Word identification accuracy is modulated by many factors including linguistic characteristics of words (frequent vs. infrequent), listening environment (noisy vs. quiet), and listener-related differences (older vs. younger). Nearly, all studies investigating these factors use high-familiarity words and noise signals that are either energetic…

Purpose: Depicting the development pattern of vowel perception for children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CIs) would be useful for clinicians and school teachers to monitor children's auditory rehabilitation. The study was to investigate the development of Mandarin Chinese vowel perception for Mandarin Chinese native-speaking…

Purpose: Age-related sensorineural hearing loss can dramatically affect speech recognition performance due to reduced audibility and suprathreshold distortion of spectrotemporal information. Normal aging produces changes within the central auditory system that impose further distortions. The goal of this study was to characterize the effects of…

Purpose: We aim to identify the possible sources for age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the distinct roles of semantics (words) and prosody (tone of speech) and their interaction. Method: We implement the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (Ben-David, Multani, Shakuf, Rudzicz, & van Lieshout, 2016).…

Purpose: The authors determined the accuracy of younger and older adults in identifying vocal emotions using the Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS; Dupuis & Pichora-Fuller, 2010a) and investigated the possible contributions of auditory acuity and suprathreshold processing to emotion identification accuracy. Method: In 2 experiments, younger…

Purpose: To examine song identification by preschoolers with normal hearing (NH) versus preschoolers with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Participants included 45 children ages 3;8-7;3 (years;months): 12 with NH and 33 with CIs, including 10 with unilateral CI, 14 with bilateral CIs, and 9 bimodal users (CI-HA) with unilateral CI and…

The journey from playful musical exploration in childhood to an adult identity as a skilled musician is likely to be problematic for people with hearing impairments. Although a number of subjective accounts have been published, there is a lack of empirical research in the area. In this study, twelve musicians with hearing impairments were…

This study examined the abilities of adult listeners to discriminate and identify temporal order of sounds presented in tonal sequence. Listeners had either normal hearing or mild to moderate sensorineural hearing losses. In general, older listeners performed more poorly than younger listeners on the discrimination and identification tasks. Order…

Revises an earlier experiment that revealed age-related increases in sensitivity to rhythmic information when judging the difference between a theme and selected pitch and rhythm variations. Tested the possibility that the developmental differences found earlier were due to characteristics of the test melody. Results supported the earlier study.…