Background and aims: Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but…

Learning new information constitutes a fundamental part of children's school years. Recently, studies have found beneficial effects of emotion on learning and memory. Here, we specifically examined the effect of positive emotional prosody on content learning in two groups of Swedish school children (ages 8-10 and 11-13 years). The participants…

Purpose: Maturation of the ability to recognize target speech in the presence of a two-talker speech masker extends into early adolescence. This study evaluated whether children benefit from differences in fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) contour depth between the target and masker speech, a cue that has been shown to improve recognition in…

F0 contours convey multiple types of information, including lexical and post-lexical meanings, as well as affective and socio-indexical indicators. This dissertation investigates the interaction between lexical tone and sentence-level intonation in Thai, focusing on how sentence position influences the acoustic realization and perceptual…

In Korean language, questions containing ambiguous wh-words may be interpreted as either wh-questions or yes-no questions. This study investigated 43 Korean three-year-olds' ability to disambiguate eight indeterminate questions using prosodic and visual cues. The intonation of each question provided a cue as to whether it should be interpreted as…

Purpose: Congenital deafness not only delays auditory development but also hampers the ability to perceive nonspeech and speech signals. This study aimed to use auditory event-related potentials to explore the mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, negative wave (Nc), and late discriminative negativity (LDN) components in children with and without…

Fetal hearing experiences shape the linguistic and musical preferences of neonates. From the very first moment after birth, newborns prefer their native language, recognize their mother's voice, and show a greater responsiveness to lullabies presented during pregnancy. Yet, the neural underpinnings of this experience inducing plasticity have…

Purpose: In the context of music and speech perception, this study aimed to assess the effect of variation in one of two auditory attributes--pitch contour and timbre--on the perception of the other in prelingually deafened young cochlear implant (CI) users, and the relationship between pitch contour perception and two cognitive functions of…

Purpose: The Pitch Patterns Test (PPT) and the Duration Patterns Test (DPT) are clinical auditory processing tests that evaluate temporal patterning skills based on pitch (PPT) or duration (DPT) aspects of sound. Although temporal patterning tests are categorized under the temporal processing domain, successful performance on the PPT also relies…

Purpose: This study details the intended and unintended consequences of pitch shifting with the commercially available Eventide Eclipse. Method: Ten vocally healthy participants (M = 22.0 years; 6 cisgender females, 4 cisgender males) produced a sustained /?/, creating an input signal. This input signal was processed in near real time by the…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine how aging and modifications of critical acoustic parameters may affect the perception of whispered speech as a degraded signal. Method: Forty Mandarin-speaking adults were included in the study. Part 1 of the study compared the perception of Mandarin lexical tones, vowels, and syllables in older and younger…

Children with autism often show atypical brain lateralization for speech and language processing, however, it is unclear what linguistic component contributes to this phenomenon. Here we measured event-related potential (ERP) responses in 21 school-age autistic children and 25 age-matched neurotypical (NT) peers during listening to word-level…

Purpose: In this study, we investigated how the direction and timing of a perturbation in voice pitch auditory feedback during phrasal production modulated the magnitude and latency of the pitch-shift reflex as well as the scaling of acoustic production of anticipatory intonation targets for phrasal prominence and boundary. Method: Brief pitch…

Purpose: Previous studies have demonstrated that tone identification can be facilitated when auditory tones are integrated with visual information that depicts the pitch contours of the auditory tones (hereafter, visual effect). This study investigates this visual effect in combined visual-auditory integration with high- and low-variability speech…

Recent findings have revealed that very preterm neonates already show the typical brain responses to place of articulation changes in stop consonants, but data on their sensitivity to other types of phonetic changes remain scarce. Here, we examined the impact of 7-8 weeks of extra-uterine life on the automatic processing of syllables in 20 healthy…