In this study, we report analyses of nonword repetition responses from 76 experienced pediatric cochlear implants users. Nonword repetition performance reflects the participants' reliance on their phonological system, which has been found to be related to phonological awareness skills and reading in normal-hearing children. We found that nonword repetition performance was strongly correlated wi...

A number of models of visual-word recognition assume that the repetition of an item in a lexical decision experiment increases that item's familiarity/wordness. This would produce not only a facilitative repetition effect for words, but also an inhibitory effect for nonwords (i.e., more familiarity/wordness makes the negative decision slower). We conducted a two-block lexical decision experimen...

Purpose The primary purpose of this study was to identify the brain bases of phonological working memory (the short-term maintenance of speech sounds) using behavioral tasks analogous to clinically sensitive assessments of nonword repetition. The secondary purpose of the study was to identify how individual differences in brain activation were related to participants' nonword repetition abiliti...

Two experiments were performed in an attempt to evaluate explanations of repetition priming-the facilitation observed when the same word is processed a second time in the same task. One task employed was lexical decision (word/nonword) and the other was ambiguity decision (ambiguous/ unambiguous). In the first experiment, transfer on a lexical decision task was measured following either a lexic...

Masked priming effects in word identification tasks such as lexical decision and word naming have been attributed to a lexical mechanism whereby the masked prime opens a lexical entry corresponding to the target word. Two experiments are reported in which masked repetition priming effects of similar magnitude were obtained with word and nonword targets in a naming task. Masked orthographic prim...

We tested and confirmed the hypothesis that the prior presentation of nonwords in lexical decision is the net result of two opposing processes:(1) a relatively fast inhibitory process based on global familiarity, and (2) a relatively slow facilitatory process based on the retrieval of specific episodic information. In three studies, we manipulated speed-stress to influence the balance between t...

PURPOSE This study compared performance of children on 2 tests of nonword repetition to investigate the factors that may contribute to the well-documented nonword repetition deficit in specific language impairment (SLI). METHOD Twelve children with SLI age 7 to 11 years, 12 age-matched control children, and 12 control children matched for language ability completed 2 tests of nonword repetiti...

This Commentary supports Gathercole’s (2006) proposal on a double deficit in children with specific language impairment (SLI). The author suggests that these children have a limited phonological storage combined with a particular problem of processing novel speech, stimuli. According to Gathercole, there are three areas of skill contributing to memory for nonwords: general cognitive abilities, ...

DOI 10.1027/0044-3409.216.3.162 Abstract. Three measures have been found to be predictive of developmental language impairment: nonword repetition, the production of English past tense, and categorical speech perception. Despite this, direct comparisons of these tasks have been limited. The present study explored the associations between these measures and other language and cognitive skills in...