This article examines the relationship between individual differences in speech perception and sublexical/phonological processing in reading. We used an auditory phoneme identification task in which a /ba/-/pa/ syllable continuum measured sensitivity to classify participants into three performance groups: poor, medium, and good categorizers. A…

Previous research has argued that fundamental frequency is a critical component of phonetic accommodation. We tested this hypothesis in an auditory naming task with two conditions. Participants in an Unfiltered Condition completed an auditory naming task with a single male model talker. A second group of participants was assigned to a Filtered…

Numerous studies have indicated that maintaining a fear memory after retrieval requires de novo protein synthesis. However, no study to date has examined how the temporal dynamics of repeated retrieval events affect this protein synthesis requirement. The present study varied the timing of a second retrieval of an established auditory fear memory…

The labial-coronal effect has originally been described as a bias to initiate a word with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant (LC) sequence. This bias has been explained with constraints on the human speech production system, and its perceptual correlates have motivated the suggestion of a perception-production link. However, previous…

Purpose: Older adults exhibit difficulty understanding speech that has been experimentally degraded. Age-related changes to the speech mechanism lead to natural degradations in signal quality. We tested the hypothesis that older adults with hearing loss would exhibit declines in speech recognition when listening to the speech of older adults,…

The placebo effect is any outcome that is not attributed to a specific treatment but rather to an individual's mindset (Benson & Friedman, 1996). This phenomenon can extend beyond its typical use in pharmaceutical drugs to involve aspects of everyday life, such as the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning. In 2 studies examining whether…

Composing with different modes--image, sound, video and the written word--to respond to and analyze literary and informational text helps students develop as readers and digital communicators. This article showcases five multimodal strategies for engaging children in rich literature-based learning using digital tools and Internet resources.

This study examined unisensory and multisensory speech perception in 8-17 year old children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and typically developing controls matched on chronological age, sex, and IQ. Consonant-vowel syllables were presented in visual only, auditory only, matched audiovisual, and mismatched audiovisual ("McGurk")…

Source memory zROC slopes change from below 1 to above 1 depending on which source gets the strongest learning. This effect has been attributed to memory processes, either in terms of a threshold source recollection process or changes in the variability of continuous source evidence. We propose 2 decision mechanisms that can produce the slope…

Literature on auditory distraction has generally focused on the effects of particular kinds of sounds on attention to target stimuli. In support of extensive previous findings that have demonstrated the special role of language as an auditory distractor, we found that a concurrent speech stream impaired recall of a short lecture, especially for…

Background: Although a general consensus holds that emotional reactivity in youth with conduct disorder (CD) symptoms arises as one of the main causes of successive aggression, it remains to be determined whether automatic emotional processing is altered in this population. Methods: We measured auditory event-related potentials (ERP) in 20 young…

Visual cues from the speaker's face, such as the discriminable mouth movements used to produce speech sounds, improve discrimination of these sounds by adults. The speaker's face, however, provides more information than just the mouth movements used to produce speech--it also provides a visual indexical cue of the identity of the speaker. The…

The Auditory Behavior Questionnaire (ABQ) evaluates abnormal behavioral responses to auditory stimulation in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This study reports preliminary reliability, construct validity and standardization of the ABQ. Parents of children with ASD aged 7-21 years (n = 165) completed the ABQ on-line. Cronbach's alpha…

This paper presents a 2007 study that was conducted amongst 147 young anglophone, francophone and allophone Montrealers in order to shed light on their attitudes towards English and French in terms of status and solidarity. The study made use of both a questionnaire and a matched-guise experiment. The findings indicate that while a certain amount…

Memory is thought to be sparsely encoded throughout multiple brain regions forming unique memory trace. Although evidence has established that the amygdala is a key brain site for memory storage and retrieval of auditory conditioned fear memory, it remains elusive whether the auditory brain regions may be involved in fear memory storage or…