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Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) have less experience accessing spoken language. Mandarin Chinese uses pitch information to contrast word meaning, and the signal that the CI devices provide is degraded. Thus, Mandarin-speaking children with CIs may face more challenges in the development of language skills. This study examines preschool Mandarin-speaking children's performance in lexical access. We hypothesized that children with CIs and their peers with normal hearing (NH) have comparable naming ability, but they process phonological or semantic information differently. Method: Twenty children with CIs and 20 age-matched children with NH were tested. The cross-modal visual–auditory picture–word interference paradigm was applied. The distractor was either phonologically related (mao55 cat -mao51 hat), semantically related (mao55 cat -shu214 mouse) or unrelated (mao55 cat -zhi214 paper) to the target, and it was aurally presented at four different points in time relative to the picture. Accuracy was compared between the two groups to tap into the children's naming abilities, and reaction time was analyzed to examine the effects of phonological and semantic information. Results: No group difference in accuracy was found. The phonologically related distractors led to significantly higher accuracy scores and shorter reaction times, whereas the semantically related distractors did not. Unlike the NH group, the CI group did not respond significantly faster or slower in phonologically related condition when the distractor and picture occurred simultaneously. Finally, the CI group made overall quicker responses than the NH group. Conclusions: Children with CIs are as successful as children with NH in word retrieval and production, and the two groups both show phonological priming effect and lack semantic effect. However, children with CIs do not process phonological information as early as their NH peers, and they may be more tasks directed and hence make quicker responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate challenges in speech-in-noise (SiN) processing faced by school-age children with autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) and their impact on listening effort. Method: Participants, including 23 Mandarin-speaking children with ASCs and 19 age-matched neurotypical (NT) peers, underwent sentence recognition tests in both quiet and noisy conditions, with a speech-shaped steady-state noise masker presented at 0-dB signal-to-noise ratio in the noisy condition. Recognition accuracy rates and task-evoked pupil responses were compared to assess behavioral performance and listening effort during auditory tasks. Results: No main effect of group was found on accuracy rates. Instead, significant effects emerged for autistic trait scores, listening conditions, and their interaction, indicating that higher trait scores were associated with poorer performance in noise. Pupillometric data revealed significantly larger and earlier peak dilations, along with more varied pupillary dynamics in the ASC group relative to the NT group, especially under noisy conditions. Importantly, the ASC group’s peak dilation in quiet mirrored that of the NT group in noise. However, the ASC group consistently exhibited reduced mean dilations than the NT group. Conclusions: Pupillary responses suggest a different resource allocation pattern in ASCs: An initial sharper and larger dilation may signal an intense, narrowed resource allocation, likely linked to heightened arousal, engagement, and cognitive load, whereas a subsequent faster tail-off may indicate a greater decrease in resource availability and engagement, or a quicker release of arousal and cognitive load. The presence of noise further accentuates this pattern. This highlights the unique SiN processing challenges children with ASCs may face, underscoring the importance of a nuanced, individual-centric approach for interventions and support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the speech recognition equivalence of Mandarin Bamford-Kowal-Bench (BKB) sentence lists with adults and children with normal hearing. Method: A total of 32 lists, each of nine sentences, were compiled from a corpus of BKB-like sentences with paired babble in Mandarin. Interlist equivalence, critical differences, and sensitivity of performance to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) were examined. Experiment 1 included 64 native Mandarin-speaking adults with normal hearing. Experiment 2 included 54 native Mandarin-speaking children with normal hearing aged 4-6 years. Results: Among the 32 sentence lists, 28 lists were confirmed to be equivalent in adults, with a mean SNR required for 50% correct (SNR50) of -5.9 ± 0.1 dB, a mean slope of 22.3%/dB ± 1.5%/dB, and a grand 95% critical difference subsequently calculated as 27.2% for score. From the 28 equivalent lists, 27 lists were selected and observed to be equivalent in children, with a mean SNR50 threshold of -2.0 ± 0.2 dB, a mean slope of 15.8%/dB ± 1.1%/dB, and a grand 95% critical difference of 24.6% for score. Conclusions: The Mandarin BKB sentences in babble noise test offers an opportunity for clinicians and researchers to assess speech understanding in adults and preschool children in an efficient manner. For comparisons of performance in different test conditions, 28 equivalent lists are available for adults and 27 equivalent lists for preschool children. The 95% critical difference values can be used for total percentage correct or SNR for 50% performance. Future work will examine the clinical utility for school-age children and children who are deaf and hard of hearing. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24400066 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

