BACKGROUND A deficit in the ability to repeat auditory-verbal information is common among individuals with aphasia. The neural basis of this deficit has traditionally been attributed to the disconnection of left posterior and anterior language regions via damage to a white matter pathway, the arcuate fasciculus. However, a number of lesion and imaging studies have called this notion into questi...

The current study investigated the cerebral basis of word perceptual repetition priming with fMRI during a letter detection task that manipulated the familiarity of perceptual word form and the number of repetitions. Some neuroimaging studies have reported increases, instead of decreases, in brain activations (called "repetition enhancement") associated with repetition priming of unfamiliar sti...

The nonword repetition (NWR) test has been shown to be a good predictor of children’s vocabulary size. NWR performance has been explained using the working memory model and specifically the phonological loop, which is seen as being critical in the learning of sound patterns. However, no detailed link between long-term memory and incoming sound patterns has been proposed. A computational model o...

Background: One language-related area that has recently received more attention from researchers working in the field of stuttering is phonological working memory. This article aimed to identify phonological skills of working memory in children with stuttering in comparison with normal children, and to obtain the relationship between the increase in the number of syllables in nonwords and the m...

A 38-year-old right-handed male with no history of speech or language problems presented with neurogenic stuttering following an ischaemic lesion of the left thalamus. He stuttered severely in propositional speech (conversation, monologue, confrontation naming, and word retrieval) but only slightly in non-propositional speech (automatic speech, sound, word and sentence repetition, and reading a...

In this paper, I study the acquisition of consonant clusters by testing the production of Greek-speaking children. Using a non-word repetition task, I tested the order of acquisition of word initial and word medial s-obstruent (sT), obstruent-obstruent (TT) and obstruent-sonorant (TR) clusters in 59 children. The data presented here shed new light on the nature of word initial clusters that vio...

This thesis is in two parts: the first focuses on theories of SLI and the development of argument structure while the second focuses on intervention. Chapter 1 reviews experimental findings and theories of SLI and finds that while some areas of language are well-researched, others (including argument structure) have received relatively little attention. Chapter 2 reviews the literature regardin...