Educational systems change in top-down and bottom-up processes. One example is when authorities introduce a new curriculum, but it can also be changed by agents active in the system. In education, agents of change include educators, students and institutions. In this article, we explore the narratives of educators (n = 4) in the bachelor's…

There have been many recent articles in this journal highlighting simple demonstrations of a wide variety of acoustic phenomena. In introductory physics courses, sound waves and their propagation through air, and resonance in musical instruments, are covered in detail. However, attention is not usually paid to the active role that our ears play in…

The inflectional diversity of parents' speech directed to children acquiring Dutch was investigated. Inflectional diversity is defined as the number of inflected forms of a particular lemma (e.g. singular, plural of a noun) and measured by means of Mean Size of Paradigm (MSP). Changes in the inflectional diversity of infant directed speech (IDS)…

Background: Intelligibility measurement is influenced by the characteristics of a speaker, listener and contextual factors. This study addresses the clinical problem of measuring speech intelligibility in children with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) in real-world conditions. Aims: The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of…

Purpose: Talkers often modify their speech when communicating with individuals who struggle to understand speech, such as listeners with hearing loss. This study evaluated the benefit of clear speech in school-age children and adults with normal hearing for speech-in-noise and speech-in-speech recognition. Method: Masked sentence recognition…

Purpose: The effects of neurological diseases on the auditory system have been a notable issue for investigators because the auditory pathway is closely associated with neural systems. The purposes of this study are to evaluate the efferent auditory system function and hearing quality in Parkinson's disease (PD) and to compare the findings with…

Purpose: Early studies of perceptual learning of dysarthric speech, those summarized in Borrie, McAuliffe, and Liss (2012), yielded preliminary evidence that listeners could learn to better understand the speech of a person with dysarthria, revealing a potentially promising avenue for future intelligibility interventions. Since then, a…

Individuals who are deaf and use American Sign Language (ASL) as their primary mode of communication experience unique negative life experiences, such as lack of communication, limited access to services, marginalization, and discrimination, that can adversely impact resilience and psychological well-being. In addition, deaf individuals experience…

Purpose: For colocated targets and maskers, binaural listening typically offers a small but significant advantage over monaural listening. This study investigated how monaural asymmetry and target--masker similarity may limit binaural advantage in adults and children. Method: Ten Mandarin-speaking Chinese adults (aged 22-27 years) and 12 children…

Purpose: Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the…

Purpose: Sensitivity to sounds and atypical reactions to sensory input by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been reported in the literature. In response to this sensitivity, some individuals use ear protection devices (EPDs) such as noise-canceling headphones, earplugs, or earmuffs to attenuate the perceived unpleasant sounds.…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate changes in autonomic function, as measured by heart rate variability, in individuals with tinnitus following acoustic therapy implemented using tinnitus maskers presented via hearing aids. Method: Twenty-six individuals with tinnitus and hearing impairment completed an 8-week field trial wearing…

This study aims to document the implementation of sign bilingualism and co-enrollment education in a kindergarten in Quzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, to identify the major characteristics of the programme, and to report findings of children's language in terms of vocabulary and surveys on the views and attitudes of the stakeholders of the…

The aim of this study is twofold: To examine if deafness is invariably associated with deficits in executive function (EF) and to investigate the relationship between sign language proficiency and EF in deaf children of deaf parents with early exposure to a sign language. It is also the first study of EF in children acquiring Polish Sign Language.…

The long-term objective of this project was to better understand how shorter auditory experience and spectral degradation of the cochlear implant (CI) signal impact spoken language processing in deaf children with CIs. The specific objective of this research was to utilize psycholinguistic methods to investigate the mechanisms underlying observed…