The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…

Joint engagement--the sharing of events during social interactions--is an important context for early learning. To date, sharing topics that are only heard has not been systematically documented. To describe the development of auditory joint engagement, 48 child-parent dyads were observed 5 times from 12 to 30 months during seminaturalistic play.…

Purpose: As a class, fricatives are more "resistant" to consonant-vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /[voiceless dental fricative], s, [voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech…

Purpose: The aim of this longitudinal study was to describe developmental courses of childhood dysarthria against the background of typical speech motor development by collecting auditory-perceptual data. Method: Fourteen children (four girls, 10 boys; 5;1-8;4 [years;months] at Time 1) with neurological conditions (CNC) and 14 typically developing…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate developmental and noise-induced changes in central auditory processing indexed by event-related potentials in typically developing children. Method: P1, N2, and N4 responses as well as mismatch negativities (MMNs) were recorded for standard syllables and consonants, frequency, intensity, vowel, and…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Binding is key in multisensory perception. This study investigated the audio-visual (A-V) temporal binding window in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children (total N = 120). Children watched a person uttering a syllable whose auditory and visual components were either temporally synchronized or desynchronized by 366, 500, or 666 ms. They were asked…

Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were…

Being able to see a talking face confers a considerable advantage for speech perception in adulthood. However, behavioural data currently suggest that children fail to make full use of these available visual speech cues until age 8 or 9. This is particularly surprising given the potential utility of multiple informational cues during language…

This study investigated neurodevelopmental changes in sound processing by recording mismatch negativity (MMN) in response to various degrees of sound complexity in 18 mildly to moderately autistic versus 15 healthy boys aged between 6 and 15 years. Autistic boys presented with lower IQ and poor performance on a range of executive and social…

In human adults, visual dominance emerges in several multisensory tasks. In children, auditory dominance has been reported up to 4 years of age. To establish when sensory dominance changes during development, 41 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were tested on the Colavita task (Experiment 1) and 32 children (6-7, 9-10, and 11-12 years) were…

Multitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation…

Purpose: To establish the age at which children can complete tests of spatial listening and to measure the normative relationship between age and performance. Method: Fifty-six normal-hearing children, ages 1.5-7.9 years, attempted tests of the ability to discriminate a sound source on the left from one on the right, to localize a source, to track…

The development of executive functions in the preschool years is not fully understood. Although there exists a large body of research investigating the maturation of executive functioning in school-aged children, little is known about the emergence of such skills, in particular inhibition, among preschool-aged children. Understanding developmental…

Childhood research has long shared a bio-political terrain with state agencies in which children figure primarily as "human futures". In the 20th century bio-social dualism helped to make that terrain navigable by researchers, but, as life processes increasingly become key sites of bio-political action, bio-social dualism is becoming…