The varieties of speech to young children.

This article examines caregiver speech to young children. The authors obtained several measures of the speech used to children during early language development (14-30 months). For all measures, they found substantial variation across individuals and subgroups. Speech patterns vary with caregiver education, and the differences are maintained over time. While there are distinct levels of complexity for different caregivers, there is a common pattern of increase across age within the range that characterizes each educational group. Thus, caregiver speech exhibits both long-standing patterns of linguistic behavior and adjustment for the interlocutor. This information about the variability of speech by individual caregivers provides a framework for systematic study of the role of input in language acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hemiface contributions to hemispheric dominance in visual speech perception.

Lateralized displays are used widely to investigate hemispheric asymmetry in language perception. However, few studies have used lateralized displays to investigate hemispheric asymmetry in visual speech perception, and those that have yielded mixed results. This issue was investigated in the current study by presenting visual speech to either the left hemisphere (LH) or the right hemisphere (RH) using the face as recorded (normal), a mirror image of the normal face (reversed), and chimeric displays constructed by duplicating and reversing just one hemiface (left or right) to form symmetrical images (left-duplicated, right-duplicated). The projection of displays to each hemisphere was controlled precisely by an automated eye-tracking technique. Visual speech perception showed the same, clear LH advantage for normal and reversed displays, a greater LH advantage for right-duplicated displays, and no hemispheric difference for left-duplicated displays. Of particular note is that perception of LH displays was affected greatly by the presence of right-hemiface information, whereas perception of RH displays was unaffected by changes in hemiface content. Thus, when investigated under precise viewing conditions, the indications are not only that the dominant processes of visual speech perception are located in the LH but that these processes are uniquely sensitive to right-hemiface information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Color-object paired associates in deaf and hearing children with and without response competition.

Deaf and hearing Ss, aged 6 and 10, were compared in 2 nonverbally presented paired-associates tasks. One condition used neutral color stimuli unrelated to toy response objects and another condition had colors systematically related to the same objects to provide interfering response competition. Age differences were observed, while task interacted with deafness such that hearing but not deaf Ss were impeded by the interference condition relative to the neutral condition. It was concluded that deaf Ss showed no perceptual rigidity and that covert verbalizations of hearing Ss or experiential poverty in deaf Ss produced the differential task effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of language on the development of concept formation in deaf children.

To isolate the effect of language development on the development of thinking, children between 7 and 12 who had been deaf since an early age were presented with 3 tasks assessing conceptual functioning. Their performance was compared to that of a relatively comparable group of "hearers." The results indicated that the lack of a capacity to verbalize did not, in itself, interfere with a general capacity for abstract conceptualization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conceptual performance in deaf adults.

Noncollege deaf adults were compared with hearing controls on a series of 8 nonverbal learning and transfer or shift tasks which were designed to test an S's ability to combine previously discovered elements into new disjunctive and conjunctive groupings. In terms of total errors, successes, and trials to criterion, performance on these tasks was found to differentiate high from low IQ normal Ss and deaf Ss performed similar to hearing Ss on all tasks except one. These results would seem to refute the hypothesis that deaf people are generally inferior to hearing people in conceptual ability or that deaf children's experimental deficiency would leave a permanent lack in their conceptual development. The need for clarifying the role of language in cognition was stressed. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cerebral hemodynamics during discrimination of prosodic and semantic emotion in speech studied by transcranial Doppler ultrasonography.

Simultaneous measurement of blood flow velocity (BFV) in the middle cerebral arteries was achieved by transcranial Doppler ultrasonography in 36 right-handed volunteers who were instructed to identify the emotion conveyed by prosody or semantics of a number of sentences. The tasks were performed under 2 levels of interference: neutral versus discordant affective value of the modality that had to be ignored. A multivariate analysis of variance showed a significant bilateral increase in BFV during the discordant conditions reflecting increased attentional demand. A significant left-hemispheric lateralization of BFV was observed as emotional semantics were labeled. When attention was shifted to affective prosody, the lateralization effect disappeared as a result of a marked increase in right-hemispheric BFV. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cerebral laterality in deaf and hearing children.

Studied the development of lateralization of cerebral function in 20 hearing and 20 prelingually deaf children using the concurrent task paradigm. Ss were aged 5–6 and 11–12 yrs; all were right-handed. Concurrent processing of a nonverbal task did not cause a selective hand impairment monitored by a manual tapping task. However, deaf Ss were more impaired than hearing Ss in both age groups. Using a concurrent verbal task, both groups manifested a selective impairment of right-hand performance. The deaf also showed a greater left-hand decrement than did the hearing Ss. This result suggests that hemispheric specialization may be less apparent in the deaf than in hearing children. The factor of cognitive task difficulty is suggested as an explanation of these results. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context-conditioned generalization in adaptation to distorted speech.

