A lack of response to voices, and a great interest for music are part of the behavioral expressions, commonly (self-)reported in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These atypical interests for vocal and musical sounds could be attributable to different levels of acoustical noise, quantified in the harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR). No previous study has…

Music performance requires high levels of motor control. Professional musicians use body movements not only to accomplish and help technical efficiency, but to shape expressive interpretation. Here, we recorded motion and audio data of twenty participants performing four musical fragments varying in the degree of technical difficulty to analyze…

Purpose: A fundamental feature of human speech is variation, including the manner of phonation, as exemplified in the case of whispered speech. In this study, we employed whispered speech to examine an unresolved issue about congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical pitch processing, which also affects speech pitch processing…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine fatigue associated with sustained and effortful speech-processing in children with mild to moderately severe hearing loss. Method: We used auditory P300 responses, subjective reports, and behavioral indices (response time, lapses of attention) to measure fatigue resulting from sustained…

Purpose: Studies suggest that deficits in auditory processing predict cognitive decline and dementia, but those studies included limited measures of auditory processing. The purpose of this study was to compare older adults with and without probable mild cognitive impairment (MCI) across two domains of auditory processing (auditory performance in…

Purpose: The objectives of this study were to determine (a) whether school-age children with typical hearing demonstrate poorer auditory working memory performance in multitalker babble at degraded signal-to-noise ratios than in quiet; and (b) whether the amount of cognitive demand of the task contributed to differences in performance in noise. It…

The study presented in this paper investigates the potential effects of including non-speech audio such as sound effects into multimedia-based instruction taking into account Sweller's cognitive load theory (Sweller, 2005) and applied frameworks such as the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2005) and the cognitive affective theory of…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) frequently demonstrate preserved or enhanced frequency perception but impaired timing perception. The present study investigated the processing of spectral and temporal information in 12 adolescents with ASD and 15 age-matched controls. Participants completed two psychoacoustic tasks: one determined…

Background: Although a general consensus holds that emotional reactivity in youth with conduct disorder (CD) symptoms arises as one of the main causes of successive aggression, it remains to be determined whether automatic emotional processing is altered in this population. Methods: We measured auditory event-related potentials (ERP) in 20 young…

Wernicke's aphasia (WA) is the classical neurological model of comprehension impairment and, as a result, the posterior temporal lobe is assumed to be critical to semantic cognition. This conclusion is potentially confused by (a) the existence of patient groups with semantic impairment following damage to other brain regions (semantic dementia and…

We do not know how vocal learning came to be, but it is such a salient trait in human evolution that many have tried to imagine it. In primates this is difficult because we are the only species known to possess this skill. Songbirds provide a richer and independent set of data. I use comparative data and ask broad questions: How does vocal…

Auditory processing of speech is influenced by internal (i.e., attention, working memory) and external factors (i.e., background noise, visual information). This study examined the interplay among these factors in individuals with and without ADHD. All participants completed a listening in noise task, two working memory capacity tasks, and two…

Lying is a deliberate attempt to transmit messages that mislead others. Analysis of language behaviors holds great promise as an objective method of detecting deception. The current study reports on the frequency of use and acoustic nature of "um" and "like" during laboratory-elicited lying versus truth-telling. Results obtained using a…

This study was designed to examine two aspects of sight-singing instruction: (1) solfege syllables versus the syllable "loo" for singing patterns and (2) the use of related songs (songs that began with tonal patterns being studied) as compared with unrelated songs. Second-grade students (N = 193) enrolled in general music classes…

This literature review aims to interpret behavioural and electrophysiological studies addressing auditory processing in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Data have been organised according to the applied methodology (behavioural versus electrophysiological studies) and according to stimulus complexity (pure versus complex…