Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychophysical boundary used for categorization of voiced-voiceless stop consonants in native Japanese speakers. Method: Twelve native Japanese speakers participated in the experiment. The stimuli were synthetic stop consonant-vowel stimuli varying in voice onset time (VOT) with…

A recent study has shown that congenitally blind adults, who have never had visual experience, are impaired on an auditory spatial bisection task (Gori, Sandini, Martinoli, & Burr, 2014). In this study we investigated how thresholds for auditory spatial bisection and auditory discrimination develop with age in sighted and congenitally blind…

Recent studies have established that even infants can determine what others know based on previous visual experience. In the current study, we investigated whether 2-and 3-year-olds know what others know based on previous auditory experience. A child and an adult heard the sound of one object together, but only the child heard the sound of another…

Introduction: As the number of people with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) is continuously increasing, rehabilitation and engineering researchers have identified the need to design sensory-substitution devices that would offer assistance and guidance to these people for performing navigational tasks. Auditory…

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects…

Two experiments investigate the effectiveness of audiovisual (AV) speech cues (cues derived from both seeing and hearing a talker speak) in facilitating perceptual learning of spectrally distorted speech. Speech was distorted through an eight channel noise-vocoder which shifted the spectral envelope of the speech signal to simulate the properties…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the new Cognitive Spare Capacity Test (CSCT), which measures aspects of working memory capacity for heard speech in the audiovisual and auditory-only modalities of presentation. Method: In Experiment 1, 20 young adults with normal hearing performed the CSCT and an independent battery of…

Four visual-world experiments, in which listeners heard spoken words and saw printed words, compared an optimal-perception account with the theory of phonological underspecification. This theory argues that default phonological features are not specified in the mental lexicon, leading to asymmetric lexical matching: Mismatching input…

Recent research provides evidence that individuals shift in their perception of variants depending on social characteristics attributed to the speaker. This paper reports on a speech perception experiment designed to test the degree to which the age attributed to a speaker influences the perception of vowels undergoing a chain shift. As a result…

Researchers from different disciplines have attempted to investigate the way in which people who are blind conceptualize and perceive elements of the spatial environment. Most of the studies that are reported in the literature use an experimental approach based on measurements of the performance in test situations of people who are blind or people…

It is well established that speakers accommodate in speech production. Recent work has shown a similar effect in perception--speech perception is affected by a listener's beliefs about the speaker. In this paper, we explore the consequences of such perceptual accommodation for experiments in speech perception and lexical access. Our interest is…

Two experiments examined how Dutch listeners deal with the effects of connected-speech processes, specifically those arising from word-final /t/ reduction (e.g., whether Dutch [tas] is "tas," bag, or a reduced-/t/ version of "tast," touch). Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays containing 4…

Three picture-word interference (PWI) experiments assessed the extent to which embedded subset words are activated during the identification of spoken superset words (e.g., "bone" in "trombone"). Participants named aloud pictures (e.g., "brain") while spoken distractors were presented. In the critical condition,…

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…

The present study investigated the mechanisms underlying perceptual compensation for assimilation in novel words. During training, participants learned canonical versions of novel spoken words (e.g., "decibot") presented in isolation. Following exposure to a second set of novel words the next day, participants carried out a phoneme…