in French immersion in Grades 1 and 2 to explore the impact of orthographic overlap and cognate status (true vs. false) on children's ability to recognize cognate relationships. We also assessed the impact of French L2/L3 status on performance. Method: We compared performance on three conditions (true cognates with same and similar spellings, false cognates with same spellings) within and across grades. We used a direct measure of cognate awareness that required children (n = 81) to distinguish true from false cognates presented orally and in print. Results: Overall, Grade 1 children failed to recognize cognate relationships between true cognates with similar spellings, but successfully recognized true cognates with same spellings. Performance on all conditions increased significantly between Grades 1 and 2. The greatest improvement was seen on true cognates with similar spellings. Performance on false cognates was inferior to performance on true cognates with same spellings in Grade 1, and inferior to performance on both same and similar spelled true cognates in Grade 2. No differences were found due to L2/L3 status. Conclusions: Among sequential learners of L2/L3 French in the early stages of additional language learning, cognate awareness is impacted by the degree of orthographic overlap, as well as by cognate status. Children's ability to recognize cross-language orthographic and semantic relationships improves substantially across the early elementary grades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder sometimes spontaneously repeat clinician models of morphemes targeted for treatment. We examine how spontaneous repeating of clinician models in the form of recasts associates with improved child production of those emerging morphemes. Method: Forty-seven preschool children with developmental language disorder participated in Enhanced Conversational Recast therapy and were monitored for spontaneous repetitions of morphemes modeled by the clinician through conversational recasting. We calculated proportion of correct and incorrect productions elicited during treatment and for generalization probes as well as treatment effect sizes. We then used odds ratios to determine the probability that a spontaneous repetition may precede treatment gains and calculated correlations of correct repetitions with correct in-treatment productions of targets and treatment effect sizes. Results: Spontaneous repetitions were highly likely to happen just prior to meaningful treatment progress. Children with higher frequencies of correct spontaneous repetitions of morpheme targets also showed higher frequencies of correct productions of these forms during the course of treatment. Furthermore, children with an earlier onset of repetitions and higher frequencies of correct repetitions showed overall larger effect sizes at the end of treatment. Conclusions: Children's use of correct forms in their repetitions may serve as a self-scaffold for mastering productions of the correct form via structural priming mechanisms. Tracking spontaneously repeated targets may be a useful milestone for identifying response to treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigates the acoustic environment of children with cochlear implants (CIs) and the relationship between exposure to speech, in noise and in quiet, and the children's lexical production up to 1 year after CI activation, while controlling for the effect of early individual differences in receptive vocabulary growth. Method: Eighteen children with CIs were observed at 3, 6, and 12 months after CI activation. Children's spontaneous word production during interaction with their mothers (types and tokens) and their expressive and receptive vocabulary size were considered. The characteristics of the acoustic environments in terms of acoustic scenes (speech in noise or in quiet, quiet, noise, music, and other) and of loudness ranges were assessed using data logging of the children's devices. Results: Data analysis showed that both the number of tokens and the number of types produced 1 year after CI activation were affected by the children'sexposure to speech in quiet with a loudness range between 40 and 69 dB. Expressive vocabulary size and types were affected by the receptive vocabulary knowledge that the children achieved over the first 3 months after CI activation. Conclusions: Our data support the role of speech environment and individual differences in early comprehension on lexical production. The importance of exposure to speech with particular characteristics for the lexical development of children with CIs and the implications for clinical practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]