Sentence Repetition Task Research Articles

The Competition Between Processing and Discourse-Pragmatic Factors in Children's and Adults' Production of Adverbial When-Clauses.

This is the first study to investigate the combined effects of processing-based factors (i.e., clause length and clause order) and discourse-pragmatic factors (i.e., information structure) on children's and adults' production of adverbial when-clauses. In a sentence repetition task, 16 three-year-old and 16 five-year-old children as well as 17 adults listened to and watched an animated story and then were asked to repeat what they had just heard and seen. Each story contained an adverbial when-clause and its main clause. The sentences were manipulated for their clause order, information structure, and clause length. Adults tended to change main-when clause orders to when-main in their repetitions, and they showed a strong preference for the given-new order of information. In contrast, 3-year-olds tended to change when-main clause orders to main-when, and they showed a preference for the new-given order of information. In addition, 3-year-olds tended to produce short-long clause orders irrespective of what they had heard, whereas adults produced both short-long and long-short orders in line with the input. In general, 5-year-olds were more adultlike in their production compared to 3-year-olds. Young children were strongly affected by processing-based factors in their production of complex sentences. They tended to order main and when-clauses in a way that requires less planning and processing load. However, they have not yet attained an adultlike sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic factors. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24422635.

Subordination in Turkish Heritage Children with and without Developmental Language Impairment

A large body of cross-linguistic research has shown that complex constructions, such as subordinate constructions, are vulnerable in bilingual DLD children, whereas they are robust in bilingual children with typical language development; therefore, they are argued to constitute a potential clinical marker for identifying DLD in bilingual contexts, especially when the majority language is assessed. However, it is not clear whether this also applies to heritage contexts, particularly in contexts in which the heritage language is affected by L2 contact-induced phenomena, as in the case of Heritage Turkish in Germany. In this study, we compare subordination using data obtained from 13 Turkish heritage children with and without DLD (age range 5; 1–11; 6) to 10 late successive (lL2) BiTDs (age range 7; 2–12; 2) and 10 Turkish adult heritage bilinguals (age range 20; 3–25; 10) by analyzing subordinate constructions using both Standard and Heritage Turkish as reference varieties. We further investigate which background factors predict performance in subordinate constructions. Speech samples were elicited using the sentence repetition task (SRT) from the TODİL standardized test battery and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). A systematic analysis of a corpus of subordinate clauses constructed with respect to SRT and MAIN narrative production comprehension tasks shows that heritage children with TD and DLD may not be differentiated through these tasks, especially when their utterances are scored using the Standard Turkish variety as a baseline; however, they may be differentiated if the Heritage Turkish is considered as the baseline. The age of onset in the second language (AoO_L2) was the leading performance predictor in subordinate clause production in SRT and in both tasks of MAIN regardless of using Standard Turkish or Heritage Turkish as reference varieties in scoring.

Investigating Verbal Repetition in Persian-speaking Patients with the Semantic Variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia Compared to Healthy Individuals

Introduction: Language deficit is regarded as one of the most important hallmarks of primary progressive aphasia. This study aims to analyze the nature of verbal repetition ability in a group of patients suffering from the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia and investigate their cognitive capability.
 Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 12 patients of the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia and 12 healthy individuals accomplished a set of tasks, including naming, word comprehension, digit span, repetition of multisyllabic single words, monosyllabic word span under similar or dissimilar phonological conditions, and sentence repetition
 Results: The patients exhibited some degree of impairment with diverse patterns in each task, although the accomplishment of the sentence repetition task was the most challenging activity for the primary progressive aphasic patients of the semantic variant. However, the healthy individuals performed well in all tasks.
 Conclusion: The recognition of the quantity and quality of the cognitive deficit in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasics can illuminate the nature of this disease and contribute to a better diagnosis of this disease. Furthermore, it can assist speech therapists and neuropsychologist to recruit appropriate therapies and employ better techniques for the diagnosis and cure of these patients.

