Deaf children rely mainly on lipreading to understand spoken language. The phonological representations they develop from the lipread signal are underspecified, leading to poor performances in all mental activities relying on such representations. To overcome these difficulties, systems have been designed that deliver entirely visually specified information about the phonological contrasts of s...

Within the subfields of linguistics, traditional approaches tend to examine different phenomena in isolation. As Stoel-Gammon (this issue) correctly states, there is little interaction between the subfields. However, for a more comprehensive understanding of language acquisition in general and, more specifically, lexical and phonological development, wemust consider relations between multiple s...

Phonological awareness, knowledge that speech is composed of syllables and phonemes, is critical for learning to read. Phonological awareness precedes and predicts successful transition from language to literacy, and weakness in phonological awareness is a leading cause of dyslexia, but the brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children is unknown. We used functional magn...

OBJECTIVE To examine the long term effects of prenatal cocaine exposure (PCE) on the language development of 10-year-old children utilizing a prospective design, controlling for confounding drug and environmental factors. PARTICIPANTS Children exposed to cocaine in utero (PCE; n=175) and non-exposed children (NCE; n=175) were followed prospectively to 10years of age and were compared on langu...

The development of reading skill and bases of developmental dyslexia were explored using connectionist models. Four issues were examined: the acquisition of phonological knowledge prior to reading, how this knowledge facilitates learning to read, phonological and nonphonological bases of dyslexia, and effects of literacy on phonological representation. Compared with simple feedforward networks,...

This study investigates whether phonological working memory is associated with spoken language development in preschool children. Assessments were made of speech corpora taken from 3-year old children grouped in terms of their phonological memory abilities. Both quantitative and qualitative indices of the children's spontaneous speech output were taken in a structured play session. Significant ...

PURPOSE To compare children with typical language development (TLD) and evolutional phonological disorder (EPD) regarding the phonemic discrimination and the linguistic performance of language levels (morphological, syntactic, semantic, and perceptual and productive vocabulary). METHODS The sample comprised 36 children, aged between 5 years and 7 years and 11 months, with TLD and EPD. Childre...