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In typical adults, recognizing both spoken and written words is thought to be served by a process of competition between candidates in the lexicon. In recent years, work has used eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm to characterize this competition process over development. It has shown that both spoken and written word recognition continue to develop through adolescence (Rigler et al., 2015). It is still unclear what drives these changes in real-time word recognition over the school years, as there are dramatic changes in language, the onset of reading instruction, and gains in domain general function during this time. This study began to address these issues by asking whether changes in real-time word recognition derive from changes in overall language and reading ability or reflect more general age-related development. This cross-sectional study examined 278 school-age children (Grades 1-3) using the Visual World Paradigm to assess both spoken and written word recognition, along with multiple measures of language, reading and phonology. A structural equation model applied to these ability measures found three factors representing language, reading, and phonology. Multiple regression analyses were used to understand how these three factors relate to real-time spoken and written word recognition as well as a non-linguistic variant of the VWP intended to capture decision speed, eye-movement factors, and other non-language/reading differences. We found that for both spoken and written word recognition, the speed of activating target words in both domains was more closely tied to the relevant ability (e.g., reading for written word recognition) than was age. We also examined competition resolution (how fully competitors were suppressed late in processing). Here, spoken word recognition showed only small, developmental effects that were only related to phonological processing, suggesting links to developmental language disorder. However, in written word recognition, competitor resolution showed large impacts of development which were strongly linked to reading. This suggests the dimensionality of real-time lexical processing may differ across domains. Importantly, neither spoken nor written word recognition is fully described by changes in non-linguistic skills assessed with non-linguistic VWP, and the non-linguistic VWP was linked to differences in language and reading. These findings suggest that spoken and written word recognition continue past the first year of life and are mostly driven by ability and not only by overall maturation., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Eight to 11% of children have a clinical disorder in oral language (Developmental Language Disorder, DLD). Language deficits in DLD can affect all levels of language and persist through adulthood. Word-level processing may be critical as words link phonology, orthography, syntax and semantics. Thus, a lexical deficit could cascade throughout language. Cognitively, word recognition is a competition process: as the input (e.g., lizard) unfolds, multiple candidates (liver, wizard) compete for recognition. Children with DLD do not fully resolve this competition, but it is unclear what cognitive mechanisms underlie this. We examined lexical inhibition-the ability of more active words to suppress competitors-in 79 adolescents with and without DLD. Participants heard words (e.g. net) in which the onset was manipulated to briefly favor a competitor (neck). This was predicted to inhibit the target, slowing recognition. Word recognition was measured using a task in which participants heard the stimulus, and clicked on a picture of the item from an array of competitors, while eye-movements were monitored as a measure of how strongly the participant was committed to that interpretation over time. TD listeners showed evidence of inhibition with greater interference for stimuli that briefly activated a competitor word. DLD listeners did not. This suggests deficits in DLD may stem from a failure to engage lexical inhibition. This in turn could have ripple effects throughout the language system. This supports theoretical approaches to DLD that emphasize lexical-level deficits, and deficits in real-time processing., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

