Purpose: This study examined the relationship between measurements derived from spontaneous speech and participants' scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. Method: Participants (N = 521) aged between 64 and 97 years completed the cognitive assessment and were prompted to describe an early childhood memory. A range of acoustic and linguistic…

Purpose: The visual Text Reception Threshold (TRT) test (Zekveld et al., 2007) has been designed to assess modality-general factors relevant for speech perception in noise. In the last decade, the test has been adopted in audiology labs worldwide. The 1st aim of this study was to examine which factors best predict interindividual differences in…

Purpose: This study evaluated the relationship between working memory (WM) and speech recognition in noise with different noise types as well as in the presence of visual cues. Method: Seventy-six adults with bilateral, mild to moderately severe sensorineural hearing loss (mean age: 69 years) participated. Using a cross-sectional design, 2…

Purpose: The present study aimed to compare acoustic models of speech intelligibility in individuals with the same disease (Parkinson's disease [PD]) and presumably similar underlying neuropathologies but with different native languages (American English [AE] and Korean). Method: A total of 48 speakers from the 4 speaker groups (AE speakers with…

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…

Cognitive assessment in natural group settings facilitates data collection but poses threats to the validity. In this study, tablet-based working memory (WM) tasks, the counting span, and reading span were used in predicting 12-year-old children's (N = 837) scholastic skills and fluid intelligence in a classroom with environmental noise. WM tasks…

Purpose: We describe the natural auditory environment of people with cochlear implants (CIs), how it changes across the life span, and how it varies between individuals. Method: We performed a retrospective cross-sectional analysis of Cochlear Nucleus 6 CI sound-processor data logs. The logs were obtained from 1,501 people with CIs (ages 0-96…

Purpose: This study investigates the effects of left- and right-hemisphere damage (LHD and RHD) on the production of idiomatic or literal expressions utilizing acoustic analyses. Method: Twenty-one native speakers of Korean with LHD or RHD and in a healthy control (HC) group produced 6 ditropically ambiguous (idiomatic or literal) sentences in 2…

The present study is concerned with lax /[upsilon]/-fronting in Standard British English and in particular with whether this sound change in progress can be attributed to a waning of the perceptual compensation for the coarticulatory effects of context. Younger and older speakers produced various monosyllables in which /[upsilon]/ occurred in…

Purpose: This study examined acoustic predictors of speech intelligibility in speakers with several types of dysarthria secondary to different diseases and conducted classification analysis solely by acoustic measures according to 3 variables (disease, speech severity, and dysarthria type). Method: Speech recordings from 107 speakers with…

Speech productions of 40 English- and 40 Japanese-speaking children (aged 2-5) were examined and compared with the speech produced by 20 adult speakers (10 speakers per language). Participants were recorded while repeating words that began with "s" and "sh" sounds. Clear language-specific patterns in adults' speech were found,…

We report two sets of experiments showing that the large individual variability in language learning success in adults can be attributed to neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, cognitive, and perceptual factors. In the first set of experiments, native English-speaking adults learned to incorporate lexically meaningfully pitch patterns in words. We…