Effects of Speaking Rate on Variability of Second Formant Frequency Transitions in Dysarthria

Introduction: This study examined the utility of multiple second formant (F2) slope metrics to capture differences in speech production for individuals with dysarthria and healthy controls as a function of speaking rate. In addition, the utility of F2 slope metrics for predicting severity of intelligibility impairment in dysarthria was examined. Methods: Twenty three speakers with Parkinson’s disease and mild to moderate hypokinetic dysarthria (HD), 9 speakers with various neurological diseases and mild to severe ataxic or ataxic-spastic dysarthria (AD), and 26 age-matched healthy control speakers (CON) participated in a sentence repetition task. Sentences were produced at habitual, fast, and slow speaking rate. A variety of metrics were derived from the rising F2 transition portion of the diphthong /ai/. To obtain measures of intelligibility for the two clinical speaker groups, 15 undergraduate SLP students participated in a transcription experiment. Results: Significantly shallower slopes were found for the speakers with HD compared to control speakers. Steeper F2 slopes were associated with increased speaking rate for all groups. Higher variability in F2 slope metrics was found for the speakers with AD compared to the two other speaker groups. For both clinical speaker groups, there was a negative association between intelligibility and F2 slope variability metrics, indicating lower variability in speech production was associated with higher intelligibility. Discussion: F2 slope metrics were sensitive to dysarthria presence, dysarthria type, and speaking rate. The current study provided evidence that the use of F2 slope variability measures has additional value to F2 slope averaged measures for predicting severity of intelligibility impairment in dysarthria.

Assessing structural language skills of autistic adults: Focus on sentence repetition

Although autism is a life-long disorder, there is limited data on structural language abilities in adults, and a lack of language tools appropriate for this population. This study investigates the relevance of a sentence repetition (SR) task for assessing morphosyntactic abilities in autistic adults. The so-called LITMUS-SR-FR(ench)-Adults is an adaptation of a child SR task shown to be efficient for identifying language impairment in autistic children. It consists of sentences divided into six structures and structure subtypes created by manipulating ingredients of syntactic complexity (e.g., embedding and syntactic movement). The task was administered to 39 French-speaking autistic individuals aged 18–56 years, with ranging intellectual abilities, and 41 age-matched control participants. Performance on identical repetition was characterized by higher variability in the autistic group than in the control group, and it distinguished autistic adults with language difficulties from those without language difficulties on all structure types and subtypes. Error analysis showed that autistic adults with language difficulties were sensitive to syntactic complexity, revealing group specificities. Performance was explained neither by nonverbal cognition nor by autism severity, indicating possible independence of structural language from both variables. Our findings support the appropriateness of LITMUS-SR-FR-Adults for assessing structural language in autistic adults and contribute to document the variability in their morphosyntactic skills.

Using multiple measures of language dominance and proficiency in Farsi-English bilingual children

This paper aims to identify effective means of measuring dominance and proficiency in bilingual children. Thirty-seven Farsi-English Heritage language speaking children from 6;1 to 11;6 were assessed on their vocabulary, morphosyntax, and narrative microstructure skills in both languages to address whether there is a difference between their proficiency in Farsi as a heritage and English as a majority language, how the scores on the vocabulary, morphosyntax, and narrative microstructure tasks relate to one another, and based on the results of each task in both languages if any of the children are at risk for a Developmental Language Disorder. Vocabulary was assessed using the LITMUS- Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task (CLT), morphosyntax using the LITMUS-Sentence Repetition (SR) tasks, and Narrative microstructure using the LITMUS-Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Individual language proficiency was identified via an in-depth profile analysis for each participant who looked at their performance on all experimental tasks in both languages. The data demonstrated that on the vocabulary and narrative tasks the participants were more dominant in English than in Farsi, while on the sentence repetition task there were no significant differences between the two languages. Correlation analyses showed that vocabulary scores were strongly correlated to the sentence repetition scores and the microstructure scores. The English and Farsi sentence repetition scores also correlated moderately with the microstructure scores within each language. Profile analysis showed that no child within the study scored < 1.5 or 2 standard deviations below the mean on more than two tasks in both languages. However, interesting patterns emerged indicating that some participants had a greater proficiency in one language vs. the other language. The results from this study showed that measuring language within a single domain (e.g., morphosyntax) is not enough to identify a bilingual child's language dominance and/or proficiency. Instead, an in-depth profile analysis and language assessments across various language domains need to be done in order to appropriately measure language dominance and proficiency. Consequently, this study supports the importance of measuring language across multiple domains in studies of bilingual children. The clinical significance of appropriately identifying language dominance and proficiency was also shown, as such information would allow clinicians to make more appropriate clinical decisions.

