Purpose: This study examined speech changes induced by deep-brain stimulation (DBS) in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) using a set of auditory-perceptual and acoustic measures. Method: Speech recordings from nine speakers with PD and DBS were compared between DBS-On and DBS-Off conditions using auditory-perceptual and acoustic analyses.…

Purpose: Congenital deafness not only delays auditory development but also hampers the ability to perceive nonspeech and speech signals. This study aimed to use auditory event-related potentials to explore the mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, negative wave (Nc), and late discriminative negativity (LDN) components in children with and without…

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…

Purpose: Perceptual training is a listener-targeted means for improving intelligibility of dysarthric speech. Recent work has shown that training with one talker generalizes to a novel talker of the same sex and that the magnitude of benefit is maximized when the talkers are perceptually similar. The current study expands previous findings by…

Purpose: Robust improvements in intelligibility following familiarization, a listener-targeted perceptual training paradigm, have been revealed for talkers diagnosed with spastic, ataxic, and hypokinetic dysarthria but not for talkers with hyperkinetic dysarthria. While the theoretical explanation for the lack of intelligibility improvement…

Purpose: Differences in communication development impact long-term outcomes of children with autism. Previous research has identified factors associated with communication in children with autism, but much of the variance in communication skill remains unexplained. It has been proposed that early differences in sensory responsiveness (i.e.,…

Purpose: The extant literature suggests that individual differences in speech perception can be linked to broad receptive language phenotype. For example, a recent study found that individuals with a smaller receptive vocabulary showed diminished lexically guided perceptual learning compared to individuals with a larger receptive vocabulary. Here,…

Purpose: This study was conducted to determine whether the perceptions of nasal consonants in children with normal hearing and children with cochlear implants were predicted by the discontinuity hypothesis. Methods: Four groups participated: 8 adults, 8 children with normal hearing (ages 5-7 years), 8 children with normal hearing (ages 3.5-4…

Purpose: The study addressed three research questions: Does lipreading improve between the ages of 7 and 14 years? Does hearing loss affect the development of lipreading? How do individual differences in lipreading relate to other abilities? Method: Forty children with normal hearing (NH) and 24 with hearing loss (HL) were tested using 4…

Purpose: To examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children. Method: Children ("N" = 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory-no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory-static face and audiovisual- dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load,…

Purpose: To establish the age at which children can complete tests of spatial listening and to measure the normative relationship between age and performance. Method: Fifty-six normal-hearing children, ages 1.5-7.9 years, attempted tests of the ability to discriminate a sound source on the left from one on the right, to localize a source, to track…

Purpose: To examine patterns of sensory responsiveness (i.e., hyperresponsiveness, hyporesponsiveness, and sensory seeking) as factors that may account for variability in social-communicative symptoms of autism and variability in language, social, and communication skill development in children with autism or other developmental disabilities…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine children's head orientation relative to the arrival angle of competing signals and the sound source of interest in actual school settings. These data were gathered to provide information relative to the potential for directional benefit. Method: Forty children, 4-17 years of age, with and without…

This study examined whether the perceptual weights of 40 children and adults with hearing loss differ from those of normal hearing counterparts. Results revealed child-adult differences in overall performance and also revealed an effect of hearing loss. However, the pattern of perceptual weights was similar across groups under most conditions.…

A study of 12 patients with left-hemisphere damage (LHD) and aphasia, 10 with right-hemisphere damage (RHD), and 10 controls, sought to identify phonemic and emphatic stress contrasts. Individuals with LHD were unable to identify phonemic stress contrasts with better-than-chance accuracy. Individuals with RHD performed better than those with LHD.…