This study investigated the developmental time course of spoken word recognition in older children using eye tracking to assess how the real-time processing dynamics of word recognition change over development. We found that 9-year-olds were slower to activate the target words and showed more early competition from competitor words than 16-year-olds; however, both age groups ultimately fixated targets to the same degree. This contrasts with a prior study of adolescents with language impairment (McMurray, Samelson, Lee, & Tomblin, 2010) that showed a different pattern of real-time processes. These findings suggest that the dynamics of word recognition are still developing even at these late ages, and developmental changes may derive from different sources than individual differences in relative language ability., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Objectives: The primary objective of this article was to describe recruitment, data collection, and methods for a longitudinal, multicenter study involving children with bilateral mild to severe hearing loss. The goals of this research program were to characterize the developmental outcomes of children with mild to severe bilateral hearing loss during infancy and the preschool years. Furthermore, the researchers examined how these outcomes were associated with the child's hearing loss and how home background and clinical interventions mediated and moderated these outcomes., Design: The participants in this study were children who are hard of hearing (CHH) and children with normal hearing (CNH) who provided comparison data. CHH were eligible for participation if (1) their chronological age was between 6 months and 7 years of age at the time of recruitment, (2) they had a better-ear pure-tone average of 25 to 75 dB HL, (3) they had not received a cochlear implant, (4) they were from homes where English was the primary language, and (5) they did not demonstrate significant cognitive or motor delays. Across the time span of recruitment, 430 parents of potential children with hearing loss made contact with the research group. This resulted in 317 CHH who qualified for enrollment. In addition, 117 CNH qualified for enrollment. An accelerated longitudinal design was used, in which multiple age cohorts were followed long enough to provide overlap. Specifically, children were recruited and enrolled continuously across an age span of 6.5 years and were followed for at least 3 years. This design allowed for tests of time (period) versus cohort age effects that could arise by changes in services and technology over time, yet still allowed for examination of important developmental relationships., Results: The distribution of degree of hearing loss for the CHH showed that the majority of CHH had moderate or moderate-to-severe hearing losses, indicating that the sample undersampled children with mild HL. For mothers of both CHH and CNH, the distribution of maternal education level showed that few mothers lacked at least a high school education and a slight majority had completed a bachelor's degree, suggesting that this sample of research volunteers was more advantaged than the United States population. The test battery consisted of a variety of measures concerning participants' hearing and behavioral development. These data were gathered in sessions during which the child was examined by an audiologist and a speech-language examiner. In addition, questionnaires concerning the child's behavior and development were completed by the parents., Conclusion: The Outcomes of Children with Hearing Loss study was intended to examine the relationship between variation in hearing ability across children with normal and mild to severe hearing loss and variation in their outcomes across several domains of development. In addition, the research team sought to document important mediators and moderators that act between the hearing loss and the outcomes. Because the study design provided for the examination of outcomes throughout infancy and early childhood, it was necessary to employ a number of different measures of the same construct to accommodate changes in developmental performance across age. This resulted in a large matrix of measures across variable types and developmental levels, as described in this manuscript.

Objectives: Few studies have examined the long-term effect of age at implantation on outcomes using multiple data points in children with cochlear implants. The goal of this study was to determine whether age at implantation has a significant, lasting impact on speech perception, language, and reading performance for children with prelingual hearing loss., Design: A linear mixed-model framework was used to determine the effect of age at implantation on speech perception, language, and reading abilities in 83 children with prelingual hearing loss who received cochlear implants by the age of 4 years. The children were divided into two groups based on their age at implantation: (1) under 2 years of age and (2) between 2 and 3.9 years of age. Differences in model-specified mean scores between groups were compared at annual intervals from 5 to 13 years of age for speech perception, and 7 to 11 years of age for language and reading., Results: After controlling for communication mode, device configuration, and preoperative pure-tone average, there was no significant effect of age at implantation for receptive language by 8 years of age, expressive language by 10 years of age, reading by 7 years of age. In terms of speech-perception outcomes, significance varied between 7 and 13 years of age, with no significant difference in speech-perception scores between groups at ages 7, 11, and 13 years. Children who used oral communication (OC) demonstrated significantly higher speech-perception scores than children who used total communication (TC). OC users tended to have higher expressive language scores than TC users, although this did not reach significance. There was no significant difference between OC and TC users for receptive language or reading scores., Conclusions: Speech perception, language, and reading performance continue to improve over time for children implanted before 4 years of age. The present results indicate that the effect of age at implantation diminishes with time, particularly for higher-order skills such as language and reading. Some children who receive cochlear implants after the age of 2 years have the capacity to approximate the language and reading skills of their earlier-implanted peers, suggesting that additional factors may moderate the influence of age at implantation on outcomes over time.

Though much is known about how words are recognized, little research has focused on how a degraded signal affects the fine-grained temporal aspects of real-time word recognition. The perception of degraded speech was examined in two populations with the goal of describing the time course of word recognition and lexical competition. Thirty-three postlingually deafened cochlear implant (CI) users and 57 normal hearing (NH) adults (16 in a CI-simulation condition) participated in a visual world paradigm eye-tracking task in which their fixations to a set of phonologically related items were monitored as they heard one item being named. Each degraded-speech group was compared with a set of age-matched NH participants listening to unfiltered speech. CI users and the simulation group showed a delay in activation relative to the NH listeners, and there is weak evidence that the CI users showed differences in the degree of peak and late competitor activation. In general, though, the degraded-speech groups behaved statistically similarly with respect to activation levels., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.)

