Purpose: Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) are at increased risk for neurocognitive delays, which can have cascading effects on development. Associations between neurocognition and the content of parental language—specifically the use of mental state vocabulary—have been observed in typically hearing (TH) children. This study investigated the role of parental use of mental state language (e.g., vocabulary related to thought processes, desires, and emotions) in explaining variability in neurocognition in children who are D/HH. Method: Dyads of 62 TH and 69 D/HH children who wear hearing aids or cochlear implants (ages 3–8 years) and their primary parent were videorecorded during a 20-min play session. Specific mental state words used by parents were extracted. Child neurocognition (specifically, inhibitory control) was assessed using norm-referenced measures. Results: Parent use of mental state language predicted child inhibitory control differentially based on hearing status, with a significant relation in the D/HH but not the TH group. Mental state vocabulary related to cognition (e.g., “think,” “know”), but not to desire (e.g., “want,” “like”) or emotion (e.g., “feel,” “frustrated”), predicted child inhibitory control in the D/HH group. Finally, there was a significant relation between the use of first person, but not second or third person, mental state verbs (e.g., “I think”) and child inhibitory control. Conclusions: Parental use of cognitive mental state vocabulary models language around thought processes, and parents' use of first-person referents models “self-talk.” Modeling of these linguistic forms is likely foundational for developing self-regulation. Children who are D/HH often experience reduced auditory access and/or language delays and thus rely on high-quality parental language input for longer periods of development than their TH peers. Continued support from interventionists is indicated to coach parents to be high-quality models of more abstract, decontextualized language, supporting complex language development and inhibitory control in children who are D/HH.

Online testing for behavioral research has become an increasingly used tool. Although more researchers have been using online data collection methods, few studies have assessed the replicability of findings for speech intelligibility tasks. Here we assess intelligibility in quiet and two noise-added conditions for several different accents of English (Midland American, Standard Southern British, Scottish, German-accented, Mandarin-accented, Japanese-accented, and Hindi-English bilingual). Participants were tested in person at a museum-based laboratory and online. Results showed little to no difference between the two settings for the easier noise condition and in quiet, but large performance differences in the most difficult noise condition with an advantage for the participants tested online. Technology-based variables did not appear to drive the setting effect, but experimenter presence may have influenced response strategy for the in-person group and differences in demographics could have provided advantages for the online group. Additional research should continue to investigate how setting, demographic factors, experimenter presence, and motivational factors interact to determine performance in speech perception experiments.

Non-native accent ratings are related to segmental and holistic acoustic deviations from listeners’ home accents (Bartelds et al., 2020). This study builds on prior work by including both non-ambient native and nonnative accents, using a different perceptual task in which listeners ranked talkers based on their perceived distance from Standard American English, and employing analyses that account for collinearity between distance metrics. Listeners (n = 52) completed two rankings where all talkers produced the same sentence and one where each talker produced a unique sentence. Phonemic and holistic acoustic distances between the nine non-ambient accents and Midland American English were quantified using Levenshtein distances and dynamic time warping (DTW), respectively. Results from separate linear mixed effects models showed that both DTW and Levenshtein distances contributed to perceptual distance. Sentence and its interaction with DTW/Levenshtein distance were not significant. The model predicting perceptual rankings from DTW was a better fitting model than the model with Levenshtein distances. Because DTW captures both segmental and suprasegmental distance, it may better predict listeners’ similarity judgements among English varieties than a metric only capturing phonemic distance. [Funded by the National Science Foundation (1941691; 1941662) and The Ohio State University Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences.]

Objectives: To examine the interaction between child temperament and caregiver linguistic input (i.e., syntactic complexity and lexical diversity) on receptive language in children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). Design: Families of 59 DHH children (M age = 5.66 years) using spoken language for communication participated in this cross-sectional study. Caregivers completed the Child Behavior Questionnaire—Short Form, which measured child temperament across three established factors (i.e., effortful control, negative affectivity, surgency-extraversion) and participated with their child in a semi-structured, dyadic play interaction that occurred during a home visit. Caregivers’ language during the play interaction was quantified based on lexical diversity and syntactic complexity. Children also completed norm-referenced receptive language measures (i.e., Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language-2, age-appropriate Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals) during the home visit that were combined into a composite measure of child receptive language. Results: When caregivers used lower to moderate levels of lexical diversity, child effortful control was positively related to child receptive language. However, when caregivers used higher levels of lexical diversity, child effortful control and child receptive language were not related to each other. Conclusions: Family environments rich in caregiver lexical input to children might provide a protective influence on DHH child language outcomes by helping to ensure DHH children with varying self-regulatory abilities achieve better spoken language comprehension. These findings highlight the importance of encouraging caregivers to provide rich and stimulating language-learning environments for DHH children.