Title : Predictors of children ’ s sentence perception performance

Introduction: Recent findings suggest deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) do not use sentence context to help perceive spoken words (Conway et al., 2014). This indicates that children with CIs may understand language primarily using bottomup processes, recognizing words separately and failing to integrate them to formulate meaning for the entire sentence. However, typical-hearing (TH) children likely use both bottom-up and top-down processing during sentence perception (SP). Top-down processing involves using stored information to gather meaning, which facilitates perception of individual words. In the current study, we examined whether top-down information (semantic knowledge) would predict SP abilities in TH children.