People were trained to decode noise-vocoded speech by hearing monosyllabic stimuli in distorted and unaltered forms. When later presented with different stimuli, listeners were able to successfully generalize their experience. However, generalization was modulated by the degree to which testing stimuli resembled training stimuli: Testing stimuli's consonants were easier to recognize when they had occurred in the same position at training, or flanked by the same vowel, than when they did not. Furthermore, greater generalization occurred when listeners had been trained on existing words than on nonsense strings. We propose that the process by which adult listeners learn to interpret distorted speech is akin to building phonological categories in one's native language, a process where categories and structure emerge from the words in the ambient language without completely abstracting from them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The education of the deaf in Canada.

Some problems in the field of Deaf Education are described. It is maintained that the dominant system of educating the deaf in North America, usually referred to as the oralist approach, has been a failure. Reasons for the failure of pure oralism are offered, and some suggestions are made for an approach to Deaf Education which would involve the introduction of the language signs and fingerspelling at the time critical for language development. Also, the relationship of the adult deaf community to the educational system is discussed, and suggestions are made concerning the potential of Instructional Television for adult deaf education as well as for the education of deaf children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sibling relationships for deaf children: The impact of child and family characteristics.

Objective: To examine factors that affect relationships between deaf children who use cochlear implants or hearing aids and their hearing siblings. Study Design: Qualitative analysis of interview data from parents of deaf children. Participants: Parents of 29 deaf children with at least 1 sibling; 20 children used cochlear implants and 9 used hearing aids. Main Outcome Measure: Quality of deaf-hearing sibling relationships as assessed by an ordinal scale developed by the authors. Results: Birth order, family size, parents' anxiety about deafness, and negative comparisons by parents of hearing and deaf siblings were key factors in sibling relationships. Conclusions: Family context is important in understanding experiences of deaf children and their hearing siblings. The model replaces assumptions of hearing loss as individual disability with an emphasis on the social determinants of managing differences in siblings' hearing status. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The dominance-contiguity theory of the acquisition of classical conditioning.

The purpose of this article is to present a formulation of the "dominance-contiguity" theory of the acquisition of classical conditioning in the light of a new treatment of old research and the large amount of new research relevant to the theory. One of the conclusions drawn was "that contiguity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for classical CR acquisition and that drive reduction is neither necessary nor sufficient for it." 668 item bibliography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The bounds on flexibility in speech perception.

Dutch listeners were exposed to the English theta sound (as in bath), which replaced [f] in /f/-final Dutch words or, for another group, [s] in /s/-final words. A subsequent identity-priming task showed that participants had learned to interpret theta as, respectively, /f/ or /s/. Priming effects were equally strong when the exposure sound was an ambiguous [fs]-mixture and when primes contained unambiguous fricatives. When the exposure sound was signal-correlated noise, listeners interpreted it as the spectrally similar /f/, irrespective of lexical bias during exposure. Perceptual learning about speech is thus constrained by spectral similarity between the input and established phonological categories, but within those limits, adjustments are thorough enough that even nonnative sounds can be treated fully as native sounds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When hearing clients work with a deaf therapist.

Not being able to hear can present significant challenges for the therapist and for the deaf therapist/hearing client dyad. It can also create opportunities. Although the literature indicates that most culturally Deaf therapists work with Deaf clients due to their mutual use of American Sign Language, I describe (a) the background of an audiologically deaf therapist who relies on speech reading rather than sign language, and (b) this therapist's clinical work with hearing clients. Some of the relational dynamics of these treatments are identified, and I conclude by noting how attention to communication can benefit the work of all psychotherapists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generalization of perceptual learning of vocoded speech.

Recent work demonstrates that learning to understand noise-vocoded (NV) speech alters sublexical perceptual processes but is enhanced by the simultaneous provision of higher-level, phonological, but not lexical content (Hervais-Adelman, Davis, Johnsrude, & Carlyon, 2008), consistent with top-down learning (Davis, Johnsrude, Hervais-Adelman, Taylor, & McGettigan, 2005; Hervais-Adelman et al., 2008). Here, we investigate whether training listeners with specific types of NV speech improves intelligibility of vocoded speech with different acoustic characteristics. Transfer of perceptual learning would provide evidence for abstraction from variable properties of the speech input. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that learning of NV speech in one frequency region generalizes to an untrained frequency region. In Experiment 2, we assessed generalization among three carrier signals used to create NV speech: noise bands, pulse trains, and sine waves. Stimuli created using these three carriers possess the same slow, time-varying amplitude information and are equated for na?ve intelligibility but differ in their temporal fine structure. Perceptual learning generalized partially, but not completely, among different carrier signals. These results delimit the functional and neural locus of perceptual learning of vocoded speech. Generalization across frequency regions suggests that learning occurs at a stage of processing at which some abstraction from the physical signal has occurred, while incomplete transfer across carriers indicates that learning occurs at a stage of processing that is sensitive to acoustic features critical for speech perception (e.g., noise, periodicity). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Make-A-Picture Story (MAPS) test findings for rubella deaf children.