Thirty years of research has uncovered the broad principles that characterize spoken word processing across listeners. However, there have been few systematic investigations of individual differences. Such an investigation could help refine models of word recognition by indicating which processing parameters are likely to vary, and could also have important implications for work on language impairment. The present study begins to fill this gap by relating individual differences in overall language ability to variation in online word recognition processes. Using the visual world paradigm, we evaluated online spoken word recognition in adolescents who varied in both basic language abilities and non-verbal cognitive abilities. Eye movements to target, cohort and rhyme objects were monitored during spoken word recognition, as an index of lexical activation. Adolescents with poor language skills showed fewer looks to the target and more fixations to the cohort and rhyme competitors. These results were compared to a number of variants of the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986) that were constructed to test a range of theoretical approaches to language impairment: impairments at sensory and phonological levels; vocabulary size, and generalized slowing. None of the existing approaches were strongly supported, and variation in lexical decay offered the best fit. Thus, basic word recognition processes like lexical decay may offer a new way to characterize processing differences in language impairment.

This study investigated the phonological processing skills of 29 children with prelingual, profound hearing loss with 4 years of cochlear implant experience. Results were group matched with regard to word-reading ability and mother's educational level with the performance of 29 hearing children. Results revealed that it is possible to obtain a valid measure of phonological processing (PP) skills in children using CIs. They could complete rhyming tasks and were able to complete sound-based tasks using standard test materials provided by a commercial test distributor. The CI children completed tasks measuring PP, but there were performance differences between the CI users and the hearing children. The process of learning phonological awareness (PA) for the children with CIs was characterized by a longer, more protracted learning phase than their counterparts with hearing. Tests of phonological memory skills indicated that when the tasks were controlled for presentation method and response modality, there were no differences between the performance of children with CIs and their counterparts with hearing. Tests of rapid naming revealed that there were no differences between rapid letter and number naming between the two groups. Results yielded a possible PP test battery for children with CI experience.

Objectives: Current cochlear implant (CI) devices are limited in providing voice pitch information that is critical for listeners' recognition of prosodic contrasts of speech (e.g., intonation and lexical tones). As a result, mastery of the production and perception of such speech contrasts can be very challenging for prelingually deafened individuals who received a CI in their childhood (i.e., pediatric CI recipients). The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) pediatric CI recipients' mastery of the production and perception of speech intonation contrasts, in comparison with their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and (b) the relationships between intonation production and perception in CI and NH individuals., Design: Twenty-six pediatric CI recipients aged from 7.44 to 20.74 yrs and 17 age-matched individuals with NH participated. All CI users were prelingually deafened, and each of them received a CI between 1.48 and 6.34 yrs of age. Each participant performed an intonation production task and an intonation perception task. In the production task, 10 questions and 10 statements that were syntactically matched (e.g., "The girl is on the playground." versus "The girl is on the playground?") were elicited from each participant using interactive discourse involving pictures. These utterances were judged by a panel of eight adult listeners with NH in terms of utterance type accuracy (question versus statement) and contour appropriateness (on a five-point scale). In the perception task, each participant identified the speech intonation contrasts of natural utterances in a two-alternative forced-choice task., Results: The results from the production task indicated that CI participants' scores for both utterance type accuracy and contour appropriateness were significantly lower than the scores of NH participants (both p < 0.001). The results from the perception task indicated that CI participants' identification accuracy was significantly lower than that of their NH peers (CI, 70.13% versus NH, 97.11%, p < 0.001). The Pearson correlation coefficients (r) between CI participants' performance levels in the production and perception tasks were approximately 0.65 (p = 0.001)., Conclusion: As a group, pediatric CI recipients do not show mastery of speech intonation in their production or perception to the same extent as their NH peers. Pediatric CI recipients' performance levels in the production and perception of speech intonation contrasts are moderately correlated. Intersubject variability exists in pediatric CI recipients' mastery levels in the production and perception of speech intonation contrasts. These findings suggest the importance of addressing both aspects (production and perception) of speech intonation in the aural rehabilitation and speech intervention programs for prelingually deafened children and young adults who use a CI.

