As reading is inherently a multisensory, audiovisual (AV) process where visual symbols (i.e., letters) are connected to speech sounds, the question has been raised whether individuals with reading difficulties, like children with developmental dyslexia (DD), have broader impairments in multisensory processing. This question has been posed before,…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Previous studies demonstrated that dual-task impairments are higher in children than in young adults. A previous study systematically assessed the sources of these larger dual-task impairments by identifying age-related differences in capacity limitations during dual-task processing. Capacity limitations in central cognitive processes were present…

Purpose: The "bouba-kiki" (BK) effect refers to associations between visual shapes and auditory pseudonames. Thus, when tested, people tend to associate the pseudowords "bouba" and "kiki" with round or spiky shapes, respectively. This association requires cross-modal sensory integration. The ability to integrate…

This study examined the effect of increasing visual perceptual load on auditory awareness for social and non-social stimuli in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 63) and typically developing (TD, n = 62) adolescents. Using an inattentional deafness paradigm, a socially meaningful ('Hi') or a non-social (neutral tone) critical…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Purpose: Bound morphemes are challenging for children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) to acquire and to use successfully. The challenge arises in part from limited access to spoken word forms as a result of reduced audibility during perception, but successful comprehension requires access to both the morphological forms and the mapping…

The research focuses on the diagnostics and stimulation of socially disadvantaged children of a preschool age, which is a crucial component of inclusive education. The aim of the research was to experimentally verify through input and output orientation diagnostics the effectiveness of the stimulation program for 5 to 6 year old socially…

Dyslexia has been associated with a problem in visual-audio integration mechanisms. Here, we investigate for the first time the contribution of unisensory cues on multisensory audio and visual integration in 32 dyslexic children by modelling results using the Bayesian approach. Non-linguistic stimuli were used. Children performed a temporal task:…

Previous research has variably indicated the role of working memory in error detection by which working memory played a role in rhythmic error detection but not melodic error detection. Here, we devised a longer melodic error detection task for college musicians in an auditory, rather than visual, condition using classical excerpts, which we…

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…

Autism spectrum disorder is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder that has been linked to a range of perceptual processing alterations, including hypo- and hyperresponsiveness to sensory stimulation. A recently proposed theory that attempts to account for these symptoms, states that autistic individuals have a decreased ability to anticipate…

Purpose: Prelingual deaf children with cochlear implants show lower digit span test scores compared to normal-hearing peers, suggesting a working memory impairment. To pinpoint more precisely the subprocesses responsible for this impairment, we designed a sequence reproduction task with varying length (two to six stimuli), modality (auditory or…

This study investigates how task-irrelevant auditory information is processed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eighteen children with ASD and 19 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children were presented with semantically-congruent and incongruent picture-sound pairs, and in separate tasks were instructed to attend to…

Objectives: We provide a novel application of psycholinguistic theories and methods to the field of auditory training to provide preliminary data regarding which minimal pair contrasts are more difficult for listeners with typical hearing to distinguish in real-time. Design: Using eye-tracking, participants heard a word and selected the…