Some listeners exhibit higher sensitivity to subphonemic acoustic differences (i.e., higher speech gradiency). Here, we asked whether higher gradiency in a listener's first language (L1) facilitates foreign language learning and explored the possible sources of individual differences in L1 gradiency. To address these questions, we tested 164…

The present study investigates the time course of acoustic cue integration in the processing of the Korean three-way laryngeal stop contrast by native Korean listeners and English second language (L2) learners of Korean. As such, this study seeks to understand how native listeners and L2 learners weight and integrate fine-grained acoustic…

Purpose: In individuals with cochlear implants, speech recognition is not associated with tests of working memory that primarily reflect storage, such as forward digit span. In contrast, our previous work found that vocoded speech recognition in individuals with normal hearing was correlated with performance on a forward digit span task. A…

Musical expertise and working memory (WM) have been isolated as being the most important predictors of phonetic aptitude -- meaning the ability to imitate unfamiliar speech material. Although the link between language functions and musical expertise has been subject to many investigations, specific languages and their individual link to musical…

Purpose: Background noise can interfere with our ability to understand speech. Working memory capacity (WMC) has been shown to contribute to the perception of speech in modulated noise maskers. WMC has been assessed with a variety of auditory and visual tests, often pertaining to different components of working memory. This study assessed the…

Purpose: This study examined the potential roles of phonological sensitivity and processing speed in age-related declines of verbal working memory. Method: Twenty younger and 25 older adults with age-normal hearing participated. Two measures of verbal working memory were collected: digit span and serial recall of words. Processing speed was…

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech…

Although activity in premotor and motor cortices is commonly observed in neuroimaging studies of spoken language processing, the degree to which this activity is an obligatory part of everyday speech comprehension remains unclear. We hypothesised that rather than being a unitary phenomenon, the neural response to speech perception in motor regions…

In this article, we report the results of a study on the relationship between individual differences in language learning aptitude and the structural connectivity of language pathways in the adult brain, the first of its kind. We measured four components of language aptitude ("vocabulary learning"; "sound recognition"; "sound-symbol…

Fundamental learning abilities related to the implicit encoding of sequential structure have been postulated to underlie language acquisition and processing. However, there is very little direct evidence to date supporting such a link between implicit statistical learning and language. In three experiments using novel methods of assessing implicit…

A study investigated connections between reading difficulties and short term memory processes in order to explore the psychological basis for some individual differences in reading comprehension skills. Drawing on previous research indicating that poor readers were inferior to normal ones in judging whether two patterns of long and short tones…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether memory support and elicited production differentially benefited fast mapping of new vocabulary (comprehension, production accuracy, and speed) in adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) compared with typically developing (TD) children matched for syntax comprehension. The study also examined…