Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine listeners' ability to learn talker identity from speech produced with an electrolarynx, explore source and filter differentiation in talker identification, and describe acoustic-phonetic changes associated with electrolarynx use. Method: Healthy adult control listeners learned to identify…

Social avoidance and anxiety are prevalent in fragile X syndrome (FXS) and are potentially mediated by the amygdala, a brain region critical for social behavior. Unfortunately, functional brain resonance imaging investigation of the amygdala in FXS is limited by the difficulties experienced by intellectually impaired and anxious participants. We…

Many children experience recurrent acute otitis media (RAOM) in early childhood. In a previous study, 2-year-old children with RAOM were shown to have immature neural patterns for speech sound discrimination. The present study further investigated the consonant inventories of these same children using natural speech samples. The results showed…

Purpose: Difficulties with intonation and vibrato control during the menstrual cycle have been reported by singers; however, this phenomenon has not yet been systematically investigated. Method: A double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial assessing effects of the menstrual cycle and use of a combined oral contraceptive pill (OCP) on pitch…

Patients with anorexia nervosa frequently believe they are larger than they really are. The precise nature of this bias is not known: is it a false belief related to the patient's aesthetic and emotional attitudes towards her body? Or could it also reflect abnormal processing of the representation of the body in action? We tested this latter…

Despite its importance in the development of children's skills of social cognition and communication, very little is known about the ontogenetic origins of the pointing gesture. We report a training study in which mothers gave children one month of extra daily experience with pointing as compared with a control group who had extra experience with…

Saccadic endpoint variability is often viewed as the outcome of neural noise occurring during sensorimotor processing. However, part of this variability might result from operant learning. We tested this hypothesis by reinforcing dispersions of saccadic amplitude distributions, while maintaining constant their medians. In a first experiment we…

Background: Previous research suggests that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have a reduced preference for viewing social stimuli in the environment and impaired facial identity recognition. Methods: Here, we directly tested a link between these two phenomena in 13 ASD children and 13 age-matched typically developing (TD) controls.…

This study examined the effect of a 10-week physical exercise program on the health status of college staff. Eighty-one participants were pre-tested on 22 variables including physical fitness, biochemical status, psychological health, and morphological measures. Participants in an experimental group (n = 61) received a 10-week intervention…

Based on recent progress in theory and measurement techniques, the analysis of eye movements has become one of the major methodological tools in experimental reading research. Our work uses this approach to advance the understanding of impaired information processing in acquired central dyslexia of stroke patients with aphasia. Up to now there has…

Background: Strong evidence from twin and family studies suggests that the genetic liability to autism may be expressed through personality and language characteristics qualitatively similar, but more subtly expressed than those defining the full syndrome. This study examined behavioral features of this "broad autism phenotype" (BAP) in relation…