Recent evidence suggests that the musical rhythm of a particular culture may parallel the speech rhythm of that culture's language (Patel, A. D., & Daniele, J. R. (2003). "An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music." "Cognition, 87," B35-B45). The present experiments aimed to determine whether listeners actually perceive such rhythmic…

It has been claimed that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a limited ability to process perceptual stimuli in reference to the contextual information of the percept. Such a connection between a nonholistic processing style and behavioral traits associated with ASD is thought to exist also within the neurotypical population albeit…

One of the central themes in the study of language acquisition is the gap between the linguistic knowledge that learners demonstrate, and the apparent inadequacy of linguistic input to support induction of this knowledge. One of the first linguistic abilities in the course of development to exemplify this problem is in speech perception:…

Motion information available to different sensory modalities can interact at both perceptual and post-perceptual (i.e., decisional) stages of processing. However, to date, researchers have only been able to demonstrate the influence of one of these components at any given time, hence the relationship between them remains uncertain. We addressed…

We explore in this study how infants may derive phonetic categories from adult input that are highly variable. Neural networks in the form of self-organizing maps (SOMs; Kohonen, 1989, 1995) were used to simulate unsupervised learning of Mandarin tones. In Simulation 1, we trained the SOMs with syllable-sized continuous F[subscript 0] contours,…

Negative priming refers to slowed down reactions when the distractor on one trial becomes the target on the next. Following two popular accounts, the effect might be due either to inhibitory processes associated with the frontal cortex, or to an ambiguity in the retrieval of episodic information. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to…

The McGurk effect is usually presented as an example of fast, automatic, multisensory integration. We report a series of experiments designed to directly assess these claims. We used a syllabic version of the "speeded classification" paradigm, whereby response latencies to the first (target) syllable of spoken word-like stimuli are slowed down…