Lexical and sub-lexical knowledge influences the encoding, storage, and articulation of nonwords

Nonword repetition (NWR) has been used extensively in the study of child language. Although lexical and sub-lexical knowledge is known to influence NWR performance, there has been little examination of the NWR processes (e.g., encoding, storage, articulation) that may be affected by lexical and sub-lexical knowledge. We administered 2- and 3-syllable spoken nonword recognition and nonword repetition tests on two independent groups of 31 children (M=5;07). Spoken nonword recognition primarily involves encoding and storage, whereas NWR involves an additional articulation process. The influence of lexical and sub-lexical knowledge was determined by examining the amount of lexical errors produced. There was a clear involvement of long-term lexical and sub-lexical knowledge in both spoken nonword recognition and NWR. In spoken nonword recognition, twice as many errors involved selecting a foil that contained a lexical item (e.g., yashukup) over a foil that contained only nonsense syllables (e.g., yashunup). In repetition, over 30% of errors changed a nonsense syllable to a lexical item. Our results show that long-term lexical and sub-lexical knowledge is pervasive in NWR – any explanation of NWR performance must therefore consider the influence of lexical and sub-lexical knowledge throughout the whole repetition process, from the encoding of nonwords to the articulation of them

Development of audiovisual comprehension skills in prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants

Objective: The present study investigated the development of audiovisual comprehension skills in prelingually deaf children who received cochlear implants. Design: We analyzed results obtained with the Common Phrases (Robbins et al., 1995) test of sentence comprehension from 80 prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants who were enrolled in a longitudinal study, from pre-implantation to 5 years after implantation. Results: The results revealed that prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants performed better under audiovisual (AV) presentation compared with auditory-alone (A-alone) or visual-alone (V-alone) conditions. AV sentence comprehension skills were found to be strongly correlated with several clinical outcome measures of speech perception, speech intelligibility, and language. Finally, pre-implantation V-alone performance on the Common Phrases test was strongly correlated with 3-year postimplantation performance on clinical outcome measures of speech perception, speech intelligibility, and language skills. Conclusions: The results suggest that lipreading skills and AV speech perception reflect a common source of variance associated with the development of phonological processing skills that is shared among a wide range of speech and language outcome measures