Classical views of speech perception argue that the static and dynamic characteristics of spectral energy peaks (formants) are the acoustic features that underpin phoneme recognition. Here we use representations where the amplitude modulations of sub-band filtered speech are described, precisely, in terms of co-sinusoidal pulses. These pulses are…

The current study examined auditory processing deficits in dyslexia using a dichotic pitch stimulus and functional MRI. Cortical activation by the dichotic pitch task occurred in bilateral Heschl's gyri, right planum temporale, and right superior temporal sulcus. Adolescents with dyslexia, relative to age-matched controls, illustrated greater…

Visual speech inputs can enhance auditory speech information, particularly in noisy or degraded conditions. The natural statistics of audiovisual speech highlight the temporal correspondence between visual and auditory prosody, with lip, jaw, cheek and head movements conveying information about the speech envelope. Low-frequency spatial and…

Speech sounds can be classified on the basis of their underlying articulators or on the basis of the acoustic characteristics resulting from particular articulatory positions. Research in speech perception suggests that distinctive features are based on both articulatory and acoustic information. In recent years, neuroelectric and neuromagnetic…

Phonation is a fundamental feature of human communication. Control of phonation in the context of speech-language disturbances has traditionally been considered a characteristic of lesions to subcortical structures and pathways. Evidence suggests however, that cortical lesions may also implicate phonation. We carried out acoustic and perceptual…

Listeners perceive speech sounds relative to context. Contextual influences might differ over hemispheres if different types of auditory processing are lateralized. Hemispheric differences in contextual influences on vowel perception were investigated by presenting speech targets and both speech and non-speech contexts to listeners' right or left…

Central nervous networks, be they a part of the human brain or a group of neurons in a snail, may be designed to produce distinct patterns of movement. Central pattern generators can account for the development and production of normal vocal signals without auditory feedback in non-songbirds. Songbirds need auditory feedback to develop and…

Speech production is inextricably linked to speech perception, yet they are usually investigated in isolation. In this study, we employed a verbal-repetition task to identify the neural substrates of speech processing with two ends active simultaneously using functional MRI. Subjects verbally repeated auditory stimuli containing an ambiguous vowel…

For children, learning often occurs in the presence of background noise. As such, there is growing desire to improve a child's access to a target signal in noise. Given adult musicians' perceptual and neural speech-in-noise enhancements, we asked whether similar effects are present in musically-trained children. We assessed the perception and…

Using functional MRI, we investigated whether auditory processing of both speech and meaningful non-linguistic environmental sounds in superior and middle temporal cortex relies on a complex and spatially distributed neural system. We found that evidence for spatially distributed processing of speech and environmental sounds in a substantial…

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech…

Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 10) to test pre-attentive speech discrimination in two language contexts. ERPs were recorded while participants silently read magazines in English or Spanish. Two speech contrast conditions were recorded in each language context. In the "phonemic in English"…

This chapter briefly reviews what is known-and what remains to be understood--about Grey parrot vocal learning. I review Greys' physical capacities--issues of auditory perception and production--then discuss how these capacities are used in vocal learning and can be recruited for referential communication with humans. I discuss cross-species…

The present study investigated whether the neural correlates for auditory feedback control of vocal pitch can be shaped by tone language experience. Event-related potentials (P2/N1) were recorded from adult native speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese who heard their voice auditory feedback shifted in pitch by -50, -100, -200, or -500 cents when they…

Dysarthria following surgical resection of childhood posterior fossa tumour (PFT) is most commonly documented in a select group of participants with mutism in the acute recovery phase, thus limiting knowledge of post-operative prognosis for this population of children as a whole. Here we report on the speech characteristics of 13 cases seen…