The Development of Left Hemisphere Lateralization for Sentence-Level Prosodic Processing.

Purpose: The fine-tuning of linguistic prosody in later childhood is poorly understood, and its neurological processing is even less well studied. In particular, it is unknown if grammatical processing of prosody is left- or right-lateralized in childhood versus adulthood and how phonological working memory might modulate such lateralization. Furthermore, it is virtually unknown how prosody develops neurologically among children with cochlear implants (CIs).

Acquisition of consonants among typically developing Akan-speaking children: A preliminary report.

Purpose: Although Akan is one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in Ghana, very little is known about children's phonological development. This paper investigates the development of consonants in Akan among typically developing children aged 3-5 years.

Method: A list of 103 Akan words was compiled, sampling the full range of prosodic structures, sound positions, features and segments, and controlling for word familiarity.

U-shaped development in error-driven child phonology.

Phonological regressions or U-shaped development have frequently been observed in longitudinal studies of child speech production. However, the typology of which phonological patterns regress, and their implications for learning, have not been given much attention in the recent literature on constraint-based phonological development. One basic question is simply the definition of a phonological regression, as created by the grammar or other mechanisms, which is in turn dependent on the type of grammar and learner assumed.

Human central auditory plasticity: A review of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure cochlear implant performance and tinnitus perception.

Objective: Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging noninvasive technology used to study cerebral cortex activity. Being virtually silent and compatible with cochlear implants has helped establish fNIRS as an important tool when investigating auditory cortex as well as cortices involved with hearing and language processing in adults and during child development. With respect to this review article, more recently, fNIRS has also been used to investigate central auditory plasticity following hearing loss and tinnitus or phantom sound perception.