Analysis of Errors in Sentence Repetition by Subgroups of Children with Speech Sound Disorders

Objectives: Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) are clinically useful tasks for examining working memory ability and discriminating residual language delay. This study aims to examine sentence repetition skills by groups of children with SSDs and analyze error types and morphosyntactic strengths and weaknesses in SRTs. Methods: Thirty-four children aged 5-7 years with SSDs were classified into groups with articulation disorders, phonological delays, and phonological disorders. SRTs were conducted, and errors in SRTs were analyzed in terms of lexical and grammatical morphemes and children’s sentence repetition (SR) skills were examined by two scoring systems including or excluding articulation errors. Results: In SRTs, children with phonological disorders showed more omission errors; in particular, omission of grammatical morphemes, and sentence paraphrase errors were more frequent. Children with phonological disorders showed more lexical grammatical morpheme errors than the other subgroups. Even in the scoring system that reflects both language and articulation errors, children with phonological disorders showed a lower performance than children with articulation disorders. Conclusion: Children with phonological disorders exhibited morphosyntactic weakness by showing greater difficulties in repeating grammatical morphemes accurately in SRTs. This finding suggests that systematic grammar intervention should be addressed for children with phonological disorders.

Individual differences in attention control and the processing of phonological contrasts in a second language.

This study investigated attention control in L2 phonological processing from a cognitive individual differences perspective, to determine its role in predicting phonological acquisition in adult L2 learning. Participants were 21 L1-Spanish learners of English, and 19 L1-English learners of Spanish. Attention control was measured through a novel speech-based attention-switching task. Phonological processing was assessed through a speeded ABX categorization task (perception) and a delayed sentence repetition task (production). Correlational analyses indicated that learners with more efficient attention switching skill and faster speed in correctly identifying the target phonetic features in the speech dimension under focus could perceptually discriminate L2 vowels at higher processing speed, but not at higher accuracy rates. Thus, attentional flexibility provided a processing advantage for difficult L2 contrasts but did not predict the extent to which precise representations for the target L2 vowels had been established. However, attention control was related to L2 learners' ability to distinguish the contrasting L2 vowels in production. In addition, L2 learners' accuracy in perceptually distinguishing between two contrasting vowels was significantly related to how much of a quality distinction between them they could make in production.

Clinical Bilingual Evaluations: Exploring Ways to Overcome Barriers in the Direct Assessment of Both Languages When There Is a Suspicion of Language Disorder

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists report barriers to conducting culturally appropriate bilingual language evaluations when there is a suspicion of language disorder. One barrier is that there may not be personnel available to directly assess language development in a language other than English. The purpose of this clinical focus article is to demonstrate the potential for speech-language pathologists to incorporate direct assessment data from a language they cannot speak fluently when there are barriers to a comprehensive bilingual evaluation. First, we review the clinical markers of bilingual language disorders. Second, we review the evidence from audiology that uses closed-set tasks to assess speech recognition in languages the clinician cannot speak fluently. Last, we explore potential methods for applying such practices in clinical language evaluations when there is a suspicion of language disorder. Conclusions: Closed-set tasks, such as receptive language tests, could be a promising way for speech-language pathologists to incorporate direct assessment data from a language they cannot fluently speak into bilingual language evaluations. Other structured tasks, such as sentence repetition tasks, may not yield valid language data without the clinician having adequate competency in the test language. This clinical focus article emphasizes the great need to diversify the profession of speech-language pathology to promote equity and access to clinical language evaluations and interventions for culturally and linguistically diverse children.

Speech Production Errors in Children With Cleft Palate With or Without Cleft Lip.

The purpose of this study was to describe the frequency of speech production errors in children with cleft palate with or without cleft lip (CP±L) and explore characteristics related to speech production errors. Fifty-six children with nonsyndromic CP±L between the ages of 4;0 and 7;11 (years;months) were included in this study. The children's audio-recorded production of a sentence repetition task was transcribed using narrow transcription and coded for speech error type. Children used, on average, 18 speech errors during the sentence repetition task that sampled 59 phoneme targets. On average, phonological errors were used most frequently, with nine errors per sample, followed by anterior oral speech errors at four errors per sample, and non-oral compensatory errors at three errors per sample. Individual-level characteristics including age and cleft type were related to frequency of phonological errors and anterior oral speech errors, respectively. One treatment-level characteristic, hypernasality, was related to use of non-oral compensatory errors and passive speech errors. This study identified the most frequent speech production errors as phonological errors, followed by anterior oral speech errors and non-oral compensatory errors. Individual-level and treatment-level characteristics were related to speech production errors. Future research should explore additional characteristics that may influence use of speech production errors. Clinically, this study adds information regarding speech error types that should be monitored throughout cleft care, including phonological errors that were most prevalent among this sample. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22044095.

