Background and aims Previous investigations of word learning problems among people with developmental language disorder suggest that encoding, not retention, is the primary deficit. We aimed to replicate this finding; test the prediction that word form, not the linking of form to referent, is particularly problematic; and determine whether women with developmental language disorder are better word learners than men with developmental language disorder. Methods Twenty adults with developmental language disorder and 19 age-, sex-, and education-matched peers with typical language development attempted to learn 15 words by retrieval practice. Their retention was measured one day-, one week-, and one month after training. Results The participants with developmental language disorder required more exposures to the word-referent pairs than the participants with typical language development to reach mastery. While training to mastery, they made more errors in word form production, alone or in combination with errors in linking forms to the correct referents, but the number of no attempts and pure link errors did not differ by group. Women demonstrated stronger retention of the words than men at all intervals. The developmental language disorder and typical language development groups did not differ at the one-day- and one-month retention intervals but the developmental language disorder group was weaker at the one-week interval. Review via retrieval practice at the one-day and one-week interval enhanced retention at the one-month interval; the review at one week was more beneficial than the review at one day. Women benefitted more from the review opportunities than men but the developmental language disorder and typical language development groups did not differ. Conclusions Adults with developmental language disorder present with weaknesses in the encoding of new words but retention is a relative strength. Encoding word forms is especially challenging but encoding word-to-referent links is not. We interpret this profile, and the evidence of a female advantage, as consistent with the Procedural Circuit Deficit Hypothesis. Implications: When treating a client with developmental language disorder whose goal is to increase vocabulary knowledge, the interventionist should anticipate the need for multiple exposures to new words within activities that highlight the forms of the words and support their memory and production. Periodic review should serve to support long-term retention.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) served as a test case for determining the role of extant vocabulary knowledge, endogenous attention, and phonological working memory abilities in cross‐situational word learning. First‐graders (Mage = 7 years; 3 months), 44 with typical development (TD) and 28 with DLD, completed a cross‐situational word‐learning task comprised six cycles, followed by retention tests and independent assessments of attention, memory, and vocabulary. Children with DLD scored lower than those with TD on all measures of learning and retention, a performance gap that emerged in the first cycle of the cross‐situational protocol and that we attribute to weaknesses in initial encoding. Over cycles, children with DLD learned words at a similar rate as their TD peers but they were less flexible in their strategy use, demonstrating a propose‐but‐verify approach but never a statistical aggregation approach. Also, they drew upon different mechanisms to support their learning. Attention played a greater role for the children with DLD, whereas extant vocabulary size played a greater role for the children with TD. Children navigate the problem space of cross‐situational learning via varied routes. This conclusion is offered as motivation for theorists to capture all learners, not just the most typical ones.

While previous stuttering research has successfully revealed areas vulnerable to disfluency at the word level in stuttering, identifying the specific factors responsible for this instability has proved difficult; moreover, inconsistent results are complicated by a failure to control for the effects of phrasal prosody, which govern such word-level factors as lexical stress. The present experiment tested the hypothesis that disfluencies in stuttering are directly proportional to the prominence-level of a given production. Three stuttering subjects participated in an oral sentence-reading task testing a variety of sentence types while manipulating intonational factors such as pitch accent type and location. It was anticipated that pitch-accented syllables, representing a higher degree of stress in an intonation phrase than stressed but non-pitch-accented syllables, would be most prone to triggering disfluency, since they bear a greater level of prominence in the utterance. The results of the study confirmed the major hypothesis: in all of the comparisons between pitch-accented and non-pitch-accented positions of stress, the former attracted the highest rate of disfluent speech productions. This supports the principal hypothesis that intonationally prominent domains, not simply lexically stressed syllables, are a better indicator of unstable positions in stuttered speech.

It is well-known that velar stop consonants coarticulate more with the following vowel than stops at other places of articulation. The fine phonetic detail of this coarticulation is highly language-specific. For example, /k/ in Greek is more front before front vowels and more back before back vowels relative to /k/ in English [Arbisi-Kelm et al. (2008)]. The purpose of this study was to investigate how these cross-linguistic differences in production influence perception of place of articulation for lingual stops. The stimuli were word-initial consonant-vowel (CV) sequences excised from words produced by 2- to 5-year-old children and adults. The listeners were 20 adult native English speakers (tested in Minneapolis, USA) and Greek speakers (tested in Thessaloniki, Greece) who listened to these sequences combined across ages and languages in a visual analog scaling task [Urberg-Carlson et al. (2008)]. Listeners rated how alveolar or velar each sequence was by clicking on a double-headed arrow anchored with language-specific orthographic representations of the target consonants. Results showed that the two groups of adults perceived the sounds differently, as would be expected. We will report on the relationship between listeners’ perception and psychoacoustic properties of the stop bursts. [Work supported by NIDCD 02932 and NSF BCS072914 and BCS0729277.]

This paper relates consonant development in first-language acquisition to the mastery of rhythmic structure, starting with the emergence of the "core syllable" in babbling. We first review results on very early phonetic development that suggest how a rich hierarchy of language-specific metrical structures might emerge from a universal developmental progression of basic utterance rhythms in interaction with ambient language input. We then describe salient differences in prosodic structures across the languages being studied in a cross-language investigation of phonological development, in which we are eliciting and analyzing recordings from hundreds of children aged two years through five years who are acquiring Cantonese, English, Greek, or Japanese. Finally, we present examples of how patterns of disfluent consonant production differ across children acquiring the different languages in this set, in ways that seem to be related to the differences in metrical organization across the languages.