Comprehension and production of English plural morphology by school-age deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers have difficulty comprehending and producing English plural morphology. This study investigated their comprehension and production of the plural at primary-school age using novel words, to better understand their mental representation of plural morphology. Thirty 5- to 9-year-old DHH children and 31 children with normal hearing (NH) completed a two-alternative forced-choice comprehension task and a production task.

The acquisition of plain-emphatic consonant contrasts by Arabic-speaking children: An acoustic study.

Arabic emphatic consonants are claimed to be late-acquired, likely due to their motoric complexity, involving both coronal and pharyngeal/uvular constrictions. Children's production has largely been studied using impressionistic data, with limited acoustic analysis. This study acoustically examines the acquisition of emphatic consonants in Saudi-Hijazi Arabic-speaking children aged 3-6 years.

Investigating the Effects of Speaking Rate on Spoken Language Processing in Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate how hearing loss affects (a) spoken language processing and (b) processing of faster speech in school-age children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH).

Method: Spoken language processing was compared in thirty-six 7- to 12-year-olds who are DHH and 31 peers with normal hearing using a word detection task. Children listened for a target word in sentences presented at a normal (4.

"" or "": Mandarin-speaking preschoolers use duration and pitch to distinguish compounds and lists.

Compounds (e.g., ) and list forms (e.

Due to increased variability, the expanded vowel and tone space in Mandarin IDS does not lead to enhanced contrasts.

Expanded vowel or tone space in IDS has traditionally been interpreted as evidence of enhanced acoustic contrasts. However, emerging evidence from various languages shows that the within-category acoustic of vowels and tones also increases in IDS, offsetting the benefit of space expansion and leading to non-enhanced, or reduced acoustic contrasts. This study re-analysed a corpus of Mandarin IDS and ADS, showing that, relative to ADS, vowels and tones in IDS display greater variability, resulting in non-enhanced contrasts.

Real-time spoken word recognition in deaf and hard of hearing preschoolers: Effects of phonological competition.

This study investigates how phonological competition affects real-time spoken word recognition in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) preschoolers compared to peers with hearing in the normal range (NH). Three-to-six-year olds (27 with NH, 18 DHH, including uni- and bilateral hearing losses) were instructed to look at pictures that corresponded to words alongside a phonological competitor (e.g.

Maternal input, not transient elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, predicts 2-year-olds' vocabulary development.

Both the quantity and quality of the maternal language input are important for early language development. However, depression and anxiety can negatively impact mothers' engagement with their infants and their infants' expressive language abilities. Australian mother-infant dyads ( = 30) participated in a longitudinal study examining the effect of maternal language input when infants were 24 and 30 months and maternal depression and anxiety symptoms on vocabulary size.

Mandarin-speaking Children With Cochlear Implants Face Challenges in Using F0 Expansion to Express Contrastive Focus.

Objectives: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in perceiving fundamental frequency (F0) information because CIs do not transmit F0 effectively. In Mandarin, F0 can contrast meanings at the word level, that is, via lexical tones with distinct F0 contours, and signal contrastive relations between words at the utterance-level, that is, via contrastive focus with expanded F0 range and longer duration. Mandarin-speaking children with CIs have been reported to face challenges in producing distinct F0 contours across tones, but early implantation facilitates tonal acquisition.

Uncovering the development of linguistic knowledge in lesser studied languages.

There has recently been an increased interest in studying the language development of non-western languages. This is not new - it began in 1960's and continued into the 1980's and 1990's. The current renewed interest is much welcomed, and will benefit from many of the experimental methods and theoretical insights developed over the past decades.

Effects of maternal depression on maternal responsiveness and infants' expressive language abilities.

High levels of maternal responsiveness are associated with healthy cognitive and emotional development in infants. However, depression and anxiety can negatively impact individual mothers' responsiveness levels and infants' expressive language abilities. Australian mother-infant dyads (N = 48) participated in a longitudinal study examining the effect of maternal responsiveness (when infants were 9- and 12-months), and maternal depression and anxiety symptoms on infant vocabulary size at 18-months.

The acoustic realization of contrastive focus by 6-year-old Australian English-speaking children.

Children as young as five have some ability to produce contrastive focus [Wells et al. (2004) J. Child Lang.

The acquisition of contrastive focus during online sentence-comprehension by children learning mandarin Chinese.

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used inappropriately in a misleads listeners to predict an incorrect referent, hindering the identification process (Ito et al., 2012, 2014).

