PURPOSE Debate around the underlying cognitive factors leading to poor performance in the repetition of nonwords by children with developmental impairments in language has centered around phonological short-term memory, lexical knowledge, and other factors. The present study examined the impact of motor-control demands on nonword repetition in groups of school children with specific impairments...

PURPOSE Adults who stutter (AWS) are less accurate in their immediate repetition of novel phonological sequences compared to adults who do not stutter (AWNS). The present study examined whether manipulation of the following two aspects of traditional nonword repetition tasks unmask distinct weaknesses in phonological working memory in AWS: (1) presentation of stimuli with less-frequent stress p...

UNLABELLED Stuttering is a disorder of speech production that typically arises in the preschool years, and many accounts of its onset and development implicate language and motor processes as critical underlying factors. There have, however, been very few studies of speech motor control processes in preschool children who stutter. Hearing novel nonwords and reproducing them engages multiple neu...

PURPOSE To investigate the usefulness of 3 tasks known to be effective diagnostic clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in children: (a) nonword repetition, (b) sentence repetition, and (c) grammaticality judgments of finiteness marking. METHOD Two groups of young adults, 13 with SLI and 18 with typical language, completed 3 experimental tasks: (a) nonword repetition, (b) sen...

Nonword repetition (NWR) has been used extensively in the study of child language. Although lexical and sub-lexical knowledge is known to influence NWR performance, there has been little examination of the NWR processes (e.g., encoding, storage, articulation) that may be affected by lexical and sub-lexical knowledge. We administered 2and 3-syllable spoken nonword recognition and nonword repetit...

UNLABELLED Some children with autism demonstrate poor nonword repetition--a deficit considered to be a psycholinguistic marker of specific language impairment (SLI). The present study examined whether there is an SLI subtype among children with autism. We compared the language abilities of children with SLI (n=34, M age=11;10 S.D.=2;3), and children with autism with (Apoor, n=18, M age=10;11 S....

Early second language (EL2) learners generally perform more poorly than monolinguals in specific language domains, presenting similarities with children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). As a consequence, it can be difficult to correctly diagnose this disorder in EL2 children. The current study investigated the performance of 120 EL2 and 40 age-matched monolingual children in obje...

Nonword repetition is closely associated with the learning of the phonological form of novel words. Several factors influence nonword repetition performance such as short-term memory, phonotactic probability, lexical knowledge, and prosodic factors. The present study examined the influence of list duration, coarticulation, and prosody on nonword repetition by comparing naturally articulated mul...

Using a novel all-nonword task ("Does the target have more vowels than consonants?"), new evidence is provided showing that processing fluency can bias masked priming of binary judgments. Two experiments revealed masked repetition priming for "yes" nonwords (e.g., NUISO) but not for "no" nonwords (e.g., RULON). This pattern is considered evidence that the greater ease of target processing induc...