The MAPS test was given to matched groups of rubella deaf, non-rubella deaf, and hearing 15-year-old children. In comparison with the non-deaf, the rubella deaf scored fewer "normal" signs and more "schizophrenic" signs. "It is contended that the fantasy productions of the deaf, in general, are indicative of their social isolation and illogical unrealistic thinking." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Language learning and concept acquisition: Foundational issues.

Reviews the book, Language Learning and concept acquisition: Foundational issues edited by William Demopoulos and Ausonio Marras (1986). This is a stimulating and informative book presenting various attempts to account for the highly regular nature of language acquisition. Although many of the individual chapters in this book are quite excellent, the book suffers from a lack of cohesiveness because: (1) the chapters vary tremendously in their complexity and completeness--some are written at an introductory level, whereas others assume the reader to have a highly sophisticated knowledge base; and (2) the editors make no attempt to tie the book together. There are no introductory or summary comments to the various sections in the book and, in fact, there is not even a proper foreword. This severely limits the usefulness of the book. Nevertheless, I would recommend this collection of readings to researchers and scholars in the fields of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences. It contains many provocative ideas, and would be particularly useful to study in a seminar (or other group) setting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Statistical regularities in vocabulary guide language acquisition in connectionist models and 15-20-month-olds.

This research tested the hypothesis that young children's bias to generalize names for solid objects by shape is the product of statistical regularities among nouns in the early productive vocabulary. Data from a 4-layer Hopfield network suggested that the statistical regularities in the early noun vocabulary are strong enough to create a shape bias, and that the shape bias is overgeneralized to nonsolid stimuli. A 2nd simulation suggested that this overgeneralization is due to the dominance of names for shape-based categories in the early noun vocabulary. Two subsequent longitudinal experiments tested whether it is possible to create word learning biases in children. Children 15-20 months old were given intensive naming experiences with 12 noun categories typical of the types of categories children learn to name early. The children developed a precocious shape bias that was overgeneralized to naming nonsolid substances; they also showed accelerated vocabulary development. Children taught an atypical set of nouns or no new nouns did not develop a shape bias and did not show accelerated vocabulary development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Variability in deaf children's spelling: The effect of language experience.

French-speaking hearing and deaf children, ranging in age from 6 years 10 months to 14 years 7 months were required to spell words including phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences that were either statistically dominant or nondominant. Of interest was whether the nature of linguistic experience (cued speech vs. sign language) and the precocity of such experience (early vs. late exposure) determines accuracy in the use of phoneme-to-grapheme knowledge. Cued speech is a system delivering phonemically augmented speechreading through the visual modality. Hearing and deaf children exposed to cued speech early at home relied on accurate phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, whereas children exposed to cued speech later and at school only, and children exposed to sign language, did not. A critical factor in the development of the phonological route for spelling seems to be early and intensive exposure to a system making all phonological distinctions easily perceivable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual memory for shapes in deaf signers and nonsigners and in hearing signers and nonsigners: Atypical lateralization and enhancement.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 21(3) of Neuropsychology (see record 2007-06185-013). Figure 1 on p. 117 (Stimulus Materials section) depicting sample and match stimuli was incorrect. The labels Object condition and Shape condition should be reversed so that the top row is indicated as the shape condition and the bottom row as the object condition.] Deaf and hearing individuals who either used sign language (signers) or not (nonsigners) were tested on visual memory for objects and shapes that were difficult to describe verbally with a same/different matching paradigm. The use of 4 groups was designed to permit a separation of effects related to sign language use (signers vs. nonsigners) and effects related to auditory deprivation (deaf vs. hearing). Forty deaf native signers and nonsigners and 51 hearing signers and nonsigners participated in the study. Signing individuals (both deaf and hearing) were more accurate than nonsigning individuals (deaf and hearing) at memorizing shapes. For the shape memory task but not the object task, deaf signers and nonsigners displayed right hemisphere (RH) advantage over the left hemisphere (LH). Conversely, both hearing groups displayed a memory advantage for shapes in the LH over the RH. Results indicate that enhanced memory performance for shapes in signers (deaf and hearing) stems from the visual skills acquired through sign language use and that deafness, irrespective of language background, leads to the use of a visually based strategy for memory of difficult-to-describe items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)