Purpose: Children with language impairment (LI) often perform below the level of typically developing peers on measures of both processing speed and working memory. This study examined the relationship between these 2 types of measures and attempted to determine whether such measures can account for the LI itself., Method: Fourteen-year-old children with LI and their typically developing peers participated in a wide range of processing speed and working memory tasks and were administered a comprehensive language test battery. Confirmatory factor analyses were used to compare 3 nested models designed to examine the dimensionality of the speed and working memory measures. A model that included a general speed factor was also evaluated., Results: The models meeting our evaluation criteria treated speed and working memory as separable factors. Furthermore, nonverbal as well as verbal processing factors emerged from these analyses. Latent variable regression analyses showed that each of the appropriate models accounted for 62% of the variance in the children's concurrent composite language test scores, with verbal working memory making the largest contribution., Conclusions: These findings shed light on the relationship among different types of processing and suggest that processing factors can contribute to the understanding of language disorders.

Objective: Mandarin is a lexical tone language in which four tones are crucial for determining lexical meanings. Acquisition of such a tone system may be challenging to prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants because, as recent studies have shown, cochlear implant devices are ineffective in encoding voice pitch information required for tone recognition. This study aimed to investigate Mandarin tone production and perception skills of children with cochlear implants., Design: Thirty prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants, ages 6;0 (yr;mo) to 12;6, participated. These children received their implants at an average age of 5;8, with a range from 2;3 to 10;3. The average length of their cochlear implant experience was 3;7, with a range from 1;7 to 6;5. Tasks of tone production and tone identification involved a pictorial protocol of 48 words containing the targeted tones in either monosyllabic or disyllabic forms., Results: The average scores for tone production was 53.09% (SD = 15.42), and for tone identification was 72.88% (SD = 19.68; chance level = 50%). Significant differences were found in the percentages across the production or identification of tone types or tone pairs. The children with exceptional performance in tone production tended to also perform well in tone identification. The children's performance levels in tone identification and production were also discussed in relation to the factors of age at implantation and length of cochlear implant experience., Conclusions: The present results suggest that the majority of prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants did not master Mandarin tone production. However, a small group of participants demonstrated nearly perfect skills of Mandarin tone production in addition to tone perception. Thus, it is necessary to consider factors other than the device's limitations to explain these high levels of performance in the perception and production of Mandarin lexical tones., (Copyright 2004 Lippincott Williams and Wilkins)

Objectives: To determine the feasibility of replicating prior bimodal perception findings with hearing-impaired infants during their preimplant, hearing aid trial, and postimplant experiences; secondarily, to determine the point in development at which these infants were able to match phonetic information in the lips and voice for the vowels /a/ and /i/., Methods: A total of 10 infants with hearing loss, aged 4 to 24 months, were assessed at least once prior to cochlear implantation and previous to implant stimulation. The Split-Screen Preferential Looking Procedure was used to evaluate the bimodal perception skills of these infants., Results: Examples of individual bimodal perception data and preliminary group data are presented. A difference in performance across preimplant and postimplant test sessions was noted for the individuals and the group., Conclusion: These data provide evidence that the infants' audibility levels were improved by their cochlear implants, which may have contributed to their evolving ability to match phonetic information in the lips and voice.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the speed with which children with specific language impairment (SLI) respond on a range of tasks. Seventy-seven third-grade children participated in 10 different tasks (involving a total of 41 conditions), including nonlinguistic and linguistic activities. Mean response times (RTs) of children with SLI (n = 29) increased as a function of mean RTs of children with normal language (NLD, n = 29) under each of three different regression models; children with SLI responded more slowly across all task conditions, and also when linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks were analyzed separately. Children with nonspecific language impairment (NLI) were also included (n = 19). The results were similar to those for children with SLI, but the degree of slowing was greater. The results of the group analyses support the hypothesis that speed of processing in children with SLI is generally slower than that of children with normal language. However, some children with SLI do not appear to show deficits of this type.