Children with hearing loss can use subject-verb agreement to predict during spoken language processing.

Rapid processing of spoken language is aided by the ability to predict upcoming words using both semantic and syntactic cues. However, although children with hearing loss (HL) can predict upcoming words using semantic associations, little is known about their ability to predict using syntactic dependencies such as subject-verb (SV) agreement. This study examined whether school-aged children with hearing aids and/or cochlear implants can use SV agreement to predict upcoming nouns when processing spoken language.

The production of /s/-stop clusters by pre-schoolers with hearing loss.

Producing word-initial /s/-stop clusters can be a challenge for English-speaking pre-schoolers. For children with hearing loss (HL), fricatives can be also difficult to perceive, raising questions about their production and representation of /s/-stop clusters. The goal of this study was therefore to determine if pre-schoolers with HL can produce and represent the /s/ in word-initial /s/-stop clusters, and to compare this to their normal hearing (NH) peers.

Produced, but not 'productive': Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers' challenges acquiring L2 English plural morphology.

It is often assumed that pre-schoolers learn a second language (L2) with ease, even for structures that are absent in their L1, such as Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers learning L2 English grammatical inflections (e.g., ducks, horses).

The Acquisition of Acoustic Cues to Onset and Coda Voicing Contrasts by Preschoolers With Hearing Loss.

Purpose: Children with hearing loss (HL), including those with hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs), often have difficulties contrasting words like " " versus " " and " " versus " " due to challenges producing systematic voicing contrasts. Even when acoustic contrasts are present, these may not be perceived as such by others. This can cause miscommunication, leading to poor self-esteem and social isolation.

Child-directed and overheard input from different speakers in two distinct cultures.

Despite the fact that in most communities interaction occurs between the child and multiple speakers, most previous research on input to children focused on input from mothers. We annotated recordings of Sesotho-learning toddlers living in non-industrial Lesotho in South Africa, and French-learning toddlers living in urban regions in France. We examined who produced the input (mothers, other children, adults), how much input was child directed, and whether and how it varied across speakers.

Longer Cochlear Implant Experience Leads to Better Production of Mandarin Tones for Early Implanted Children.

Objectives: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tones, since CIs do not transmit pitch information effectively. It has been suggested that longer CI experience provides additional benefits for children implanted early, enabling them to achieve language abilities similar to that of normal-hearing (NH) children (Colletti 2009). Mandarin is a tonal language with four lexical tones and a neutral tone (T0), characterized by distinct pitch and durational patterns.

Children with hearing loss can predict during sentence processing.

Listeners readily anticipate upcoming sentence constituents, however little is known about prediction when the input is suboptimal, such as for children with hearing loss (HL). Here we examined whether children with hearing aids and/or cochlear implants use semantic context to predict upcoming spoken sentence completions. We expected reduced prediction among children with HL, but found they were able to predict similarly to children with normal hearing.

… or 5-6-year-olds can identify the prosody of compounds but not lists.

Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in production, at least for early-acquired noun-noun compounds (Yuen et al., 2021).

Acoustic cues to coda stop voicing contrasts in Australian English-speaking children.

While voicing contrasts in word-onset position are acquired relatively early, much less is known about how and when they are acquired in word-coda position, where accurate production of these contrasts is also critical for distinguishing words (e.g., dog vs.

Temporal cues to onset voicing contrasts in Australian English-speaking children.

Voicing contrasts are lexically important for differentiating words in many languages (e.g., "bear" vs "pear").

Is One Ear Good Enough? Unilateral Hearing Loss and Preschoolers' Comprehension of the English Plural.

Purpose The plural is one of the first grammatical morphemes acquired by English-speaking children with normal hearing (NH). Yet, those with hearing loss show delays in both plural comprehension and production. However, little is known about the effects of unilateral hearing loss (UHL) on children's acquisition of the plural, where children's ability to perceive fricatives (e.

Dichotic listening is associated with phonological awareness in Australian aboriginal children with otitis media: A remote community-based study.

Objective: Recent literature has highlighted a link between hearing loss as a result of otitis media in the early years of life and impacted binaural processing skills in later childhood. Such findings are of particular relevance to Indigenous Australian children, who tend to experience otitis media earlier in life and for longer periods than their non-Indigenous counterparts. There is also growing interest in the effects of reduced auditory processing ability on a child's early learning of language and, specifically, on phonological awareness that contributes to word reading skills.