This review explores the literacy difficulties experienced by prelingual, profoundly deaf, sign-dominant adults. A critical overview of the existing literature identifies the importance of understanding their language experiences and word-coding preferences. Findings challenge the notion that a permanent lack of audition from birth prevents…

Purpose: This study examined the perception of fundamental frequency (f0) patterns by Cantonese children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants were 14 five-year-old children with SLI, and 14 age-matched (AM) and 13 four-year-old vocabulary-matched (VM) controls. The children identified a word from familiar word…

Our goal was to investigate auditory and speech perception abilities of children with and without reading disability (RD) and associations between auditory, speech perception, reading, and spelling skills. Participants were 9-year-old, Finnish-speaking children with RD (N = 30) and typically reading children (N = 30). Results showed significant…

It has been a matter of debate whether the specifically human capacity to process syntactic information draws on attentional resources or is automatic. To address this issue, we recorded neurophysiological indicators of syntactic processing to spoken sentences while subjects were distracted to different degrees from language processing. Subjects…

The study's purpose is to determine the efficacy of the Tomatis Method of auditory stimulation as a therapeutic intervention for Auditory Processing Disorders (APD). Forty-one subjects (18 females, 23 males; 4.3-19.8 years old) were evaluated for APD. Performance on standardized tests indicated weaknesses with auditory processing skills. Each…

Absolute auditory thresholds, frequency resolution and temporal resolution develop with age. It is still discussed whether low-level auditory performance is of clinical significance--specifically, for delayed maturation of central auditory processing. Recently, five new auditory tasks were used to study the development of low-level auditory…

Numerous findings suggest that non-native speech perception undergoes dramatic changes before the infant' s first birthday. Yet the nature and cause of these changes remain uncertain. We evaluated the predictions of several theoretical accounts of developmental change in infants' perception of non-native consonant contrasts. Experiment 1 assessed…

Debate continues over the hypothesis that children with language or literacy difficulties have a genuine auditory processing deficit. Several recent studies have reported deficits in frequency discrimination (FD), but it is unclear whether these are genuine perceptual impairments or reflective of the comorbid attentional problems that exist in…

Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this phenomenon agree that the decline in discrimination ability is linked to the formation of native-language phonemic…

A technique for evaluating children's auditory-language processing abilities was developed. Teachers were trained in inservice workshops to identify auditory-language processing problems, using the Observational Profile of Classroom Communication. They subsequently referred 46 nonhandicapped first-, second-, and third-graders for evaluation, which…