Theories of autism have proposed that a bias towards low-level perceptual information, or a featural/surface-biased information-processing style, may compromise higher-level language processing in such individuals. Two experiments, utilizing linguistic stimuli with competing low-level/perceptual and high-level/semantic information, tested…

The development of native language phonetic representations in bilingual infants was compared to that of monolingual infants. Infants (ages 6-8, 10-12, and 14-20 months) from English-French or English-only environments were tested on their ability to discriminate a French and an English voice onset time distinction. Although 6- to 8-month-olds…

When presented with several time-compressed sentences, young adults' performance improves with practice. Such adaptation has not been studied in older adults. To study age-related changes in perceptual learning, the authors tested young and older adults' ability to adapt to degraded speech. First, the authors showed that older adults, when equated…