Objective: To compare how children who use either cochlear implants (CIs) or hearing aids (HAs) express English inflectional morphemes during conversation, i.e., with voice, with sign, or with both. A secondary objective was to investigate the relationship between morpheme use in pediatric CI users and their speech perception skills, length of experience with the device, and accuracy of phoneme production., Design: Group 1 consisted of 25 children who used CIs, and Group 2 consisted of 13 children who used HAs. All children were prelingually deafened and all used simultaneous communication. A 12 minute spontaneous conversation was elicited, transcribed and coded. Between group comparisons were performed to evaluate differences in modality and number of morphemes used. Additionally, use of morpheme endings was related to length of CI experience, accuracy of phoneme production, and closed-set speech recognition performance., Results: Children who had CI experience produced significantly more English inflected morphemes than children in the HA group. CI participants also expressed the inflected endings by using voice-only mode 91% of the time, whereas HA participants used voice-only mode 1% of the time. In the CI group, a strong relationship was found between number of morpheme endings used and speech recognition scores, length of CI experience and accuracy of phoneme production. The results of this study indicate that input from the CI facilitates children's ability to perceive and comprehend bound morphemes.

The hypothesis that the Repetition Task partially reflects the listener's level of perceptual learning was tested in this study. Specifically, it was predicted from data on auditory temporal processing that performance on the Repetition Task would improve with experience. Ten kindergarten children with no known communication problems were given 10 sets of the Repetition Task over a span of 5 days. Analysis of the data revealed a significant difference in performance across interstimulus intervals (ISI) and also over the training period. Performance improved as a function of increments in ISI and number of days of training. The data reflected a significant training effect, thereby supporting the experimental hypothesis. These results suggest the possibility that differences between dysphasic and normal children on the Repetition Task may result from differences in perceptual learning.

