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Short‐term auditory phonological priming effects involve changes in the speed with which words are processed by a listener as a function of recent exposure to other similar‐sounding words. Activation of phonological/lexical representations appears to persist beyond the immediate offset of a word, influencing subsequent processing. Priming effects are commonly cited as demonstrating concurrent activation of word/phonological candidates during word identification. Phonological priming is controversial, the direction of effects (facilitating versus slowing) varying with the prime‐target relationship. In adults, it has repeatedly been demonstrated, however, that hearing a prime word that rhymes with the following target word (ISI=50 ms) decreases the time necessary to initiate repetition of the target, relative to when the prime and target have no phonemic overlap. Activation of phonological representations in children has not typically been studied using this paradigm, auditory‐word + picture‐naming tasks be...

The purposes of the current study are: (1) To investigate discrimination of a vowel contrast not found in Spanish by late learners of English with Spanish as a first language; (2) to assess whether the use of natural consonant‐vowel‐consonant stimuli and multiple exemplars will show the same pattern of results as found in studies using synthetic stimuli; and (3) examine whether better speech perception as examined by the event‐related potential, mismatch negativity (MMN) correlates with greater language usage as measured by a language background questionnaire. The results indicate that late‐bilinguals are slower at discriminating the vowel contrast than the English monolinguals, as indexed by MMN. Monolingual English listeners showed significant MMN from 200 to 300 ms, whereas for late learners of English, the MMN was significant 50 ms later between 250 and 300 ms. Both groups showed excellent behavioral discrimination of the vowel contrast. Results also suggest that vowel category reshaping is less flexi...

Thirteen monolingual Mandarin‐speaking children residing in the U.S. were recruited to examine their production of the four Mandarin lexical tones in monosyllabic words. A picture‐naming task was used to elicit the children’s productions of lexical tones in isolated words and in sentence final position. Four mothers were asked to say the same set of words to their children in a picture reading activity. The children’s and the mothers’ productions were recorded and low‐pass filtered at 500 and 400 Hz, respectively, to eliminate phonemic and semantic information. Ten Mandarin‐speaking judges were recruited to identify the children’s and adults’ tone productions from the filtered stimuli. Contrary to the findings of L1 research conducted in countries where Mandarin is the language of the environment, the present results revealed that the lexical tones produced by 3‐year‐old children acquiring Mandarin as their first language in the U.S. were not yet adultlike. Children’s tone productions were more difficult ...

Children with language impairments, particularly those defined in an exclusionary fashion as having a specific language impairment, have been reported to have auditory and speech perception deficits in comparison to age‐matched peers. Investigators have suggested characterizations ranging from generalized temporal deficits, causing difficulty with brief or rapidly changing cues, to limited processing capacity, resulting in high demands for difficult discriminations. Findings concerning perceptual abilities and limitations of children with developmental language disorders will be critically reviewed. The review will focus on the nature of the stimuli and the tasks employed in order to provide a comprehensive characterization of these auditory and speech perception limitations. The relationship between these deficits and known speech and language deficits and their hypothesized relationship to limitations in working memory will be considered. The problem of comparing auditory and phonetic perception to prod...

Homophones are different words that sound alike, e.g., “bear” and “bare.” Since young children can often hear differences they cannot speak, they may produce homophones for words they know to be different. Thus, for example, a child may hear that “bike” and “bite” are different, but if s/he cannot yet produce word‐final consonants, s/he may utter both as /bai/. Two questions presently under investigation are: (1) Do young children actively seek to include or exclude such potential homophones in their early vocabulary? (2) Do children faced with such potential homophones produce subtle, subphonemic differences between them? This paper reports the results of a study aimed at answering the second of these two questions. Nine 20‐month‐old normally developing, English‐speaking children's utterances were tape recorded for acoustic analysis. These utterances were produced in situations in which homophones were likely to result from (a) reduction of initial consonant clusters, (b) stopping of initial fricatives, ...