Recent work on event perception suggests that perceptual processing increases when events change. An important question is how such changes influence the way other information is processed, particularly during dual-task performance. In this study, participants monitored a long series of distractor items for an occasional target as they…

Several studies have shown that handedness has an impact on visual spatial abilities. Here we investigated the effect of laterality on auditory space perception. Participants (33 right-handers, 20 left-handers) completed two tasks of sound localization. In a dark, anechoic, and sound-proof room, sound stimuli (broadband noise) were presented via…

Sentence position and word length have been claimed to contribute to the perceptual salience of words. The perceptual salience of words in turn is said to predict L2 developmental sequences. Data for such claims come from sentence repetition tasks that required perceptual re-encoding of input and that did not control for focal accent. We used a…

This project investigates whether learners of Russian perceive the sociocultural weight of the two personal pronouns for "you", "ty" (informal/intimate) and "vy" (formal/polite) when they listen to native speech. Research on address pronoun use shows it to be an important sociocultural variable and, while there is some general consistency in use,…

This study investigated the relationship between speech perception, phonological processing and reading skills among school-aged children classified as "skilled" and "less skilled" readers based on their ability to read words, decode non-words, and comprehend short passages. Three speech perception tasks involving categorization of speech continua…

We explore the relationships between basic auditory processing, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and word reading in a sample of 95 children, 55 typically developing children, and 40 children with low IQ. All children received nonspeech auditory processing tasks, phonological processing and literacy measures, and a receptive vocabulary task.…

This study explored the second language perceptual accuracy of Japanese geminates (moraic units) by English-speaking learners at three proficiency levels: beginner (28), low-intermediate (42), and advanced (15). Stimuli included singleton and geminate /t/, /k/, /s/ followed by /a/ or /u/ produced by a native speaker in isolated words and carrier…

Three picture-word interference (PWI) experiments assessed the extent to which embedded subset words are activated during the identification of spoken superset words (e.g., "bone" in "trombone"). Participants named aloud pictures (e.g., "brain") while spoken distractors were presented. In the critical condition,…

The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown…

Four experiments examined transfer of noncorresponding spatial stimulus-response associations to an auditory Simon task for which stimulus location was irrelevant. Experiment 1 established that, for a horizontal auditory Simon task, transfer of spatial associations occurs after 300 trials of practice with an incompatible mapping of auditory …

Several recent experiments indicate that, when learning words, children are not as sensitive to phonemic differences (e.g., /d/ vs. /t/) as they are in discrimination tasks [Pater, J., Stager, C. L., & Werker, J. F. (2004). "The perceptual acquisition of phonological contrasts." "Language," 80, 384-402; Stager, C. L., & Werker, J. F. (1997).…

This study investigated whether task instructions affect sound-isolation performance. The effects of phoneme class and phoneme position were also assessed. Two hundred Dutch kindergartners were presented with a free-sound-isolation task and its constrained counterparts: an initial-, a middle-, and a final-sound-isolation task. All tasks contained…

The phenomenon of attentional capture by a unique yet irrelevant singleton distractor has typically been studied in visual search. In this article, the authors examine whether a similar phenomenon occurs in the auditory domain. Participants searched sequences of sounds for targets defined by frequency, intensity, or duration. The presence of a…

In a cross-modal matching task, participants were asked to match visual and auditory displays of speech based on the identity of the speaker. The present investigation used this task with acoustically transformed speech to examine the properties of sound that can convey cross-modal information. Word recognition performance was also measured under…

To test the hypothesis that level of neural complexity explain the relative level of performance and brain activity in autistic individuals, available behavioural, ERP and imaging findings related to the perception of increasingly complex auditory material under various processing tasks in autism were reviewed. Tasks involving simple material…