Auditory stimuli that are relevant to a listener have the potential to capture focal attention even when unattended, the listener's own name being a particularly effective stimulus. We report two experiments to test the attention-capturing potential of the listener's own name in normal speech and time-compressed speech. In Experiment 1, 39…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate infants' neural responses to changes in emotional prosody in spoken words. The focus was on understanding developmental changes and potential sex differences, aspects that were not consistently observed in previous behavioral studies. Method: A modified multifeature oddball paradigm was used with emotional…

While our perceptual experience seems to unfold continuously over time, episodic memory preserves distinct events for storage and recollection. Previous work shows that stability in encoding context serves to temporally bind individual items into sequential composite events. This phenomenon has been almost exclusively studied using visual and…

A child's ability to comprehend speech in the mainstream classroom is vital for intellectual and social development. However, listening conditions are often sub-optimal; the presence of multiple talkers, high noise levels, and long reverberation times add to the challenge of listening with a developing auditory system. An assessment that captures…

Background and aims: Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but…

Background: Diadochokinetic (DDK) rate tasks are extensively used in the evaluation of speech disorders; however, it is unclear how the different types of speech stimuli affect DDK rate performance. Aims: To investigate the effect of age, gender and type of stimuli (non-words versus real words) on the DDK rates in individuals across the lifespan…

While known to influence visual lexical processing, the semantic information we associate with words has recently been found to influence auditory lexical processing as well. The present work explored the influence of "semantic richness" in auditory lexical decision. Study 1 recreated an experiment investigating semantic richness effects…

Purpose: Maturation of the ability to recognize target speech in the presence of a two-talker speech masker extends into early adolescence. This study evaluated whether children benefit from differences in fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) contour depth between the target and masker speech, a cue that has been shown to improve recognition in…

Purpose: Current models of speech development argue for an early link between speech production and perception in infants. Recent data show that young infants (at 4-6 months) preferentially attend to speech sounds (vowels) with infant vocal properties compared to those with adult vocal properties, suggesting the presence of special "memory…

Purpose: Envelope following responses (EFRs) could be useful for objectively evaluating audibility of speech in children who are unable to participate in routine clinical tests. However, relative to adults, the characteristics of EFRs elicited by frequency-specific speech and their utility in predicting audibility in children are unknown. Method:…

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…

Children with complex communication needs often have multiple disabilities including visual impairments that impact their ability to interact with aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. Just as the field benefited from a consideration of visual cognitive neuroscience in construction of visual displays, an exploration of…

What are the vocal experiences of children growing up on Malakula island, Vanuatu, where multilingualism is the norm? Long-form audio-recordings captured spontaneous speech behavior by, and around, 38 children (5-33 months, 23 girls) from 11 villages. Automated analyses revealed most children's vocal input came from female adults and other…

Purpose: Listening is the gateway to learning in the mainstream classroom; however, classrooms are noisy environments, making listening challenging. Therefore, speech-in-noise tests that realistically incorporate the complexity of the classroom listening environment are needed. The aim of this article was to review the speech stimuli, noise…

Two visual world experiments investigated the activation of semantically related concepts during the processing of environmental sounds and spoken words. Participants heard environmental sounds such as barking or spoken words such as "puppy" while viewing visual arrays with objects such as a bone (semantically related competitor) and…