Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…

Several studies have shown that maintaining in memory some attributes of speech, such as the content or pitch of an interlocutor's message, is markedly reduced in the presence of background sounds made of spectrotemporal variations. However, experimental paradigms showing this interference have only focused on one attribute of speech at a time,…

Using a non-speech-specific measure of prosody, rise time perception, Goswami and her colleagues have found that individuals with dyslexia perform significantly worse than nonimpaired readers. Studies have also found that children and adults with specific language impairment were impaired on these tasks. Despite the high comorbidity of these…

This study investigated phonological components of reading skill at two ages, using a novel pseudoword repetition task for assessing phonological memory (PM). Pseudowords were designed to incorporate control over segmental, prosodic and lexical features. In Experiment 1, the materials were administered to 3- and 4-year-old children together with a…

This study considered how far nonverbal cognitive, language and reading abilities are affected by common genetic influences in a sample of 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of rhythm and tonality on an academic memory task by comparing three different treatment conditions: a poem, a rhythmic chant (or rap), and a melodic rhythm (or song). A quasi-experimental experiment was designed and implemented, specifically a pretest-posttest-posttest control-group design.…

In Experiment 1, rats were trained in a symbolic delayed matching-to-sample task to discriminate sample stimuli that consisted of sequences of magazine light flashes. The intertrial interval was illuminated by the houselight for Group Light, and it was dark for Group Dark. Retention functions exhibited a choose-many response bias when the delay…

We examined effects of age and culture on children's memory for the pitch level of familiar music. Canadian 9- and 10-year-olds distinguished the original pitch level of familiar television theme songs from foils that were pitch-shifted by one semitone, whereas 5- to 8-year-olds failed to do so (Experiment 1). In contrast, Japanese 5- and…

Few attempts have been made to look systematically at the relationship between musical and intonation analysis skills, a relationship that has been to date suggested only by informal observations. Following Mackenzie Beck (2003), who showed that musical ability was a useful predictor of general phonetic skills, we report on two studies…

Pitch constancy, perceiving the same pitch from tones with differing spectral shapes, requires one to extract the fundamental frequency from two sets of harmonics and compare them. We previously showed this difficult task to be easier when tonal context is present, presumably because the context creates a tonal reference point from which to judge…