Eighty-seven primary-school children with impaired hearing were evaluated using speech perception, production, and language measures over a 3-year period. Forty-seven children with a mean unaided pure-tone-average hearing loss of 106 dB HL used a 22-electrode cochlear implant, and 40 with a mean unaided pure-tone-average hearing loss of 78 dB HL were fitted with hearing aids. All children were enrolled in oral/aural habilitation programs, and most attended integrated classes with normally hearing children for part of the time at school. Multiple linear regression was used to describe the relationships among the speech perception, production, and language measures, and the trends over time. Little difference in the level of performance and trends was found for the two groups of children, so the perceptual effect of the implant is equivalent, on average, to an improvement of about 28 dB in hearing thresholds. Scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals showed an upward trend at about 60% of the rate for normally hearing children. Rates of improvement for individual children were not correlated significantly with degree of hearing loss. The children showed a wide scatter about the average speech production score of 40% of words correctly produced in spontaneous conversations, with no significant upward trend with age. Scores on the open-set Consonant-Nucleus-Consonant (CNC) monosyllabic word test and the Bench-Kowal-Bamford (BKB) sentence test were strongly related to language level (as measured by an equivalent age on the PPVT) and speech production scores for both auditory-visual and auditory test conditions. After allowing for differences in language, speech perception scores in the auditory test condition showed a slight downward trend over time, which is consistent with the known biological effects of hearing loss on the auditory periphery and brainstem. Speech perception scores in the auditory condition also decreased significantly by about 5% for every 10 dB of hearing loss in the hearing aid group. The regression analysis model allows separation of the effects of language, speech production, and hearing levels on speech perception scores so that the effects of habilitation and training in these areas can be observed and/or predicted. The model suggests that most of the children in the study will reach a level of over 90% sentence recognition in the auditory-visual condition when their language becomes equivalent to that of a normally hearing 7-year-old, but they will enter secondary school at age 12 with an average language delay of about 4 or 5 years unless they receive concentrated and effective language training.

Four cross-modal priming experiments and two forced-choice identification experiments investigated the use of suprasegmental cues to stress in the recognition of spoken English words, by native (English-speaking) and nonnative (D utch) listeners. Previous results had indicated that suprasegmental information was exploited in lexical access by D utch but not by English listeners. For both listener groups, recognition of visually presented target words was faster, in comparison to a control condition, after stress-matching spoken primes, either monosyllabic (mus-from MUsic / muSEum) or bisyllabic (admi-from ADmiral / admiRAtion). For native listeners, the effect of stress-mismatching bisyllabic primes was not different from that of control primes, but mismatching monosyllabic primes produced partial facilitation. For non-native listeners, both bisyllabic and monosyllabic stress-mismatching primes produced partial facilitation. N ative English listeners thus can exploit suprasegmental information in spoken-word recognition, but information from two syllables is used more effectively than information from one syllable. Dutch listeners are less proficient at using suprasegmental information in English than in their native language, but, as in their native language, use mono-and bisyllabic information to an equal extent. In forced-choice identification, D utch listeners outperformed native listeners at correctly assigning a monosyllabic fragment (e.g., mus-) to one of two words differing in stress. Society to the first author, support from the D epartment of Psychology, U niversity of M elbourne, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, LaTrobe University, to the second author, and a visiting stipend from the M ax Planck Society to the third author. We are grateful to Sabine Zerbian for assistance with the materials construction and pretest for Experiments 1a and 1b, to M ichael D unn for recording the materials, to Peter K remer and Ben Williams for assistance with Experiment 2a, to Alex Wearing and Chris Davis for hospitality at M elbourne U niversity during the testing for Experiment 1a, and to Sally Andrews for hospitality at the University of N ew South Wales during testing for Experiments 2a and 3a. We further thank Peter Kremer for statistical advice, and James M cQueen, Vincent van H euven and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on the text. Key words English

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Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition.

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