Purpose: Reduced use of visible articulatory information on a speaker's face has been implicated as a possible contributor to language deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We employ an audiovisual (AV) phonemic restoration paradigm to measure behavioral performance (button press) and event-related potentials (ERPs) of visual speech…

Purpose: Many communication disorders result in speech sound errors that listeners perceive as phonemic errors. Unfortunately, manual methods for calculating phonemic error frequency are prohibitively time consuming to use in large-scale research and busy clinical settings. The purpose of this study was to validate an automated analysis based on a…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to examine whether there is a listening preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over backward speech in moderate-preterm infants (MPIs). Method: Eighteen MPIs of gestational age of 32.0 weeks (range: 32-34.06 weeks), chronological age of 8.09 months, and maturation age of 6.48 months served as the…

Purpose: An important skill in the development of speech perception is to apply optimal weights to acoustic cues so that phonemic information is recovered from speech with minimum effort. Here, we investigated the development of acoustic cue weighting of amplitude rise time (ART) and formant rise time (FRT) cues in children as measured by mismatch…

Purpose: We empirically assessed the results of computational optimization and prediction in communication interfaces that were designed to allow individuals with severe motor speech disorders to select phonemes and generate speech output. Method: Interface layouts were either random or optimized, in which phoneme targets that were likely to be…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic-phonemic normalization) were investigated through the…

Purpose: The toddler years are a critical period for language development and growth. We investigated how event-related potentials (ERPs) to repeated and novel nonwords are associated with clinical assessments of language in young children. In addition, nonword repetition (NWR) was used to measure phonological working memory to determine the…

Purpose: The aim of the present study was to investigate dual-task performance in children who stutter (CWS) and those who do not to investigate if the groups differed in the ability to attend and allocate cognitive resources effectively during task performance. Method: Participants were 24 children (12 CWS) in both groups matched for age and sex.…

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to examine /l/ developmental patterns in young learners of Southern American English, especially in relation to the effect of word position and phonetic contexts. Method: Eighteen children with typically developing speech, aged between 2 and 5 years, produced monosyllabic single words containing singleton…

Purpose: Although lexical information influences phoneme perception, the extent to which reliance on lexical information enhances speech processing in challenging listening environments is unclear. We examined the extent to which individual differences in lexical influences on phonemic processing impact speech processing in maskers containing…

Purpose: Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) of a speaker's voice disturbs normal speech production. Various traditional theories assume that the content of the delayed feedback signal interferes with the actual production of a particular speech unit ("phonemic content hypothesis"). The "displaced rhythm hypothesis" as an alternative explanation…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to further explore the understanding of speaker-specific realizations of the /s/--/?/ contrast in German in relation to individual differences in palate shape. Method: Two articulatory experiments were carried out with German native speakers. In the first experiment, 4 monozygotic and 2 dizygotic twin pairs…

Purpose: The goal was to assess the effects of maturation and phonological development on performance, by normally hearing children, on an imitative test of auditory capacity (On-Line Imitative Test of Speech-Pattern Contrast Perception [OlimSpac]; Boothroyd, Eisenberg, & Martinez, 2006; Eisenberg, Martinez, & Boothroyd, 2003, 2007). Method:…

Purpose: Previous research has found that auditory training helps native English speakers to perceive phonemic vowel length contrasts in Japanese, but their performance did not reach native levels after training. Given that multimodal information, such as lip movement and hand gesture, influences many aspects of native language processing, the…

Purpose: To examine the ability to discriminate phonemic length and the association of this ability with reading accuracy, reading speed, and spelling accuracy in Finnish children throughout Grades 1-3. Method: Reading-disabled (RDFR, n = 35) and typically reading children (TRFR, n = 69) with family risk for dyslexia and typically reading control…