The development of phonemic categorization in children aged 6–12

Effects of contextual support on preschoolers’ accented speech comprehension

“…These findings concur with other research suggesting that children are less adept than adults at comprehending speech in ideal (Hazan & Barrett, 2000;Ohde & Haley, PRESCHOOL ACCENT COMPREHENSION 1997) and non-ideal listening conditions (Fallon et al, 2000(Fallon et al, , 2002. Findings of non-adultlike accent comprehension in young children are also consistent with accounts of protracted perceptual development (e.g.…”

Impairments in speech and nonspeech sound categorization in children with dyslexia are driven by temporal processing difficulties

“…At the nonspeech level, this is in line with (1) physiological animal studies showing that neural coding for temporal aspects of the stimulus reaches maturity later than neural coding for frequency selectivity (Eggermont, 1996), and with (2) behavioral auditory studies in humans providing evidence for a more prolonged development of the sensitivity for temporal than for nontemporal auditory cues (Hartley, Wright, Hogan, & Moore, 2000), even after accounting for the effect of procedure-related skills (Dawes & Bishop, 2008). At the speech level, it coincides with behavioral speech perception studies demonstrating that the identification of stop consonants is not yet mature by the age of 11 (Hazan & Barrett, 2000;Johnson, 2000;Krause, 1982;Simon & Fourcin, 1978;Medina, Hoonhorst, Bogliotti, & Serniclaes, 2010), whereas the identification of vowels does only slightly, though not significantly, improves towards adolescence (Pursell, Swanson, Hedrick, & Nabelek, 2002;Ohde, Haley, & McMahon, 1996;Johnson, 2000, but see Walley and Flege, 1999). Further elaboration on this topic is needed, but the indication that perception of sounds with temporal versus nontemporal cues follows different maturational trajectories in both normal and dyslexic readers, may have practical implications with regard to auditory temporal training programs.…”

Issues in human auditory development

“…Nonetheless, Hazan and Barrett (2000) have reported that children as old as 12 years of age are less consistent than adults in their identification of consonants. On average, children place their speech category boundaries in the same location as adults do, and changes in phonetic context have similar effects on the location of those boundaries.…”

“…For example, Hazan and Barrett (2000) found that children were more consistent in identification when multiple cues were available compared to when only a single cue was available suggesting that children lack the flexibility to use whatever cue was available. Nittrouer et al (2000) came to a similar conclusion in a study of 5-and 7-year-old children, and Johnson's (2000) observation that even 15-year-olds performed more poorly than adults in speech identification in the presence of noise or reverberation also is consistent with this idea.…”