Linda Cupples

Outcomes of early- and late-identified children at 3 years of age: findings from a prospective population-based study.

Objective: To address the question of whether, on a population level, early detection and amplification improve outcomes of children with hearing impairment. Design: All families of children who were born between 2002 and 2007, and who presented for hearing services below 3 years of age at Australian Hearing pediatric centers in New South Wales, Victoria, and Southern Queensland were invited to participate in a prospective study on outcomes. Children’s speech, language, functional, and social outcomes were assessed at 3 years of age, using a battery of age-appropriate tests. Demographic information relating to the child, family, and educational intervention was solicited through the use of custom-designed questionnaires. Audiological data were collected from the national database of Australian Hearing and records held at educational intervention agencies for children. Regression analysis was used to investigate the effects of each of 15 predictor variables, including age of amplification, on outcomes. Results: Four hundred and fifty-one children enrolled in the study, 56% of whom received their first hearing aid fitting before 6 months of age. On the basis of clinical records, 44 children (10%) were diagnosed with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder. There were 107 children (24%) reported to have additional disabilities. At 3 years of age, 317 children (70%) were hearing aid users and 134 children (30%) used cochlear implants. On the basis of parent reports, about 71% used an aural/oral mode of communication, and about 79% used English as the spoken language at home. Children’s performance scores on standardized tests administered at 3 years of age were used in a factor analysis to derive a global development factor score. On average, the global score of hearing-impaired children was more than 1 SD below the mean of normal-hearing children at the same age. Regression analysis revealed that five factors, including female gender, absence of additional disabilities, less severe hearing loss, higher maternal education, and (for children with cochlear implants) earlier age of switch-on were associated with better outcomes at the 5% significance level. Whereas the effect of age of hearing aid fitting on child outcomes was weak, a younger age at cochlear implant switch-on was significantly associated with better outcomes for children with cochlear implants at 3 years of age. Conclusions: Fifty-six percent of the 451 children were fitted with hearing aids before 6 months of age. At 3 years of age, 134 children used cochlear implants and the remaining children used hearing aids. On average, outcomes were well below population norms. Significant predictors of child outcomes include: presence/absence of additional disabilities, severity of hearing loss, gender, maternal education, together with age of switch-on for children with cochlear implants.

Lexical Expectations in Parsing Complement-Verb Sentences

Using the single-word self-paced reading task, three experiments investigated parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences containing complement verbs. The verbs differed in the likelihood with which they are typically followed by a direct object (NP-bias verbs) or a clausal complement (clausal-bias verbs). When the potential direct object was short, readers were “garden-pathed” after NP-bias verbs, but not after clausal-bias verbs. The pragmatic plausibility of the potential direct object also only influenced responses in sentences containing NP-bias verbs. The results suggest that lexical expectations may determine the initial structural assignment made by the reader in these sentences. It was argued that models of parsing should incorporate a role for lexical expectations at an early stage of syntactic decision-making.

The processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition: Typicality effects and orthographic correlates

Many studies that have examined reading at the single-word level have been restricted to the processing of monosyllabic stimuli, and, as a result, lexical stress has not been widely investigated. In the experiments reported here, we used disyllabic words and nonwords to investigate the processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found an effect of stress typicality in naming and lexical decision. Typically stressed words (trochaic nouns and iambic verbs) elicited fewer errors than atypically stressed words (iambic nouns and trochaic verbs). In Experiment 3, we carried out an analysis of 340 word endings and found clear orthographic correlates of both grammatical category and lexical stress in word endings. In Experiment 4, we demonstrated that readers are sensitive to these cues in their processing of nonwords during two tasks: sentence construction and stress assignment. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to psycholinguistic models of single-word reading.

A Semantic Subsystem of Visual Attributes

Abstract We propose that the many different forms of selective semantic impairment that have been reported over the past 20 years may be classified into three general classes: semantic-category selective, modality-of-input selective, and semantic-attribute selective. Particular patients may exhibit more than one form of selectivity, i.e. there can be doubly and perhaps even triply selective semantic impairments. We then describe a patient with a singly selective semantic impairment of a form not previously described: he was unable to access visual semantic attributes in semantic memory, whereas he could access semantic attributes relevant to other sensory modalities, and could also access non-perceptual semantic attributes. This pattern of results was independent both of modality of input and of semantic category of probed item. We infer from these data the existence of a semantic subsystem specific to the storage of information about visual attributes of animate and inanimate objects. An ERP study of sem...