urpose: This cross-sectional study aimed to depict expressive language profiles and clarify lexical–grammatical interrelationships in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during the administration of the simplified Chinese Psychoeducational Profile–Third Edition screening. Method: We collected naturalistic language samples from 81 (74 boys, seven girls) 2- to 7-year-old (Mage = 55.6 months, SD = 15.17) Mandarin-speaking children with ASD in clinician–child interactions. The child participants were divided into five age subgroups with 12-month intervals according to their chronological age. Computer-assisted part-of-speech tagging, constituency analysis, and dependency analysis addressed the developmental trajectories of early lexical and grammatical growth in each age subgroup. Results: Significant within-ASD differences were observed in content words, function words, and lexical categories. Nouns and verbs were the predominant lexical categories, while noun types overwhelmed verb types in children over 3 years old. The grammatical development of 5- to 6-year-old Mandarinspeaking children with ASD was better than that of 3- to 4-year-old children. The trends of syntactic structures, grammatical relations, and grammatical complexity in each age group were similar. Conclusions: Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with ASD produce more lexicons with increasing age. They preserve the noun bias as a universal mechanism in early lexical learning. Moreover, their developmental trajectories of grammatical growth were comparable in each age subgroup. In addition, their lexicons and grammar were synchronically developed during early language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Hearing loss (HL) is prevalent and relates to social health in old age. This study aims to examine the association between functional HL and social well-being (SWB) in older adults and to investigate whether psychological resilience mediates this association. Method: The analytical sample of 4,531 older adults aged ≥ 60 years was from the Sample Survey on Vulnerable Populations from Poor Families in Urban/ Rural China (2018). SWB was measured by social networks and social engagement using the Lubben Social Network Scale and Index of Social Engagement Scale, respectively. Functional hearing impairment was defined by a dichotomized measure of self-perceived hearing difficulty. Psychological resilience was assessed by a 25-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. Structural equation modeling was performed to determine associations of HL with SWB and the mediating roles of psychological resilience. Results: Functional HL was associated with reduced SWB among older adults living in low-income households. Hearing-impaired individuals were more likely to be socially isolated and less socially engaged compared to those with normal hearing. The association persisted in gender subsamples and in non–lowincome households but not in older adults aged ≥ 70 years. Psychological resilience partially mediated the association of hearing impairment with SWB, accounting for 50.9% of the variance in the change of SWB. Conclusions: Functional hearing impairment may be a modifiable risk factor for social restrictions and downstream older adults’ health. Promotion of hearing health care and accessibility to coping resources including psychological support may improve social wellness among the older adults and benefit healthy aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The human voice usually contains two types of information: linguistic and identity information. However, whether and how linguistic information interacts with identity information remains controversial. This study aimed to explore the processing of identity and linguistic information during spoken word processing by considering the modulation of attention. Method: We conducted two event-related potentials (ERPs) experiments in the study. Different speakers (self, friend, and unfamiliar speakers) and emotional words (positive, negative, and neutral words) were used to manipulate the identity and linguistic information. With the manipulation, Experiment 1 explored the identity and linguistic information processing with a word decision task that requires participants’ explicit attention to linguistic information. Experiment 2 further investigated the issue with a passive oddball paradigm that requires rare attention to either the identity or linguistic information. Results: Experiment 1 revealed an interaction among speaker, word type, and hemisphere in N400 amplitudes but not in N100 and P200, which suggests that identity information interacted with linguistic information at the later stage of spoken word processing. The mismatch negativity results of Experiment 2 showed no significant interaction between speaker and word pair, which indicates that identity and linguistic information were processed independently. Conclusions: The identity