Purpose: This study investigated whether sensory inhibition in children may be associated with speech perception-in-noise performance. Additionally, gating networks associated with sensory inhibition were identified via standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA), and the detectability of the cortical auditory evoked…

Purpose: Amplitude modulations (AMs) are important for speech intelligibility, and deficits in speech intelligibility are a leading source of impairment in childhood listening difficulties (LiD). The present study aimed to explore the relationships between AM perception and speech-in-noise (SiN) comprehension in children and to determine whether…

Auditory selective attention forms an important foundation of children's learning by enabling the prioritisation and encoding of relevant stimuli. It may also influence reading development, which relies on metalinguistic skills including the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. Reports of attentional impairments and speech…

Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine if and how the subcortical neural representation of pitch cues in listeners with normal hearing is affected by systematic manipulation of vocoder parameters. Method: This study assessed the effects of temporal envelope cutoff frequency (50 and 500 Hz), number of channels (1-32), and carrier…

Purpose: Speech perception in noise (SPiN) varies widely in individuals with normal hearing, which may be attributed to factors that are not reflected in the audiogram, such as inhibition. However, inhibition is involved at both sensory and cognitive stages of auditory perception, and while inhibition at the cognitive level has been shown to be a…

Purpose: Background noise has been categorized as energetic masking due to spectrotemporal overlap of the target and masker on the auditory periphery or informational masking due to cognitive-level interference from relevant content such as speech. The effects of masking on cortical and sensory auditory processing can be objectively studied with…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether speech perception would reflect small latency changes in subcortical speech representation. Method: Twelve native Japanese listeners participated in the experiment. Those listeners participated in speech identification task and auditory brainstem response (ABR) measurement using…

Purpose: We recently demonstrated that individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) respond differentially to specific altered auditory feedback parameters during speech production. Participants with PD respond more robustly to pitch and less robustly to formant manipulations compared to control participants. In this study, we investigated whether…

Purpose: A central question about auditory perception concerns how acoustic information is represented at different stages of processing. The auditory brainstem response (ABR) provides a potentially useful index of the earliest stages of this process. However, it is unclear how basic acoustic characteristics (e.g., differences in tones spanning a…

Looking at hearing loss through the WHO-ICD model for disability reveals that auditory interventions do not necessarily address all of the components of auditory disability. Auditory training has been proposed as a solution to address activity-level deficits. The purpose of this study was to examine structure- and activity-level changes as the…

Purpose: Although acquisition of Chinese lexical tones by second language (L2) learners has been intensively investigated, very few studies focused on categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones by highly proficient L2 learners. This study was designed to address this issue with behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Method: Behavioral…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method: Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic…

This work examines the link between low-level cortical acoustic processing and higher-level cortical phonemic processing. Specifically, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, it looks at 1) whether or not the vowels [alpha] and [i] are distinguishable in regions of interest defined by the first two resonant frequencies (formants) of those…

Purpose: As pulse rate increases beyond a few hundred Hertz, younger normal-hearing (NH) participants' ability to encode temporal information in band-limited acoustic pulse trains decreases, demonstrating a rate limitation in processing rapid temporal information. Rate discrimination abilities, however, have yet to be investigated in older NH…

Purpose: The intelligibility of an accent strongly depends on the specific talker-listener pairing. To explore the causes of this phenomenon, we investigated the relationship between acoustic-phonetic similarity and accent intelligibility across native (1st language) and nonnative (2nd language) talker-listener pairings. We also used online…