Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We test whether causal reasoning plays a role, and find that from childhood, people can intuitively reason about how musical sounds were generated, inferring the events and agents that caused the sounds. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, pre-registered), 6-year-old children…

Purpose: As a class, fricatives are more "resistant" to consonant-vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /[voiceless dental fricative], s, [voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech…

Purpose: Liquids are among the last sounds to be acquired by English-speaking children. The current study considers their acquisition from an articulatory timing perspective by investigating anticipatory posturing for /l/ versus /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ in child and adult speech. Method: In Experiment 1, twelve 5-year-old, twelve…

Previous research has suggested that fluency does not influence memory decisions until ages 7-8. In two experiments (n = 96 and n = 64, respectively), children, aged 4, 6, and 8 years (Experiments 1 and 2), and adults (Experiment 2) studied a list of pictures. Participants completed a recognition test during which each study item was preceded by a…

Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were…

This study investigated neurodevelopmental changes in sound processing by recording mismatch negativity (MMN) in response to various degrees of sound complexity in 18 mildly to moderately autistic versus 15 healthy boys aged between 6 and 15 years. Autistic boys presented with lower IQ and poor performance on a range of executive and social…

Children with phonological impairment (PI) often have difficulties perceiving insufficiencies in their own speech. The use of recordings has been suggested as a way of directing the child's attention toward his/her own speech, despite a lack of evidence that children actually recognize their recorded voice as their own. We present two studies of…

Here we explore relations between auditory perception of amplitude envelope structure, prosodic sensitivity, and phonological awareness in a sample of 56 typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia. We examine whether rise time sensitivity is linked to prosodic sensitivity, and whether prosodic sensitivity is linked to…

Purpose: This article integrates published acoustic data on the development of vowel production. Age specific data on formant frequencies are considered in the light of information on the development of the vocal tract (VT) to create an anatomic-acoustic description of the maturation of the vowel acoustic space for English. Method: Literature…

This study found that 5 7-year-old and 4 10-year-old prelingually hearing-impaired children displayed evidence of anticipatory coarticulation based on temporal and spectral cues, but they did so to a lesser degree than normally hearing children. (Author/JDD)

Measures of both temporal and spectral parameters were computed to determine the extent of perseveratory coarticulation in the vowel-consonant syllables produced by 7- and 10-year-old children (n=9). Profoundly hearing-impaired speakers exhibited measurable but smaller effects of perseveratory coarticulation relative to the normally hearing…

This study examined the interaction of acoustic-phonetic information with higher-level linguistic contextual information during the real-time speech perception process in child, young adult, and older adult listeners. Findings indicated that target word predictability influenced the timing and nature of the real-time recognition process, including…

A variety of topics on human development is covered in this annual report. The 11 articles are: (1) "Young Children's Personifying and Vitalistic Biology" (Kayoko Inagaki and Giyoo Hatano); (2) "Acoustic Analysis of Natural Maternal Speech to Preschool Language Impaired and Normal Children" (Debora L. Scheffel and Murray…

This annual report presents several articles related to the work of the Clinical Center for Child Development at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. The articles are: (1) "Intrinsic Musicality: Rhythm and Prosody in Infant-Directed Voices" (Niki Powers); (2) "Movable Cognitive Studies with a Portable, Telemetric Near-Infrared…