The present study examined the phonological memory capacity, rate of articulation, phonological-encoding, and perceptual-processing abilities of 13 well-defined, specifically language-impaired (SLI) children and 13 younger, language-matched normal (NL) children. The results of a nonsense word repetition task showed that SLI children repeated significantly fewer multisyllabic nonsense words than their NL peers. However, SLI and NL children were found to have comparable articulation rates, even when producing the longest nonsense word stimuli. Both SLI and NL children showed sensitivity to the phonological similarity effect, indicating that SLI children had intact phonological-encoding abilities. The results of a nonsense word discrimination task revealed that SLI children had greater difficulty perceptually processing 4-syllable nonsense words. Taken together, these findings were interpreted to be consistent with Gathercole and Baddeley's (1990) claim that SLI children have reduced phonological storage capacity. However, the capacity deficit account may require revision to include the possibility that the phonological storage deficit of some SLI children may have a perceptual basis (i.e., difficulty with processes related to item identification).

To evaluate the effect of extended adult exposure to authentic spoken English on the perceptual mastery of English /r/ and /l/, we tested 12 native speakers of English (A), 12 experienced Japanese (EJ) who had spent 12 or more years in the United States, and 12 less experienced Japanese (LJ) who had spent less than one year in the United States. The tests included the forced-choice identification of naturally produced /r/s and /1/s and the labeling of word-initial synthetic tokens that varied F2 and F3 to form an /r/-/l/-/w/ continuum. The F.Js’ mean performance in both tasks was closer to that of the As than the LJs, but nonetheless fell short. Extended exposure may improve /r/-/l/ identification accuracy; it does not ensure perfect perceptual mastery.

Toddlers in the lowest tenth percentile for lexical production, based on parental report (late talkers), were compared with age- and language-matched controls on measures of phonetic complexity, lexical development, and grammatical complexity. Late talkers were placed in the pre-meaningful speech group if they produced fewer than 10 different words or in the meaningful speech group if they produced more than 10 different words in a spontaneous language sample. Late talkers who had entered the meaningful speech stage scored higher than those who had not on most of the measures of phonology, lexical, and grammatical complexity in intelligible speech, but not on measures of phonological development in babble. These results are compatible with other studies that found an overlap between phonology, lexicon, and grammar, as well as with those that suggested the importance of true consonant production for lexical development.

Native speakers of Mandarin who learn English as a second language (L2) frequently misidentify unreleased tokens of /t/ and /d/ in the final position of English words. The purpose of this study was to evaluate two training methods that might be used to increase Mandarin adults’ accuracy in identifying such stops. Subjects were assigned to receive training using a two-alternative forced-choice procedure or a categorical same/different discrimination procedure. Small but significant increases in the percentage of correct identifications of /t/ and /d/ tokens were obtained for both groups of native Mandarin subjects, although their gains did not differ significantly. These gains were still evident for both groups 2 months after completing the training. The effect of training for both groups generalized to words that were not used in training. Contrary to the hypothesis that identification training promotes more robust long-term memory representations than same/different training, the magnitude of generalization observed for the two groups did not differ significantly. However, subjects seemed to maintain the effects of the same/different training better than the effects of the identification training. Taken together, the results obtained here challenge the view that identification training is superior to same/different training as a means for training novel phonetic contrasts.