Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…

Purpose: Although variability of training materials has the potential to benefit the learning of lexical tones, the benefit is contingent on an individual's pitch aptitude. Previous studies did not segregate immediate learning and consolidation after an overnight interval, and little is known about how pitch aptitude differences affect…

Several studies have shown that maintaining in memory some attributes of speech, such as the content or pitch of an interlocutor's message, is markedly reduced in the presence of background sounds made of spectrotemporal variations. However, experimental paradigms showing this interference have only focused on one attribute of speech at a time,…

Using a non-speech-specific measure of prosody, rise time perception, Goswami and her colleagues have found that individuals with dyslexia perform significantly worse than nonimpaired readers. Studies have also found that children and adults with specific language impairment were impaired on these tasks. Despite the high comorbidity of these…

This study investigated phonological components of reading skill at two ages, using a novel pseudoword repetition task for assessing phonological memory (PM). Pseudowords were designed to incorporate control over segmental, prosodic and lexical features. In Experiment 1, the materials were administered to 3- and 4-year-old children together with a…

This study was designed to investigate the effect of intonation on the auditory sequential memory spans of children normal in language development and those with delay. Analysis indicated that intonation as a cue did not facilitate recall of monosyllabic nouns presented in sequences of two, three, four, and five words. (Author)

Pitch constancy, perceiving the same pitch from tones with differing spectral shapes, requires one to extract the fundamental frequency from two sets of harmonics and compare them. We previously showed this difficult task to be easier when tonal context is present, presumably because the context creates a tonal reference point from which to judge…

Infants parse speech into word-sized units according to biases that develop in the first year. One bias, present before the age of 7 months, is to cluster syllables that tend to co-occur. The present computational research demonstrates that this statistical clustering bias could lead to the extraction of speech sequences that are actual words,…