In their Covert Repair Hypothesis (CRH), Postma and Kolk (1993) proposed that stuttering-like disfluencies arise, in both normal and stuttered speech, as a consequence of speakers‟ attempts to repair phonological-encoding errors before they start to speak. They posited that stutterers are particularly disfluent because they make larger numbers of such errors compared to normally-fluent speakers. To date, however, experimental research has provided little reliable evidence to support or counter this hypothesis. This thesis constitutes a systematic attempt to provide such evidence. Using a tongue-twister paradigm in conjunction with manipulations of auditory masking, it first documents (a) the vigilance with which normally-fluent speakers monitor for such errors; (b) the relative accuracy with which they detect them; and (c) the frequency with which they occur – in both inner and overt speech. A second set of experiments then extends the same investigation to a group of stutterers and matched controls and explores the relationship between the occurrence of participants‟ errors in the experimental paradigm and the frequency of their stuttering-like disfluencies in everyday speaking situations. Together, these experiments reveal that, compared to controls, participants who stutter monitor their speech with similar levels of vigilance; identify phonemic errors with similar degrees of accuracy; and, as predicted by the CRH, produce significantly more errors – in both their inner and overt speech. However, contrary to the predictions of the CRH, no relationship was found between the frequency of such errors in inner speech and the severity of participants‟ disfluencies. In a final set of experiments, a speech-recognition paradigm is employed to explore an alternative hypothesis: that stuttering-like disfluencies can be precipitated, in a speaker, by the mere anticipation that his words will result in communication failure. Results revealed that, for stutterers, stuttering decreased on words that were consistently followed by feedback implying correct recognition, but not on words followed by feedback implying incorrect recognition. For normally-fluent speakers, equivalent correlations were not found. The thesis concludes that slow or impaired phonological encoding may play a role in the development of the disorder. But, once established, the anticipation of communication failure may be a more important factor in determining where and when stuttering-like disfluencies actually occur. It then discusses implications of the experimental findings for hypotheses that posit a connection between phonological encoding and stuttering.

No description available.

No description available.

Children with developmental speech disorder of no known aetiology constitute a heterogeneous group, both in their presenting difficulties, which can include additional language and speech perception difficulties, and in the developmental course of the disorder. This thesis examines this heterogeneity from a developmental and psycholinguistic perspective. Using a longitudinal design, speech processing and language skills are explored over three years in a group of children with speech difficulties (n=47) and an age- and nonverbal IQ-matched longitudinal control group (n=47), mean age 4;06 - 6;07. Other measures were of developmental history, family history, psychosocial status and therapy input. Key areas of investigation were: the proportion of children whose speech later resolves; uncovering the 'resolving' and 'persisting' profile; the role of input processing in speech development, in particular, the role of accent variability; and the occurrence of dissociable speech processing patterns on matched word/nonword repetition and on speech input tasks. Group characteristics were examined through an analysis of patterns of dissociation on tasks across the group and an examination of patterns of association on speech and language measures (in comparison to the control group) in order to establish the developmental relationships between different aspects of speech processing. Thus concurrent and longitudinal relationships were examined using descriptive statistics, prospective and retrospective subgroup analyses and multiple regression analyses. A 'persisting' speech profile was identified as a pervasive speech processing and language difficulty and/or more severe speech output problems. A 'resolved' profile was confined to early, moderate, specific speech difficulties. Apart from nonword repetition, there was no evidence that speech outcome was related to different rates of speech or language development. Using evidence from normal and atypical development, an interactive view of speech development is outlined. Despite the need to understand development as interactive, speech output performance is argued to be the main factor mediating and constraining change between the ages of 4-6 in children with speech difficulties. An emerging discrepancy between word and nonword repetition, with nonword repetition not improving at similar rates to word repetition in some children with persisting speech difficulties, is cited as additional evidence that speech output, in particular, motor programming deficit, is the core characteristic of a persisting speech disorder.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, including its subtests and total test scores, can be used reliably as predictors of achievement on other tests used in the diagnosis of language disorders in children.

The purpose of this study is to compare black children with white children to determine if a significant difference exists between their scores on the subtests of the ITPA.

The problem of this research is to determine the similarities and differences related to the psycholinguistic abilities of Anglo-American, Negro, and Latin-American preschool children.

The dissertation explores word order phenomena in a 'free' word order language, Russian. It has been proposed in the literature that in simple sentences like 'John sees Mary', six word orders are equally possible in Russian. The dissertation questions the equal acceptability of these word orders and shows that some of the "felicitous" word orders have a degraded status compared to others. The word order findings are based on experimental evidence from elicitation, perception and grammaticality judgment psycholinguistic studies with 237 adult native speakers of Russian. The results of the experiments demonstrate that Russian speakers have a strong preference for producing some word orders over others. For example, Russian native speakers produce transitive SVO, OVS and SOV felicitous word orders, but consistently do not produce VSO, VOS and OSV felicitous word orders, which they still recognize as acceptable, but as having a degraded grammaticality status. On the basis of the experimental evidence and analysis of the various constituent movements within the Minimalist Program approach, a model of grammar is proposed which adds a pragmatic component responsible for word order permutations. According to this model, the syntactic component of grammar generates only SVO sentences (the basic word order) in Russian. All discourse-dependent sentences result from realignment in the post-syntactic pragmatic component. In contrast to the hierarchical structure of syntax, the pragmatic component of grammar has a linear structure and operates with Optimality Theory-type constraints determining the optimal output word order in a particular discourse structure. The underlying assumption of this model is that this pragmatic component is present in all languages. However, the language specific ranking of the constraints in this component results in word order variations. In contrast to the previous structural approaches to word order permutations in Russian, the proposed model has obvious advantages. The model accounts not only for grammaticality and ungrammaticality, but also for the degraded grammaticality of different word order permutations in Russian. In addition, this approach accounts for the variation between 'fixed' word order languages like English and 'free' word order languages like Russian.

No description available.

No description available.