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: When listening to speech under adverse conditions, older adults, even with "age-normal" hearing, face challenges that may lead to poorer speech recognition than their younger peers. Older listeners generally demonstrate poorer suprathreshold auditory processing along with aging-related declines in neurocognitive functioning that…

Purpose: Some speech recognition data suggest that children rely less on voice pitch and harmonicity to support auditory scene analysis than adults. Two experiments evaluated development of speech-in-speech recognition using voiced speech and whispered speech, which lacks the harmonic structure of voiced speech. Method: Listeners were 5- to…

Purpose: This study assessed state anxiety as a function of speech recognition testing using three clinical measures of speech in noise and one clinical measure of dichotic speech recognition. Method: Thirty young adults, 30 middle-age adults, and 25 older adults participated. State anxiety was measured pre-and post-speech recognition testing…

This study examined the effects of a 9-week auditory intervention on the auditory skills of five children with hearing loss who experienced prolonged auditory deprivation before receiving hearing aids. A single-case multiple baseline design across participants was used to examine the effect of the intervention on the children's auditory skills…

The current investigation examined the developmental changes involved in processing semantic context in auditorily presented sentences, as well as underlying attentional and suppression mechanisms. Thirty-nine typically developing school-aged children aged 6;0-14;0 years participated in the current cross-sectional sentential auditory word…

This study examined language-specific links among auditory processing, linguistic prosody awareness, and Mandarin (L1) and English (L2) word reading in 61 Mandarin-speaking, English-learning children. Three auditory discrimination abilities were measured: pitch contour, pitch interval, and rise time (rate of intensity change at tone onset).…

Purpose: Reading requires the ability to decode and comprehend. Impairments in working memory (WM) are often implicated in students who are poor decoders. It is unclear whether this is a domain-specific issue or a task-specific issue. Therefore, this study examined how auditory-verbal (AV) WM, visual-spatial (VS) WM, and cognitive load affected…

Purpose: This study evaluated the degree to which children benefit from the acoustic modifications made by talkers when they produce speech in noise. Method: A repeated measures design compared the speech perception performance of children (5-11 years) and adults in a 2-talker masker. Target speech was produced in a 2-talker background or in…

Speech production and perception are inextricably linked systems. Speakers modify their speech in response to listener characteristics, such as age, hearing ability, and language background. Listener-oriented modifications in speech production, commonly referred to as clear speech, have also been found to affect speech perception by enhancing…

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…

This study investigated the differential contribution of auditory-verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) on decoding skills in second- and fifth-grade children identified with poor decoding. Thirty-two second-grade students and 22 fifth-grade students completed measures that assessed simple and complex auditory-verbal and visuospatial memory,…

In this study, we examined the intercorrelations among speech perception, metalinguistic (i.e., phonological and morphological) awareness, word reading, and vocabulary in a 1st language (L1) and a 2nd language (L2). Results from 3 age groups of Chinese-English bilingual children showed that speech perception was more predictive of reading and…

Nonword repetition skills were examined in 24 pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users and 18 normal-hearing (NH) adult listeners listening through a CI simulator. Two separate groups of NH adult listeners assigned accuracy ratings to the nonword responses of the pediatric CI users and the NH adult speakers. Overall, the nonword repetitions of…

This study examined temporal processing in relation to Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. The performances of 26 Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia on tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological, and phonological awareness were compared with…