information would interact with linguistic information during spoken word processing. However, the interaction was modulated by the task demands on attention involvement. We propose an attention-modulated explanation to explain the mechanism underlying identity and linguistic information processing. Implications of our findings are discussed in light of the integration and independence theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic– phonemic normalization) were investigated through the lexical tone identification task in nonspeech contexts and speech contexts, respectively. Besides, another aim of this study was to reveal how domain-general cognitive abilities contribute to the development of the speech normalization process. Method: In this study, 94 five- to eight-year-old Mandarin-speaking children (50 boys, 44 girls) and 24 young adults (14 men, 10 women) were asked to identify ambiguous Mandarin high-level and mid-rising tones in either speech or non-speech contexts. Furthermore, in this study, we tested participants’ pitch sensitivity through a nonlinguistic pitch discrimination task and their working memory using the digit span task. Results: Higher level acoustic–phonemic normalization of lexical tones emerged at the age of 6 years and was relatively stable thereafter. However, lower level acoustic normalization was less stable across different ages. Neither pitch sen)sitivity nor working memory affected children’s lexical tone normalization. Conclusions: Mandarin-speaking children above 6 years of age successfully achieved constancy in lexical tone normalization based on speech contextual cues. The perceptual normalization of lexical tones was not affected by pitch sensitivity and working memory capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Language production, a dynamic process involving real-time language processing, is crucial for children's language and communication development. To explore the early development of children's real-time language production, this study investigated Chinese preschool children's pausing strategies in narratives and their associations with verbal working memory and vocabulary abilities. Method: A picture-elicited narrative task was employed. Sixty Mandarinspeaking children aged 4-5 years were asked to tell a story according to the book Frog, Where Are You? The pausing types and positions in narratives were coded and analyzed. Additionally, children's verbal working memory and vocabulary were measured. Results: The results showed that 4- to 5-year-old children prefer to use silent pauses and tend to produce pauses within clauses. The total frequency of pausing decreases with age and shows a significant gender difference. Girls prefer to use within-clause pauses, whereas boys prefer to use between-clause pauses. More importantly, children's pausing frequency is closely associated with their verbal working memory and vocabulary, in which working memory plays a more important role. Conclusions: This study is a first-step exploration of pausing strategies in 4- to 5-year-old Chinese children's narratives. The developmental characteristics of pausing strategies shown in typically developing children serve as a crucial reference for interventions for children with language deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to explore the contributions of phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA) to the reading comprehension skills of Chinese-speaking children with hearing loss (HL) and examine the possible mediation effect of vocabulary knowledge on the relationships of PA and MA with their reading comprehension. Method: The participants were 28 Chinese-speaking children with HL, who were followed from Grade 1 through Grade 2. They were administered a series of tests that measured their PA and MA at the beginning of Grade 1, vocabulary knowledge at the end of Grade 1, and reading comprehension at the end of Grade 2. Results: MA significantly accounted for additional variance in reading comprehension beyond the effect of PA but not vice versa. Both PA and MA contributed uniquely to vocabulary knowledge, which completely mediated the relationships of PA and MA with reading comprehension. Conclusions: PA and MA are both essential to the development of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking children with HL; however, MA seems to be more important than PA in their reading comprehension. PA and MA significantly affect children’s reading comprehension through their influence on vocabulary knowledge. This study has replicated previous evidence on the importance of PA, MA, and vocabulary knowledge in the reading comprehension of children with typical hearing, and has extended its significance to children with HL. In addition, the findings have the potential to inform educational practitioners regarding the importance of teaching essential reading skills to Chinese-speaking children with HL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We compared the narrative production in Mandarinspeaking children at risk (AR) for developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) controls to address two goals: (a) further our understanding of the Mandarin DLD phenotype and (b) examine the role of elicitation method in differentiating AR from TD. Method: Twenty-one AR children and 21 age- and nonverbal IQ-matched peers produced two stories