Parents and children together (PACT): a collaborative approach to phonological therapy

Developmental phonological disorders are a group of developmental languagelearning disorders of unknown aetiology, occurring at a phonological level, andmanifested in the use of abnormal speech patterns, by children, impairing theirgeneral intelligibility. This is one of a series of papers arising from an e

When task demands induce asyntactic' comprehension: a study of sentence interpretation in aphasia

Abstract We investigated sentence processing in two aphasic patients who appeared to have asyntactic comprehension when tested using sentence-picture matching. It was found that neither patient could handle the nonlinguistic cognitive demands of the original task: Specifically, processing two semantically incongruous inputs (sentence plus reverse-role picture) overloaded working memory. Their ability to deal with semantic conflict in the absence of multiple inputs was examined in an interleaved meaning-classification/actor-identification task. The patients rarely accepted misordered sentences like The cheese ate the muse as plausible, but performed poorly when asked to identify the “actors” in such sentences, often selecting the more likely alternative (the mouse). We concluded from this dissociation between tasks that semantic conflict only overtaxed their limited processing capacity when the conflicting options were explicitly available and directly relevant to the decision process. There was, therefore...

Effects of stress typicality during spoken word recognition by native and nonnative speakers of English: evidence from onset gating.

Onset gating was used to investigate the effects of stress typicality during the processing of disyllabic nouns and verbs by 34 native and 36 nonnative speakers of English. We utilized 50-msec increments and included two conditions. In the silenced condition, only word onsets were presented (the participants had no information about the duration or stress pattern of the entire word). In the filtered condition, word onsets were presented with a low-pass filtered version of the remainder of the word (this type of filtering provides duration and stress information in the absence of phonemic information). The results demonstrated significant effects of stress typicality in both groups of speakers. Typically stressed trochaic nouns and iambic verbs exhibited advantaged processing, as compared with atypically stressed iambic nouns and trochaic verbs. There was no significant effect of presentation condition (silenced or filtered). The results are discussed in light of recent research in which the effects of lexical stress during spoken word recognition have been investigated.

The role of families in optimizing phonological therapy outcomes

Developed in Australia, Parents and Children Together (PACT) is a broad-based, family-centred phonological therapy. It is a treatment approach for developmental phonological disorders in the course of whose implementation speech and language therapists enlist the active participation of parents and significant others. It requires family members to learn technical information and develop novel skills to use, with professional guidance, in relation to their own child and his or her specific speech clarity issues. In this paper we review the family education and “homework’ aspects of PACT and explore, with brief case illustrations, the participation of 13 families involved in its administration.

Effects of Stress Typicality During Speeded Grammatical Classification

The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the influence of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification of disyllabic English words by native and non-native speakers. Trochaic nouns and iambic verbs were considered to be typically stressed, whereas iambic nouns and trochaic verbs were considered to be atypically stressed. Experiments 1a and 2a showed that while native speakers classified typically stressed words more quickly and more accurately than atypically stressed words during reading, there were no overall effects during classification of spoken stimuli. However, a subgroup of native speaker swith high error rates did show a significant effect during classification of spoken stimuli. Experiments 1bb and 2b showed that non-native speakers classified typically stressed words more quickly and more accurately than atypically stressed words during reading. Typically stressed words were classified more accurately than atypically stressed words when the stimuli were spoken. Importantly, there was a significant relationship between error rates, vocabulary size and thes size of the stress typicality effect in each experiment. We conclude that participants use information about lexical stress to help them distinguish between disyllabic nouns and verbs during speeded grammatical classification. This is especially so for individuals with a limited vocabulary who lack other knowledge(e.g., semantic knowledge) about the differences between these grammatical categories.

Effects of Targeted Reading Instruction on Phonological Awareness and Phonic Decoding in Children with Down Syndrome

This research evaluated the effectiveness of reading instruction targeting oral reading and phonological awareness for children with Down syndrome (affecting chromosome 21). The participants were 7 children ranging in age from 2 years, 11 months to 10 years, 8 months. Each child acted as his/her own control, with assessments of language, cognition, phonological awareness, word and short-passage comprehension, and oral reading ability conducted on four occasions (initially, preintervention, postintervention and delayed postintervention) over approximately a 12-month period. The intervention was conducted over 10 weekly sessions and involved individual instruction. The postintervention assessment results provided evidence that phonic reading instruction was generally effective in improving reading skills and phonological awareness of children with Down syndrome.