Recent evidence suggests that blindness enables visual circuits to contribute to language processing. We examined whether this dramatic functional plasticity has a sensitive period. BOLD fMRI signal was measured in congenitally blind, late blind (blindness onset 9-years-old or later) and sighted participants while they performed a sentence…

This study investigated global versus local pitch pattern perception in children with dyslexia aged between 8 and 11 years. Children listened to two consecutive 4-tone pitch sequences while performing a same/different task. On the different trials, sequences either preserved the contour (local condition) or they violated the contour (global…

Everyday conversation is both an auditory and a visual phenomenon. While visual speech information enhances comprehension for the listener, evidence suggests that the ability to benefit from this information improves with development. A number of brain regions have been implicated in audiovisual speech comprehension, but the extent to which the…

Pre-linguistic sensory deficits, especially in "temporal" processing, have been implicated in developmental language impairment (LI). However, recent evidence has been equivocal with data suggesting problems in the spectral domain. The present study examined event-related potential (ERP) measures of auditory sensory temporal and spectral…

Studies evaluating temporal auditory processing among individuals with reading and other language deficits have yielded inconsistent findings due to methodological problems (Studdert-Kennedy & Mody, 1995) and sample differences. In the current study, seven auditory masking thresholds were measured in fifty-two 7- to 10-year-old children (26…

This study assessed the ability of seven children to accurately judge relative durations of auditory and visual stimuli before and after participation in a language remediation program. The goal of the intervention program is to improve the children's ability to detect and identify rapidly changing auditory stimuli, and thereby improve their…

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain-behavior correlations in a group of 16 children (9- to 12-year-olds). Activation was measured during a semantic judgment task presented in either the visual or auditory modality that required the individual to determine whether a final word was related in meaning to one…