Purpose: Pitch perception is important for speech sound learning, and reading acquisition requires integration of speech sounds and written letters. Many individuals with dyslexia exhibit auditory perception deficits that may therefore contribute to their reading impairment given that complex pitch perception is crucial for categorizing speech…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their "yes/no" questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the…

Music education students ("N" = 21) at a university in the southeastern United States took an error detection test that had been designed for this study to determine the effects of tonal contexts versus atonal contexts on the ability to detect performance errors. The investigator composed 16 melodies, 8 of which were tonal and 8 of which…

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…