Purpose: Speech motor skill is refined over the course of practice, which is commonly reflected by increased accuracy and consistency. This research examined the relationship between auditory-perceptual ratings of word accuracy and measures of speech motor timing and variability at pre- and posttreatment in children with childhood apraxia of…

As an information-bearing auditory attribute of sound, pitch plays a crucial role in the perception of speech and music. Studies examining pitch processing in autism spectrum disorder have produced equivocal results. To understand this discrepancy from a mechanistic perspective, we used a novel data-driven method, the reverse-correlation paradigm,…

Purpose: Psychoacoustic data indicate that infants and children are less likely than adults to focus on a spectral region containing an anticipated signal and are more susceptible to remote masking of a signal. These detection tasks suggest that infants and children, unlike adults, do not listen selectively. However, less is known about children's…

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: The aim of this study was to provide a systematic review of the aspects of verbal communication contributing to listener perceptions of speaker gender with a view to providing clinicians with guidance for the selection of the training goals when working with transsexual individuals. Method: Preferred reporting items for systematic review…

Purpose: The overall goal of the current study was to identify an optimal level and duration of acoustic experience that facilitates language development for pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients--specifically, to determine whether there is an optimal duration of hearing aid (HA) use and unaided threshold levels that should be considered…

Despite the body of research on auditory-visual speech perception in infants and schoolchildren, development in the early childhood period remains relatively uncharted. In this study, English-speaking children between three and four years of age were investigated for: (i) the development of visual speech perception--lip-reading and visual…

In learning language, children must discover how to interpret the linguistic significance of phonetic variation. On some accounts, receptive phonology is grounded in perceptual learning of phonetic categories from phonetic distributions drawn over the infant's sample of speech. On other accounts, receptive phonology is instead based on phonetic…

Background: Children with unilateral cochlear implants (CIs) may have delayed vocabulary development for an extended period after implantation. Bilateral cochlear implantation is reported to be associated with improved sound localization and enhanced speech perception in noise. This study proposed that bilateral implantation might also promote…

Language impairment is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The origin of the deficit is poorly understood although deficiencies in auditory processing have been detected in both perception and cortical encoding of speech sounds. Little is known about the processing and transcription of speech sounds at earlier (brainstem) levels or…

This study examined the speech perception, speech, and language developmental progress of 25 children with hearing loss (mean Pure-Tone Average [PTA] 79.37 dB HL) in an auditory verbal therapy program. Children were tested initially and then 21 months later on a battery of assessments. The speech and language results over time were compared with…

This study investigated the multidimensional information underlying accurate speech perception as processed by children with mild to severe hearing impairments. Results suggested that the auditory dimension has a normal strength-of-processing level (thus normally distracting) but that the linguistic dimension has an underdeveloped…

A study examined perceptual-weighting strategies and performance-audibility functions of 11 children with moderate hearing impairments (HI), 11 age-matched peers, 11 adults with moderate HI, and 11 typical adults. Results showed both hearing sensitivity and age effects. Listeners with HI required lower levels of audibility to achieve similar…

A study investigated whether two speech measures (peak intraoral air pressure (IOP) and IOP duration) obtained during production of intervocalic stops would be altered by the presence or absence of a cochlear implant in five children (ages 7-10). The auditory condition affected peak IOP more than IOP duration. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

This study examined spoken-word recognition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing children matched separately for age and receptive language ability. Accuracy and reaction times on an auditory lexical decision task were compared. Children with SLI were less accurate than both control groups. Two subgroups of…