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…

Efficient neural encoding of sound plays a critical role in speech and language, and when impaired, may have reverberating effects on communication skills. This study investigated disruptions to neural processing of temporal and spectral properties of speech in individuals with ASD and their parents and found evidence of inefficient temporal…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit disordered speech prosody, but sources of disordered prosody remain poorly understood. We explored patterns of temporal alignment and prosodic grouping in a speech-based metronome repetition task as well as manual coordination in a drum tapping task among Cantonese speakers with ASD and…

Background: Phonological difficulties in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are well documented. However, abilities regarding prosody, the rhythmic and melodic characteristics of language, have been less widely studied, particularly in Spanish. Moreover, the scant research findings that have been reported are contradictory. These…

Real-time use of spoken language is a fundamentally interactive process involving speech perception, speech production, linguistic competence, motor control, neurocognitive abilities such as working memory, attention, and executive function, environmental noise, conversational context, and--critically--the communicative interaction between…

Contemporary neural models of auditory language comprehension proposed that the two hemispheres are differently specialized in the processing of segmental and suprasegmental features of language. While segmental processing of syntactic and lexical semantic information is predominantly assigned to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is…

In spite of the relevant role of prosody in communication, and in contrast with other linguistic components, there is paucity of research in this field for Williams syndrome (WS). Therefore, this study performed a systematic assessment of prosodic abilities in WS. The Spanish version of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication…

Many people with the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome (AS) show poorly developed skills in understanding emotional messages. The present study addressed discrimination of speech prosody in children with AS at neurophysiological level. Detection of affective prosody was investigated in one-word utterances as indexed by the N1 and the mismatch…

Speech production studies have shown that the phonological form of a word is made up of phonemic segments in stress-timed languages (e.g., Dutch) and of syllables in syllable timed languages (e.g., Chinese). To clarify the functional unit of mora-timed languages, the authors asked native Japanese speakers to perform an implicit priming task (A. S.…

Compares the production of speech and sign: the approaches used in research, the cognitive processes involved, and the output timing mechanism. (AM)