With the rise of bilinguals globally, extensive research has been conducted to understand how bilingualism affects cognitive functions differently from monolingualism, with significant implications for bilingual education, healthcare, and other fields. Specific to language processing, differences have been identified between second language (L2)…

Cued Speech is a system that manually codes the phonemic patterns of spoken languages for visual accessibility. Since its inception, this system has transitioned from a support for speech reading to the current use of home language and literacy development. While controversial in some sectors within the field of Deaf education and the Deaf…

Purpose: Reduced use of visible articulatory information on a speaker's face has been implicated as a possible contributor to language deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We employ an audiovisual (AV) phonemic restoration paradigm to measure behavioral performance (button press) and event-related potentials (ERPs) of visual speech…

Purpose: Many communication disorders result in speech sound errors that listeners perceive as phonemic errors. Unfortunately, manual methods for calculating phonemic error frequency are prohibitively time consuming to use in large-scale research and busy clinical settings. The purpose of this study was to validate an automated analysis based on a…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to examine whether there is a listening preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over backward speech in moderate-preterm infants (MPIs). Method: Eighteen MPIs of gestational age of 32.0 weeks (range: 32-34.06 weeks), chronological age of 8.09 months, and maturation age of 6.48 months served as the…

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder which is represented by a variety of deficits in all linguistic domains including phonology. Previous research, mainly conducted in the English language, has documented phonological deficits in early childhood in Down syndrome. Given the paucity of research in the area of phonology in the Greek language, the aim…

This study described the growth trajectories of 105 children (n = 55 boys) who had just started primary school in New Zealand (NZ). Children were assessed every fourth school week around 1.5 months after starting school, for five sessions on Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills first sound fluency (FSF), AIMSweb letter sound fluency…

Retrieval enhances subsequent memory more than restudy (i.e., the testing effect), demonstrating the encoding (or reencoding) effects of retrieval. It is important to delineate the nature of the encoding effects of retrieval especially in comparison to traditional encoding processes. The current study examined if the level of retrieval, analogous…

On average, English language learners (ELLs) do not demonstrate the same academic achievement as their native English-speaking peers. The number of ELLs in U.S. schools has increased over the last several decades, as has the scholarly debate on how to best support ELLs in building foundational reading skills. The purpose of this study was to…

Eliminating the reading achievement gap is essential for long-term school success. In "Who Says I Can't?," the authors explain how to close the third-grade reading gap for marginalized students. They supply educators with research, strategies, structure, and support necessary to revise current practices so that all children, regardless…

Verbal Fluency (VF) task total scores are widely used in language attrition studies, but they do not provide insight into the processes underlying optimal performance. We analyse the efficacy of clustering (subcategories within a category) and switching (shifting between these subcategories) strategies in phonemic (PVF) and semantic (SVF) tasks.…

This study investigated whether the phonological representation of a word is modulated by its orthographic representation in case of a mismatch between the two representations. Such a mismatch is found in Persian, where short vowels are represented phonemically but not orthographically. Persian adult literates, Persian adult illiterates, and…

Kindergarten reading screening measures typically identify many students as at risk who later meet criteria on important outcome measures (i.e., false positives). To address this issue, we evaluated a gated screening process that included accelerated progress monitoring, followed by a simple goal/reward procedure (skill vs. performance assessment,…

The functions of acoustic-phonetic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) remain a question: do they specifically serve to facilitate language learning via enhanced phonemic contrasts (the hyperarticulation hypothesis) or primarily to improve communication via prosodic exaggeration (the prosodic hypothesis)? The study of lexical tones…

Teaching young children to read is one of the most important aspects of education. There is a vast body of research examining the neuroscientific processes at work in learning to read, the many components of literacy, and the best instructional methods to support literacy. The purpose of this study was to collect perceptual data from teachers…