Purpose: Reduced use of visible articulatory information on a speaker's face has been implicated as a possible contributor to language deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We employ an audiovisual (AV) phonemic restoration paradigm to measure behavioral performance (button press) and event-related potentials (ERPs) of visual speech…

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

Dyslexia has frequently been related to atypical auditory temporal processing and speech perception. Results of studies emphasizing speech onset cues and reinforcing the temporal structure of the speech envelope, that is, envelope enhancement (EE), demonstrated reduced speech perception deficits in individuals with dyslexia. The use of this…

Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination…

Previous studies indicate that at least some aspects of audiovisual speech perception are impaired in children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, whether audiovisual processing difficulties are also present in older children with a history of this disorder is unknown. By combining electrophysiological and behavioral measures, we…

Compared the ability of poor and good readers in the second grade to make same-different matches of visual, auditory, and visual-auditory stimuli. (JMB)

Sixteen kindergarten and 28 first-grade children were tested on two-choice discrimination problems. A prompt light indicated the positive (rewarded) object P on all training trials, and these were followed by a single nonprompted test trial during which a new object (X) replaced either P (X-N problems) or N (P-X problems) or neither (P-N control…

Discovering a child's possible auditory and visual perceptual problems at the reading readiness stage may save him years of frustration in reading. (MM)

The study examined 2 procedures--the ABX Test and the Oddity Task--for assessing the perception of 25 elementary grade phonologically disordered children of their own speech error sounds. Findings indicated both measures were promising and aided in identifying children whose perceptual errors influenced their speech-sound production. (DB)

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)