Purpose: Bound morphemes are challenging for children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) to acquire and to use successfully. The challenge arises in part from limited access to spoken word forms as a result of reduced audibility during perception, but successful comprehension requires access to both the morphological forms and the mapping…

Purpose: The ability to understand speech under adverse listening conditions is highly variable across listeners. Despite this, studies have found that listeners with normal hearing display consistency in their ability to perceive speech across different types of degraded speech, suggesting that, for at least these listeners, global skills may be…

Purpose: This study investigated conflict adaptation in aphasia, specifically whether upregulating cognitive control improves sentence comprehension. Method: Four individuals with mild aphasia completed four eye tracking sessions with interleaved auditory Stroop and sentence-to-picture matching trials (critical and filler sentences). Auditory…

Newborns are able to neurally discriminate between speech and nonspeech right after birth. To date it remains unknown whether this early speech discrimination and the underlying neural language network is associated with later language development. Preterm-born children are an interesting cohort to investigate this relationship, as previous…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and epilepsy represent a comorbidity that negatively influences the proper development of linguistic competencies, particularly in receptive language, in the pediatric population. This group displays impairments in the auditory comprehension of both simple and complex grammatical structures, significantly limiting…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in audiovisual speech perception and temporal processing. The current study has examined the relationship between the audiovisual speech perception deficits and temporal processing deficits in children with and without ASD. To this end, using the McGurk paradigm, we implemented two…

Purpose: Speech understanding in noise and horizontal sound localization is poor in most cochlear implant (CI) users with a hearing aid (bimodal stimulation). This study investigated the effect of static and less-extreme adaptive frequency compression in hearing aids on spatial hearing. By means of frequency compression, we aimed to restore…

Purpose: Normal-hearing (NH) children acquire plural morphemes at different rates, with the segmental allomorphs /-s, -z/ (e.g., cat-s) being acquired before the syllabic allomorph /-[schwa]z/ (e.g., bus-es). Children with hearing loss (HL) have been reported to show delays in the production of plural morphology, raising the possibility that this…

Identifying speech requires that listeners make rapid use of fine-grained acoustic cues--a process that is facilitated by being able to see the talker's face. Face masks present a challenge to this process because they can both alter acoustic information and conceal the talker's mouth. Here, we investigated the degree to which different types of…

In face-to-face interaction, speakers spontaneously produce manual gestures that can facilitate listeners' comprehension of spoken language. The present study explores the factors affecting the uptake and influence of gesture cues in situations where a speaker is referring to objects visible to the listener. In this context, the listener's…

Purpose: The conventional amplification devices render minimal or no benefit at abating the speech perception problems of individuals with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD). This study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of noise reduction strategies (multiband spectral subtraction, Wiener-as, Karhunen-Loeve transform [Subspace], and…

The auditory scaffolding hypothesis states that early experience with sound underpins the development of domain-general sequence processing abilities, supported by studies observing impaired sequence processing in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. To test this hypothesis, we administered a sequence processing task to 77 DHH children who use…

Purpose: In individuals with cochlear implants, speech recognition is not associated with tests of working memory that primarily reflect storage, such as forward digit span. In contrast, our previous work found that vocoded speech recognition in individuals with normal hearing was correlated with performance on a forward digit span task. A…

Purpose: This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in…

Background: Although previous research studies have defined several prognostic factors that affect cognitive-communication performance in patients with all traumatic brain injury (TBI) severity, little is known about what variables are associated with cognitive-communication impairment in complicated mild TBI (mTBI) specifically. Aims: To…