When longitudinal studies are performed to investigate the growth of traits in children, the measurement tool being used to quantify the trait may need to change as the subjects' age throughout the study. Changing the measurement tool at some point in the longitudinal study makes the analysis of that growth challenging which, in turn, makes it difficult to determine what other factors influence the growth rate. We developed a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework that relates the growth curves per individual for each of the different measurement tools and allows for covariates to influence the shapes of the curves by borrowing strength across curves. The method is motivated by and demonstrated by speech perception outcome measurements of children who were implanted with cochlear implants. Researchers are interested in assessing the impact of age at implantation and comparing the growth rates of children who are implanted under the age of two versus those implanted between the ages of two and four. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The authors examined speech perception deficits associated with individual differences in language ability, contrasting auditory, phonological, or lexical accounts by asking whether lexical competition is differentially sensitive to fine-grained acoustic variation. Method: Adolescents with a range of language abilities (N = 74, including 35 impaired) participated in an experiment based on McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin (2002). Participants heard tokens from six 9-step voice onset time (VOT) continua spanning 2 words (beach/peach, beak/peak, etc.) while viewing a screen containing pictures of those words and 2 unrelated objects. Participants selected the referent while eye movements to each picture were monitored as a measure of lexical activation. Fixations were examined as a function of both VOT and language ability. Results: Eye movements were sensitive to within-category VOT differences: As VOT approached the boundary, listeners made more fixations to the competing word. This did not interact with language ability, suggesting that language impairment is not associated with differential auditory sensitivity or phonetic categorization. Listeners with poorer language skills showed heightened competitors fixations overall, suggesting a deficit in lexical processes. Conclusion: Language impairment may be better characterized by a deficit in lexical competition (inability to suppress competing words), rather than differences in phonological categorization or auditory abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the development of tense markers (e.g., past tense –ed) in children with cochlear implants (CIs) over a 3-year span. Nine children who received CIs before 30 months of age participated in this study at three, four, and five years postimplantation. Nine typical 3-, 4-, and 5-year- olds served as control groups. All children participated in a story-retell task. Percent correct of tense marking in the task was computed. Within the groups, percent correct of tense marking changed significantly in children with CIs and in typical children who had more hearing experience. Across the groups, children with CIs were significantly less accurate in tense marking than typical children at four and five years postimplantation. In addition, the performance of tense marking in children with CIs was correlated with their speech perception skills at earlier time points. Errors of tense marking tended to be omission rather than commission errors in typical children as well as in children with CIs. The findings suggested that despite the perceptual and processing constraints, children who received CIs may learn tense marking albeit with a delayed pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on pediatric cochlear implantation has frequently shown that speech perception, speech production, and language outcomes are better for children who are implanted earlier in life than later. These findings are often explained on the grounds that earlier implantation takes advantage of a critical or sensitive period. This paper reviews the literature concerning sensitive periods within the framework of speech and language development. It particularly emphasizes two alternate mechanisms proposed for these periods: an experience-independent mechanism, and an experience-dependent mechanism. Based on this literature review we proposed that research in the field of pediatric cochlear implantation needs to carefully define what kind of evidence is needed to reflect a sensitive period for speech and language learning. The field also needs to consider designing studies that allow the viability of these two mechanisms to be tested. An example of such a study is provided within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how cochlear implant (CI) devices can facilitate pediatric users'' post-implant acquisition of rising intonation of speech. Participants were 24 prelingually deafened individuals who received their implants from 2.5 to 11 years of age. A target utterance “Are you ready?” was imitatively produced by each of the participants following an examiner''s model on an annual basis (up to 10 years post-implantation). Ten normal-hearing listeners perceptually judged these utterances (N=173) regarding whether the perceived utterances had an intonation of non-rise, partial rise, or full-rise. Listeners also judged each utterance with respect to its intonation contour appropriateness and speech intelligibility. Results indicated that pediatric CI recipients'' production of rising intonation was unsatisfactory. Scores of both intonation category and contour appropriateness judgments did not appear to improve beyond 7 years post-implantation. These findings suggest that CI devices can be limited in its facilitation of acquisition of rising intonation. Further studies are required to help us understand the acquisition of speech intonation both in terms of perception and production in this population. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Objectives To determine the feasibility of replicating prior bimodal perception findings with hearing-impaired infants during their preimplant, hearing aid trial, and postimplant experiences; secondarily, to determine the point in development at which these infants were able to match phonetic information in the lips and voice for the vowels /a/ and /i/. Methods A total of 10 infants with hearing loss, aged 4 to 24 months, were assessed at least once prior to cochlear implantation and previous to implant stimulation. The Split-Screen Preferential Looking Procedure was used to evaluate the bimodal perception skills of these infants. Results Examples of individual bimodal perception data and preliminary group data are presented. A difference in performance across preimplant and postimplant test sessions was noted for the individuals and the group. Conclusion These data provide evidence that the infants' audibility levels were improved by their cochlear implants, which may have contributed to their evolving ability to match phonetic information in the lips and voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words are fundamental to language, linking sound, articulation, and spelling to meaning and syntax; and lexical deficits are core to communicative disorders. Work in language acquisition commonly focuses on how lexical knowledge—knowledge of words' sound patterns and meanings—is acquired. But lexical knowledge is insufficient to account for skilled language use. Sophisticated real-time processes must decode the sound pattern of words and interpret them appropriately. We review work that bridges this gap by using sensitive real-time measures (eye tracking in the visual world paradigm) of school-age children's processing of highly familiar words. This work reveals that the development of word recognition skills can be characterized by changes in the rate at which decisions unfold in the lexical system (the activation rate). Moreover, contrary to the standard view that these real-time skills largely develop during infancy and toddlerhood, they develop slowly, at least through adolescence. In contrast, language disorders can be linked to differences in the ultimate degree to which competing interpretations are suppressed (competition resolution), and these differences can be mechanistically linked to deficits in inhibition. These findings have implications for real-world problems such as reading difficulties and second-language acquisition. They suggest that developing accurate, flexible, and efficient processing is just as important a developmental goal as is acquiring language knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]