In everyday life, children hear but also often see their caregiver talking. Children build on this correspondence to resolve auditory uncertainties and decipher words from the speech input. As they hear the name of an object, 18- to 30-month-olds form a representation that permits word recognition in either the auditory (i.e. acoustic form of the…

This dissertation examines native speakers' word recognition of, differentiation between, and social attitudes toward varieties of Arabic. It is a particularly interesting test case because of the Arabic unique regional variation situation and the available literature lacks data on how Arabic speakers perceive different accents, with a particular…

Purpose: Recent work suggests that speech perception is influenced by the somatosensory system and that oral sensorimotor disruption has specific effects on the perception of speech both in infants who have not yet begun to talk and in older children and adults with ample speech production experience; however, we do not know how such disruptions…

Purpose: Twenty years ago, von Hapsburg and Peña (2002) wrote a tutorial that reviewed the literature on speech audiometry and bilingualism and outlined valuable recommendations to increase the rigor of the evidence base. This review article returns to that seminal tutorial to reflect on how that advice was applied over the last 20 years and to…

Purpose: This study investigates whether crosslinguistic effects on auditory word recognition are modulated by the quality of the auditory signal (clear and noisy). Method: In an online experiment, a group of Spanish--English bilingual listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task, in their second language, English. Words and pseudowords…

Purpose: Vowels and consonants play different roles in language acquisition and speech recognition, yet standard clinical tests do not assess vowel and consonant perception separately. As a result, opportunities for targeted intervention may be lost. This study evaluated closed-set word recognition tests designed to rely predominantly on either…

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…

Objectives: We provide a novel application of psycholinguistic theories and methods to the field of auditory training to provide preliminary data regarding which minimal pair contrasts are more difficult for listeners with typical hearing to distinguish in real-time. Design: Using eye-tracking, participants heard a word and selected the…

Purpose: Although the existing literature has explored the link between cognitive functioning and speech recognition in noise, the specific role of fluid intelligence still needs to be studied. Given the established association between working memory capacity (WMC) and fluid intelligence and the predictive power of WMC for speech recognition in…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Purpose: Three experiments were conducted to better understand the role of between-word coarticulation in masked speech recognition. Specifically, we explored whether naturally coarticulated sentences supported better masked speech recognition as compared to sentences derived from individually spoken concatenated words. We hypothesized 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: Word recognition in quiet and in background noise has been thoroughly investigated in previous research to establish segmental speech recognition performance as a function of stimulus characteristics (e.g., audibility). Similar methods to investigate recognition performance for suprasegmental information (e.g., acoustic cues used to make…

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate a novel communication system designed to translate surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals from articulatory muscles into speech using a personalized, digital voice. The system was evaluated for word recognition, prosodic classification, and listener perception of synthesized speech. Method: sEMG signals were…