Acoustic variability of examiners’ productions in language assessment

Speech-Language Pathologists and other professionals administer assessments to determine whether children have communication disorders. Although these assessments specify procedures to ensure comparable administration across examiners, there are still individual factors that are unaccounted for. A commonly used measure in assessment is sentence repetition, in which a child repeats a live-voice production of a sentence. Sentence repetition tasks necessarily reflect the unique prosody used by experimenters, and in particular their rate of speech and f0 patterns. This study investigates examiners’ rate and f0 variation as they administer a sentence repetition task in order to quantify variability within and between the examiners. To do this, we analyzed recordings of 25 different speakers administering the Sentence Repetition subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) to children aged 3 through 10 years old. For each production of a sentence, we measured the mean pitch, pitch range, and speaking rate. The results indicate the extent to which each examiner varied these prosodic features based on the assessment item and the age of the child undergoing the assessment. This variability is compared across examiners to capture a possible point of inconsistency that may affect children’s performance on these assessment tasks.

Dual-task costs of clear and loud speech: Implications for talkers with Parkinson disease

Decades of research suggest that the speech production adjustments associated with adopting a clearer or louder speaking style enhance speech intelligibility, making these speech styles a common talker-oriented strategy in speech production interventions for talkers with dysarthria secondary to Parkinson disease (PD). Recent data suggest that explicit instructions to speak louder or clearer than usual may increase the processing load and effort associated with speech production. Empirical data will be presented that demonstrate these higher-effort speech styles may require greater attentional resources than habitual or conversational speech. A group of neurotypical talkers performed a sentence repetition task using Habitual, Loud, and Clear speech styles in isolation and while performing a concurrent visuomotor tracking task. Lip and jaw kinematics, speech intensity, and accuracy on the visuomotor task were collected to quantify performance on each task. Group-level data suggest that when faced with the competing task demands of the visuomotor task, neurotypical talkers prioritized the articulatory and phonatory adjustments associated with Clear and Loud speech at the cost of secondary task performance. Case examples from talkers with hypokinetic dysarthria resulting from PD will also be examined to frame and discuss clinical implications and considerations.

What Sentence Repetition Tasks Can Reveal about the Processing Effort Associated with Different Types of Code-Switching

In this study, we explored the linguistic consolidation processes associated with bilingual processing using an experimental paradigm novel in bilingualism research, i.e., sentence repetition. We tested 46 L1-German L2-English bilinguals immersed in the L2 context. Firstly, we compared participants’ sentence repetition accuracy in single-language sentences and in sentences involving code-switches. Secondly, we investigated the processing cost associated with different types of code-switching, i.e., alternation, insertion, and dense code-switching. Finally, we assessed the following potential predictors of repetition accuracy: regular usage of different code-switching types, executive functions (working memory and inhibitory control), as well as relevant bilingualism variables (proficiency, dominance, and immersion). Our first finding was that bilinguals displayed reduced repetition accuracy in sentences involving code-switches compared to single-language sentences, but only when the single-language sentences were in the participants’ L1. This suggests that any processing costs associated with code-switching are modulated by bilinguals’ language background. Moreover, bilinguals’ poor performance in L2 compared to L1 single-language sentences, despite reporting high levels of L2 exposure frequency, highlights the importance of age of acquisition and dominance profiles for language processing. In terms of code-switching, our results revealed that bilinguals’ repetition accuracy differed across different types of code-switching. The processing effort associated with different types of code-switching in the sentence repetition task was primarily driven by the structural depth and the degree of mixing of the involved code-switch, i.e., dense forms of code-switching involving high levels of linguistic co-activation were harder to repeat than alternations involving unintegrated language switching. This effect partially converged with bilinguals’ sociolinguistic practices because bilinguals also reported lower exposure frequency to dense code-switching, but no direct correlations were observed at the level of individual differences. In terms of general cognitive functions, repetition accuracy was modulated by working memory but not by inhibitory control. By investigating this issue, we hope to contribute to our understanding of language processing in the face of cross-linguistic consolidation processes.

Individual Differences in Bilingual Child Language Acquisition: A plunge into a Complex and Dynamic Network.

