Katherine Demuth

Arabic emphatic consonants are primarily cued by coarticulatory effects on adjacent vowels, yet little is known about how these effects unfold across different vowels. This study examined the temporal dynamics of emphatic coarticulation in Saudi Hijazi Arabic across three vowel contexts (/iː/, /aː/, /uː/) and two manners of articulation (stops, fricatives). The plain–emphatic contrast was robust across vowels and manners of articulation for F2 and less consistent for F1. The F2 contrast persisted longest in /aː/, followed by /uː/ and /iː/, with estimated differences also largest in /aː/. Vowel-dependent temporal dynamics further our understanding of emphatic coarticulation beyond static measurements.

While school-aged children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) spend much of the day in classrooms or playgrounds, little is known about how aspects of these environments, such as fast speech and background noise, affect their ability to process sentences in real time. The current study compared processing of sentences in 16-talker babble noise spoken at a fast (6.1 syll./s) vs normal (4.5 syll./s) speaking rates in twenty-seven 8–13-year-old children with hearing in the normal range (NH) and 31 DHH children. Children were instructed to detect a target word in a sentence, and response time (RT) was taken as an outcome measure. Relationships between working memory capacity, vocabulary knowledge, and RT were also assessed, but not observed. Both groups of children were slower to process fast speech than normal-rate speech, with no evidence that DHH children were differentially affected by speaking rate compared to peers with NH. DHH children processed sentences in noise slower than their peers with NH across speaking rates. These results suggest that children's sentence processing can be disrupted when they encounter fast speech in a noisy environment, and that DHH children may be most at risk for spoken sentence processing delays in real-world listening environments.

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate how hearing loss affects (a) spoken language processing and (b) processing of faster speech in school-age children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Method: Spoken language processing was compared in thirty-six 7- to 12-year-olds who are DHH and 31 peers with normal hearing using a word detection task. Children listened for a target word in sentences presented at a normal (4.5 syllables per second [syll./s]) versus fast (6.1 syll./s) speaking rate and pressed a key when they heard the word in the sentence. Response time was taken as an outcome measure. Relationships between working memory capacity, vocabulary size, and processing speed were also assessed. Results: Children who are DHH were slower than their peers with normal hearing to detect words in sentences, but no evidence for a negative effect of speaking rate was observed. Furthermore, contrary to expectation, a larger working memory capacity was associated with slower spoken language processing, with effects stronger for younger children with smaller vocabulary sizes. Conclusions: Regardless of speaking rate, children who are DHH may be at risk for delays in spoken language processing relative to peers with normal hearing. These delays may have consequences for their access to learning and communication in spoken forms in everyday environments, which contain additional challenges such as background noise, competing talkers, and speaker variability. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28842611

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a contrastive context facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used inappropriately in a noncontrastive context misleads listeners to predict an incorrect referent, hindering the identification process (Ito et al., 2012, 2014). In Mandarin Chinese, the mapping between prosodic form and contrastive focus is less transparent, potentially delaying the acquisition of contrastive focus. This study assessed the online processing of contrastive focus by 196 Mandarin-speaking 4-10-year-olds and 34 adults in China, using the visual world paradigm. Stimuli contained a target NP in a mini discourse, with focus being used in contrastive (Experiment 1) versus Noncontrastive contexts (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that the appropriate use of prosodic form for contrastive focus facilitated the identification of a target referent for 7-10-year-olds and adults, though not younger children. Experiment 2 showed that the inappropriate use of prosodic form for contrastive focus slowed the identification process only for 10-year-olds and adults. Thus, whereas 7-10-year-olds are sensitive to prosodic form for contrastive focus, only 10-year-olds use it as a primary cue to predict an upcoming referent like adults. The acquisition of contrastive focus in Mandarin is therefore a gradual process, with children showing sensitivity to contrastive focus during the early school years, and developing adult-like form-function mapping between prosody and focus until the end of primary school. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

There has recently been an increased interest in studying the language development of non-western languages. This is not new - it began in 1960’s and continued into the 1980’s and 1990’s. The current renewed interest is much welcomed, and will benefit from many of the experimental methods and theoretical insights developed over the past decades.

Children’s early utterances often have ‘missing’ grammatical morphemes, suggesting that syntactic and/or semantic representations are still developing. However, recent research suggests that ‘variable’ omission is a predictable artefact of children’s developing phonological abilities, where pre-tonic unstressed grammatical function words such as articles, and inflectional morphemes that form complex consonant clusters, are most likely to show early patterns of omission. This chapter explores these interactions across languages, demonstrating that children’s variable omission of a grammatical morpheme is not random but rather phonologically principled, exhibiting higher probabilities of early production in phonologically ‘unmarked’ contexts where the morpheme can be prosodically licenced.

Purpose Children with hearing loss (HL), including those with hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs), often have difficulties contrasting words like “beach” versus “peach” and “dog” versus “dock” due to challenges producing systematic voicing contrasts. Even when acoustic contrasts are present, these may not be perceived as such by others. This can cause miscommunication, leading to poor self-esteem and social isolation. Acoustic evidence is therefore needed to determine if these children have established distinct voicing categories before entering school and if misperceptions are due to a lack of phonological representations or due to a still-maturing implementation system. The findings should help inform more effective early intervention. Method Participants included 14 children with HL (eight HA users, five CI users, and one bimodal) and 20 with normal hearing, all English-speaking preschoolers. In an elicited imitation task, they produced consonant–vowel–consonant minimal pair words that contrasted voicing in word-initial (onset) or word-final (coda) position at all three places of articulation (PoAs). Results Overall, children with HL showed acoustically distinct voicing categories for both onsets and codas at all three PoAs. Contrasts were less systematic for codas than for onsets, as also confirmed by adults' perceptual ratings. Conclusions Preschoolers with HL produce acoustic differences for voiced versus voiceless onsets and codas, indicating distinct phonological representations for both. Nonetheless, codas were less accurately perceived by adult raters, especially when produced by CI users. This suggests a protracted development of the phonetic implementation of codas, where CI users, in particular, may benefit from targeted intervention.