from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument of Narrative, first following an adult model (i.e., story-retell) and then without a model (i.e., story-tell). Group and task effects were analyzed on macrostructure and microstructure measures. Results: For general macrostructure score and sentence complexity, children in the AR group performed more poorly than TD children on the more challenging storytell task and showed decreased scores from retell to tell tasks. In addition, children in the AR group showed poorer performance on number of different words. Productivity and grammaticality measures did not show group differences. Discussion: Consistent with previous findings, grammaticality and productivity were relatively preserved but story macrostructure, lexical diversity, and sentence complexity were vulnerable in Mandarin-speaking children with or AR for DLD. Having an adult model benefited both groups in sentence complexity and story macrostructure and potentially helped maintain the performance in TD children as they engaged in the more challenging story-telling task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of cueing for increased loudness and reduced speech rate on scaled intelligibility and acoustics of speech produced by Mandarin speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Eleven speakers with PD read passages in habitual, loud, and slow speaking conditions. Fifteen listeners rated ease of understanding (EOU) of the speech samples on a visual analog scale. Effects of the cues on EOU, vocal loudness, pitch range, pause duration and frequency, articulation rate, and vowel space, as well as relationships between EOU gains and acoustic features, were analyzed. Results: EOU increased significantly in the loud condition only. The loud cue resulted in increased intensity, and the slow cue resulted both in reduced articulation rate and increased pause frequency. In the loud condition, EOU increased significantly as intensity increased and vowel centralization decreased. In the slow condition, EOU tended to increase as intensity increased and vowel centralization decreased but did not reach statistical significance. Conclusion: Cueing for loud speech may yield greater EOU gains than cueing for slow speech in Mandarin speakers with PD. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed, although further investigations with more participants and a larger range of dysarthria severity are warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate performance of the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) automated language-analysis system for the Chinese Shanghai dialect and Mandarin (SDM) languages. Method: Volunteer parents of 22 children aged 3-23 months were recruited in Shanghai. Families provided daylong in-home audio recordings using LENA. A native speaker listened to 15 min of randomly selected audio samples per family to label speaker regions and provide Chinese character and SDM word counts for adult speakers. LENA segment labeling and counts were compared with rater-based values. Results: LENA demonstrated good sensitivity in identifying adult and child; this sensitivity was comparable to that of American English validation samples. Precision was strong for adults but less so for children. LENA adult word count correlated strongly with both Chinese characters and SDM word counts. LENA conversational turn counts correlated similarly with rater-based counts after the exclusion of three unusual samples. Performance related to some degree to child age. Conclusions: LENA adult word count and conversational turn provided reasonably accurate estimates for SDM over the age range tested. Theoretical and practical considerations regarding LENA performance in non-English languages are discussed. Despite the pilot nature and other limitations of the study, results are promising for broader cross-linguistic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigates the impact of intertalker variations on the process of mapping acoustic variations on tone categories in two different tone languages. Method: Pitch stimuli manipulated from four voice ranges were presented in isolation through a blocked-talker design. Listeners were instructed to identify the stimuli that they heard as lexical tones in their native language. Results: Tone identification of Mandarin listeners exhibited relatively stable normalization regardless of the voice, whereas tone identification of Cantonese listeners was unstable and susceptible to the influence of intertalker variations. In the case of Cantonese listeners, intertalker variations had a larger effect on the perception of F[sub 0] height dimension than of F[sub 0] slope dimension. Conclusion: The comparison between Cantonese and Mandarin listeners' performances reveals an interaction of intertalker variations and the types of tone contrasts in each language. For Cantonese tones, which depend heavily on F[sub 0] height distinctions, intertalker variations result in F[sub 0] overlapping and, consequently, ambiguities among them in isolated tone perception. For Mandarin tones, which are distinctive in terms of their F[sub 0] contours, the differences in F[sub 0] contours alone seem sufficient to elicit reliable tone identification. Intertalker variations therefore have relatively limited effect on Mandarin tone perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]