Large individual differences in language skills are well documented in monolingual children (e.g., Kidd, Donnelly & Christiansen, 2018). In bilinguals, the broad variation is even more pronounced. Interestingly, some bilingual children might be weak in their Heritage Language (HL, also labeled as Minority Language, Home Language, Community Language), to which they have naturalistic exposure from birth. Others might be weak in their Societal Language (SL), the language of the surrounding and educational environment. Large individual differences are observed in neurotypical bilingually exposed children as well as in their bilingually raised peers with developmental language disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and hearing impairment (see also Armon-Lotem & Meir, 2016; Meir & Novogrodsky, 2020). Figure 1 visualizes individual differences in morphosyntactic skills of monolingual and bilingual children with typical language development aged 5;5-6;8 as indexed by the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks (the data are drawn from Armon-Lotem & Meir, 2016; Meir, 2018). While monolingual preschool children (MonoRU and MonoHE) show little variation, bilinguals with different levels of dominance (balanced bilinguals: BB; HL dominant: HL-D; SL dominant: SL-D) as determined by standardized tests exhibit large individual differences within each language and across their two languages.

Left-behind experience and language proficiency predict narrative abilities in the home language of Kam-speaking minority children in China.

Studies have documented that child experiences such as external/environmental factors as well as internal factors jointly affect acquisition outcomes in child language. Thus far, the findings have been heavily skewed toward Indo-European languages and children in the Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies. By contrast, this study features an understudied minority language Kam, and a group of so-called left-behind children in China growing up in a unique social-communicative environment. Fifty-five bilingual children aged 5-9 acquiring Kam as home language were assessed using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS MAIN). Twenty-three "two parents-left" children (mean age = 6;8, range: 5;0-9;2) remained in rural areas while both parents went to cities for employment, and they were raised by their grandparents. Thirty-two were "one parent-left" peers (mean age = 7;3, range: 5;0-9;3) who also resided in rural areas but were raised by one parent. Oral narrative texts were analysed for macrostructure based on story structure (SS), story complexity (SC) and internal state terms (IS). The study examined whether and how narrative production is predicted by internal factors such as chronological age and linguistic proficiency of a child and an external factor such as left-behind experience. Four measures were scored as outcome measures: SS, SC, IS type, IS token. Four measures were taken as predictors: chronological age, left-behind experience, scores in a lexical production task, and scores in a sentence repetition task tapping expressive morphosyntactic competence. Results showed that left-behind experience consistently predicted all four outcome measures, where the "two parents-left" children scored significantly lower than their "one parent-left" peers. Expressive vocabulary scores predicted three measures: SS, SC, and IS Token. Expressive morphosyntactic scores predicted SS and SC. Age, by contrast, did not predict any outcome measure. These findings suggested that being left-behind by both parents may be a negative prognostic indicator for the development and maintenance of heritage language abilities in ethnic minority children. We further discussed the conceptual significance of what it means for a child to be left-behind, by relating to more basic external factors in language development, including caregiver educational level, and amount of home language and literacy support by the caretakers.

A Sentence Repetition Task in Spanish language: a valid tool for early language assessment.

Sentence Repetition Tasks (SRT) have been widely used to assess early language abilities in different languages and populations. In addition, it has been proved that performance in SRTs serve as a clinical marker to detect language difficulties. However, most of the research has been conducted in English language and with children older than 4 years of age. Despite this scarcity, [1] developed a SRT for monolingual Spanish-speaking children between 2 and 4 years of age. Initial findings showed that it is a useful tool for discriminating children with different linguistic levels. In addition, the task showed concurrent validity with a nonword repetition task. In the current study we want to explore the predictive validity of this task. We conducted a longitudinal study including 20 monolingual Spanish-Speaking children who were tested twice, at 33 months of age and six months later. In addition to the SRT, participants completed a nonword repetition task [2] and the Spanish version of the Merrill-Palmer-R Developmental Scales [3]. showed strong and positive relationships between the different tests when first assessed. We also found strong and predictive relationships between the SRT at time 1 and SRT and the Merrill-Palmer-R at time 2. We conclude that the SRT developed [1] is a valid tool for examining early language abilities and its changes over time.

Identifying the Latent Profiles of Language Ability in 5- to 7-Year-Old Children

Objectives: Classifying children into two language ability groups, with and without language impairment, may underestimate the number of groups with distinct language ability patterns. In this study, we tried to classify the children based on their language performance. The purpose of this study was to identify the number and characteristics of latent language ability groups in Korean children. Methods: An unclassified sample of 147 Korean children aged 5 to 7 years participated in the study. Oral language skills in phonological (phonological awareness task), semantical (receptive vocabulary test), and syntactical (sentence repetition task) areas; language processing skills in processing capacity (non-word repetition task); and processing speed (rapid automatized naming task) were assessed. Latent profile analysis was conducted on the language measures. Results: Results indicated that a four-group model best represented the data, characterized by high performance in one group (15.7%), average skills in another group (65.8%), low processing speed in a third group (12.3%), and low grammaticality in a fourth group (6.2%). Conclusion: The latent profiles of language ability in Korean children seemed to be largely divided according to their level of language performance. However, in the group of children with low performance, the existence of different profiles was identified. This suggests that children with low performance may have difficulties learning language for two reasons: difficulties with either grammar or processing speed. Thus, assessing language abilities without testing both areas could potentially lead to misdiagnosis.

