Speech is a complex, redundant and variable signal happening in a noisy and ever changing world. How do listeners navigate these complex auditory scenes and continuously and effortlessly understand most of the speakers around them? Studies show that listeners can quickly adapt to new situations, accents and even to distorted speech. Although prior…

This dissertation proposes a dynamical computational model of the timecourse of phonological parameter setting. In the model, phonological representations embrace phonetic detail, with phonetic parameters represented as activation fields that evolve over time and determine the specific parameter settings of a planned utterance. Existing models of…

Over the past two decades, neuroscientists have been fascinated by the way the brain processes music. Using new technologies, neuroscientists offer us a better understanding of the human brain's structures and functions. They have further proposed explanatory models for how the brain processes music. While these models shed light on how the…

Although spoken word recognition is more fundamental to human communication than text recognition, knowledge of word-processing in auditory cortex is comparatively impoverished. This dissertation synthesizes current models of auditory cortex, models of cortical pattern recognition, models of single-word reading, results in phonetics and results in…

The Woodcock-Johnson-Fourth edition (WJ IV; Schrank, McGrew, & Mather, 2014a) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth edition (WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014) are two of the major tests of cognitive abilities used in school psychology. The complete WJ IV battery includes the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (Schrank,…

Audiovisual speech perception provides an opportunity to investigate the mechanisms underlying multimodal processing. By using nonspeech stimuli, it is possible to investigate the degree to which audiovisual processing is specific to the speech domain. It has been shown in a match-to-sample design that matching across modalities is more difficult…

We report two sets of experiments showing that the large individual variability in language learning success in adults can be attributed to neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, cognitive, and perceptual factors. In the first set of experiments, native English-speaking adults learned to incorporate lexically meaningfully pitch patterns in words. We…

The model presents neurobiologically plausible accounts of sound recognition (including absolute pitch), neural plasticity involved in pitch, loudness and location information integration, and streaming and auditory recall. It is proposed that a cortical mechanism for sound identification modulates the spectrotemporal response fields of inferior…

The musical priming paradigm has shown facilitated processing for tonally related over less-related targets. However, the congruence between tonal relatedness and the psychoacoustical properties of music challenges cognitive interpretations of the involved processes. Our goal was to show that cognitive expectations (based on listeners' tonal…

Speech perception and speech production were examined in 3-year-old Dutch children at familial risk of developing dyslexia. Their performance in speech sound categorisation and their production of words was compared to that of age-matched children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls. We found that speech…

Psychophysical studies are reported examining how the context of recent auditory stimulation may modulate the processing of new sounds. The question posed is how recent tone stimulation may affect ongoing performance in a discrimination task. In the task, two complex sounds occurred in successive intervals. A single target component of one complex…

This study presents a probabilistic model of melody perception, which infers the key of a melody and also judges the probability of the melody itself. The model uses Bayesian reasoning: For any "surface" pattern and underlying "structure," we can infer the structure maximizing P(structure [vertical bar] surface) based on knowledge of P(surface,…

The aim of this study was to provide evidence that memory and perceptual processing are underpinned by the same mechanisms. Specifically, the authors conducted 3 experiments that emphasized the sensory aspect of memory traces. They examined their predictions with a short-term priming paradigm based on 2 distinct phases: a learning phase consisting…

Previous research has demonstrated that the subjective danger and usefulness of words affect lexical decision times. Usually, an interaction is found: Increasing danger predicts faster reaction times (RTs) for words low on usefulness, but increasing danger predicts slower RTs for words high on usefulness. The authors show the same interaction with…

At the level of clinical speech/language evaluation, the repetition type of conduction aphasia is characterized by repetition difficulties concomitant with reduced short-term memory capacities, in the presence of fluent spontaneous speech as well as unimpaired naming and reading abilities. It is still unsettled which dysfunctions of the…