Purpose: This study aimed to investigate infants' neural responses to changes in emotional prosody in spoken words. The focus was on understanding developmental changes and potential sex differences, aspects that were not consistently observed in previous behavioral studies. Method: A modified multifeature oddball paradigm was used with emotional…

Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction…

Purpose: Degraded temporal processing associated with aging may be a contributing factor to older adults' hearing difficulties, especially in adverse listening environments. This degraded processing may affect the ability to distinguish between words based on temporal duration cues. The current study investigates the effects of aging and hearing…

Reading is an essential skill for daily life and academic success. According to the connectionist model of reading, word recognition involves orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, as well as the interactions among them. Language skill such as phonological processing, develops earlier than reading acquisition, and thus likely serves…

School-aged and adolescent children continue to demonstrate improvements in how they integrate and comprehend real-time, auditory language over this developmental time period, which can have important implications for academic and social success. To better understand developmental changes in the neural processes engaged during language…

Although hearing often declines with age, prior research has shown that older adults may benefit from multisensory input to a greater extent when compared to younger adults, a concept known as inverse effectiveness. While there is behavioral evidence in support of this phenomenon, less is known about its neural basis. The present functional MRI…

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…

Seeing articulatory gestures enhances speech perception. Perception of auditory speech can even be changed by incongruent visual gestures, which is known as the McGurk effect (e.g., dubbing a voice saying /mi/ onto a face articulating /ni/, observers often hear /ni/). In children, the McGurk effect is weaker than in adults, but no previous…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate how deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the caudal zona incerta (cZi) affects speech intelligibility in persons with essential tremor. Method: Thirty-five participants were evaluated: off stimulation, on chronic stimulation optimized to alleviate tremor, and during unilateral stimulation at increasing…

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…

Successful spoken language comprehension depends upon both sensory and cognitive processing. Since older adults often experience declines in one or both of these domains, and perform worse on some language processing tasks than younger listeners, an important question is how declines to both auditory perception and cognitive abilities affect…

Infants' speech perception abilities change through the first year of life, from broad sensitivity to a wide range of speech contrasts to becoming more finely attuned to their native language. What remains unclear, however, is how this perceptual change relates to brain responses to native language contrasts in terms of the functional…

The present review summarizes historic and recent research which has investigated the role of the corpus callosum in dichotic processing within the context of audiology. Examination of performance by certain clinical groups, including split brain patients, multiple sclerosis cases, and other types of neurological lesions is included. Maturational,…

Dichotic listening test (DL) is an important tool to disclose speech dominance in healthy subjects and in clinical cases. The aim of this study was to probe if focal epilepsy in children reveals a corresponding suppression of the ear reports contralateral to seizure onset site. Thus, 15 children and adolescents with clinically and…

Using electroencephalographic recordings (EEG), we assessed differences in oscillatory cortical activity during auditory-oddball performance between children aged 9-13 years, younger adults, and older adults. From childhood to old age, phase synchronization increased within and between electrodes, whereas whole power and evoked power decreased. We…