The Repetition of Relative Clauses in Mandarin Children with Developmental Language Disorder

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children, and they tend to make errors involving the relativizer DE and are more likely to produce Non-RC responses. Furthermore, the gap type of RC or the adjective’s position does not affect our participants’ recall of the test sentences. We conclude that the symmetric performance of our participants in the subject RC and object RC conditions is because the structural intervention occurs in object RCs, but the linear intervention counts more in subject RCs. The syntactic deficit approach better explained the difficulty experienced by children with DLD in RC repetition. Theoretically, this study demonstrates that the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis captures more characteristics of children with DLD in repeating RCs than previous representational theories.

Auditory Attention Ability under Dichotic Dual-Task Situation in Adults with Listening Difficulties

Introduction: Recent studies have reported poor cognition, such as attention and working memory, in adults with listening difficulties (LiD). However, they do not adequately describe the actual state of poor attention ability in adults with LiD. We examined the state of auditory attention in adults with and without LiD in tasks requiring multiple attention controls. Methods: Twenty-one adults who had normal hearing but complained about LiD encountered during everyday life and 22 healthy controls were included. We presented a target detection task using an odd-ball format for one ear and a sentence repetition task for the other ear. In the target detection task, participants listened to the 1,000-Hz tone served as the standard stimulus, while they had to accept a 2,000-Hz tone presented as the deviant stimulus. In the sentence repetition task, short sentences were presented. The stimuli presented to them were played on a personal computer at the most comfortable level. The participants heard these stimuli through headphones. They were required to press a key for standard stimuli in the target detection task and repeat what they heard immediately in the repetition task. We compared the response accuracy for each ear task between adults with and without LiD. Results: Our results showed that there were significant differences between the participant groups in the auditory dual-task under the dichotic listening situation. When examined individually, four adults with LiD had decreased scores in both the sentence repetition and target detection task, while the other nine participants showed a bias toward either task. Furthermore, the analysis of reaction time for pressing button revealed that the standard deviation of reaction time was extended in participants who scored poorly in either of the ear tasks. On the other hand, all adults without LiD were able to conduct the auditory dual-task exactly and promptly. Conclusion: The results suggest that adults with LiD have difficulties in appropriately allocating various cognitive abilities required for each task. We concluded that auditory attention is an important ability to conduct the auditory dual-task, and this is applicable for adults with LiD. Therefore, we believe that it is necessary to use auditory tests that require complex attentional abilities in listening, such as those required in daily life, to assess adults with LiD.

Speaking Rate, Immediate Memory, and Grammatical Processing in Prelingual Cochlear Implant Recipients

This study examined the extent to which prelingual cochlear implant (CI) users show a slowed speaking rate compared with typical-hearing (TH) talkers when repeating various speech stimuli and whether the slowed speech of CI users relates to their immediate verbal memory. Participants included 10 prelingually deaf teenagers who received CIs before the age of 5 years and 10 age-matched TH teenagers. Participants repeated nonword syllable strings, word strings, and center-embedded sentences, with conditions balanced for syllable length and metrical structure. Participants' digit span forward and backward scores were collected to measure immediate verbal memory. Speaking rate data were analyzed using a mixed-design, repeated-measures analysis of variance, and the relationships between speaking rate and digit spans were evaluated by Pearson correlation. Participants with CIs spoke more slowly than their TH peers during the sentence repetition task but not in the nonword string and word string repetition tasks. For the CI group, significant correlations emerged between speaking rate and digit span scores (both forward and backward) for the sentence repetition task but not for the nonword string or word string repetition task. For the TH group, no significant correlations were found. The findings indicate a relation between slowed speech production, reduced immediate verbal memory, and diminished language capabilities of prelingual CI users, particularly for syntactic processing. These results support theories claiming that immediate memory, including components of a central executive, influences the speaking rate of these talkers. Implications for therapies designed to increase speech fluency in CI recipients are discussed. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21644795.