Speech Practice Effects on Bilingual Children's Fast Mapping Performance.

Learning a new word involves many subsystems and their interactions. The purpose of this study was to examine whether speech practice facilitates the subsequent fast mapping performance of bilingual preschool children. Participants were 18 typically developing preschoolers who learned Cantonese (L1) as a home language and English (L2) as a second language.

Novel word retention in bilingual and monolingual speakers.

The goal of this research was to examine word retention in bilinguals and monolinguals. Long-term word retention is an essential part of vocabulary learning. Previous studies have documented that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in terms of retrieving newly-exposed words.

Effects of speech practice on fast mapping in monolingual and bilingual speakers.

Purpose: This study examines the effects of the levels of speech practice on fast mapping in monolingual and bilingual speakers.

Method: Participants were 30 English-speaking monolingual and 30 Spanish-English bilingual young adults. Each participant was randomly assigned to 1 of 3 practice conditions prior to the fast-mapping task: (a) intensive speech practice, (b) moderate speech practice, or (c) no practice.

Age differences in speech motor performance on a novel speech task.

Purpose: The study was aimed at characterizing age-related changes in speech motor performance on a nonword repetition task as a function of practice and nonword length and complexity.

Method: Nonword repetition accuracy, lip aperture coordination, and nonword production durations were assessed on 2 consecutive days for 16 young and 16 elderly participants for the production of 6 novel nonwords increasing in length and complexity.

Results: The effect of age on the ability to accurately and rapidly repeat long, complex nonwords was significant.

Focus of attention and speech motor performance.

Purpose: The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of an internal vs. external 'focus of attention' on speech motor performance in healthy young adults.

Method: Twenty adults (aged 18-25) participated in a within-subjects experimental design.

Nonword repetition in children and adults: effects on movement coordination.

Hearing and repeating novel phonetic sequences, or novel nonwords, is a task that taps many levels of processing, including auditory decoding, phonological processing, working memory, speech motor planning and execution. Investigations of nonword repetition abilities have been framed within models of psycholinguistic processing, while the motor aspects, which also are critical for task performance, have been largely ignored. We focused our investigation on both the behavioral and speech motor performance characteristics of this task as performed in a learning paradigm by 9- and 10-year-old children and young adults.

Increasing phonological complexity reveals heightened instability in inter-articulatory coordination in adults who stutter.

Unlabelled: The potential role of phonological complexity in destabilizing the speech motor systems of adults who stutter was explored by assessing the performance of 17 adults who stutter and 17 matched control participants on a nonword repetition task. The nonwords varied in length and phonological complexity. Behavioral results revealed no differences between the stuttering and normally fluent groups on accuracy of nonword repetition.

Developmental changes in the effects of utterance length and complexity on speech movement variability.

Purpose: The authors examined the effects of utterance length and linguistic complexity on speech movement consistency for 210 participants between the ages of 5 and 22 years. Variability and durational analyses were conducted to (a) determine a more complete picture of the developmental course of earlier observations of the effects of linguistic constructs on speech motor variability and (b) describe trends for duration of the same sequence of words in different sentential contexts across development.

Method: Lower-lip movement was recorded during the production of "buy Bobby a puppy" spoken in isolation as well as embedded as a phrase in 2 longer, more complex sentences.

Effects of loudness cues on respiration in individuals with Parkinson's disease.

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) demonstrate low vocal intensity (hypophonia) which results in reduced speech intelligibility. We examined the effects of three cues to increase loudness on respiratory support in individuals with PD. Kinematic data from the rib cage and abdomen were collected using respiratory plethysmography while participants read a short passage.

Beginning to communicate after cochlear implantation: oral language development in a young child.

This longitudinal case study examined the emergence of a wide range of oral language skills in a deaf child whose cochlear implant was activated at 20 months. The main purposes of this study were to determine "Hannah's" rate of spoken language development during her second to fourth year of implant experience and to estimate the efficiency of her progress by comparing her performance to that of typically developing children. Mother-child interactions were also examined to determine changes in Hannah's communication competence.