scholarly journals Talker familiarity and spoken word recognition in school-age children

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSANNAH V. LEVI
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
School Age ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Talker Familiarity

ABSTRACTResearch with adults has shown that spoken language processing is improved when listeners are familiar with talkers' voices, known as the familiar talker advantage. The current study explored whether this ability extends to school-age children, who are still acquiring language. Children were familiarized with the voices of three German–English bilingual talkers and were tested on the speech of six bilinguals, three of whom were familiar. Results revealed that children do show improved spoken language processing when they are familiar with the talkers, but this improvement was limited to highly familiar lexical items. This restriction of the familiar talker advantage is attributed to differences in the representation of highly familiar and less familiar lexical items. In addition, children did not exhibit accent-general learning; despite having been exposed to German-accented talkers during training, there was no improvement for novel German-accented talkers.

Children With Cochlear Implants Use Semantic Prediction to Facilitate Spoken Word Recognition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Christina Blomquist ◽  
Rochelle S. Newman ◽  
Yi Ting Huang ◽  
Jan Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Target Word ◽  
Cochlear Implants ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Semantic Cues ◽  
Matched Group ◽  
Spoken Language Processing

Purpose Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use language knowledge via semantic prediction to facilitate recognition of upcoming words and help compensate for uncertainties in the acoustic signal. Method Five- to 10-year-old children with CIs heard sentences with an informative verb ( draws ) or a neutral verb ( gets ) preceding a target word ( picture ). The target referent was presented on a screen, along with a phonologically similar competitor ( pickle ). Children's eye gaze was recorded to quantify efficiency of access of the target word and suppression of phonological competition. Performance was compared to both an age-matched group and vocabulary-matched group of children with NH. Results Children with CIs, like their peers with NH, demonstrated use of informative verbs to look more quickly to the target word and look less to the phonological competitor. However, children with CIs demonstrated less efficient use of semantic cues relative to their peers with NH, even when matched for vocabulary ability. Conclusions Children with CIs use semantic prediction to facilitate spoken word recognition but do so to a lesser extent than children with NH. Children with CIs experience challenges in predictive spoken language processing above and beyond limitations from delayed vocabulary development. Children with CIs with better vocabulary ability demonstrate more efficient use of lexical-semantic cues. Clinical interventions focusing on building knowledge of words and their associations may support efficiency of spoken language processing for children with CIs. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14417627

scholarly journals Language processing in the natural world

2007 ◽  
Vol 363 (1493) ◽  
pp. 1105-1122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K Tanenhaus ◽  
Sarah Brown-Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Reference Resolution ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Natural Tasks

The authors argue that a more complete understanding of how people produce and comprehend language will require investigating real-time spoken-language processing in natural tasks, including those that require goal-oriented unscripted conversation. One promising methodology for such studies is monitoring eye movements as speakers and listeners perform natural tasks. Three lines of research that adopt this approach are reviewed: (i) spoken word recognition in continuous speech, (ii) reference resolution in real-world contexts, and (iii) real-time language processing in interactive conversation. In each domain, results emerge that provide insights which would otherwise be difficult to obtain. These results extend and, in some cases, challenge standard assumptions about language processing.

Spoken word recognition in children with and without specific language impairment

1998 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Dollaghan
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Language Impairments ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
School Age ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Specific Language Impairments

AbstractDeficits in lexical access in children with specific language impairments (SLI) have been inferred from word naming, recall, and categorization tasks, but no evidence exists concerning these children's ability to identify words in spoken input. We presented successive auditory time gatings of unfamiliar words; familiar, phonologically related words; and familiar, phonologically unrelated words to school-age children with and without SLI. The groups did not differ significantly in the point at which they recognized familiar words, but the subjects with SLI required significantly more of the acoustic-phonetic signal than did their peers to recognize unfamiliar words. For all word types, the subjects with SLI were significantly less likely to respond with correct initial consonants at the earliest gated interval than were their peers. Our results suggest that both representational and perceptual inefficiencies may contribute to slowed lexical access in children with SLI.

Spoken language comprehension: insights from eye movements

2007 ◽  
pp. 308-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Tanenhaus
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Language Production ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Response Measure ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Language Comprehension

Recently, eye movements have become a widely used response measure for studying spoken language processing in both adults and children, in situations where participants comprehend and generate utterances about a circumscribed “Visual World” while fixation is monitored, typically using a free-view eye-tracker. Psycholinguists now use the Visual World eye-movement method to study both language production and language comprehension, in studies that run the gamut of current topics in language processing. Eye movements are a response measure of choice for addressing many classic questions about spoken language processing in psycholinguistics. This article reviews the burgeoning Visual World literature on language comprehension, highlighting some of the seminal studies and examining how the Visual World approach has contributed new insights to our understanding of spoken word recognition, parsing, reference resolution, and interactive conversation. It considers some of the methodological issues that come to the fore when psycholinguists use eye movements to examine spoken language comprehension.

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