Purpose: This study investigates the debate that musicians have an advantage in speech-in-noise perception from years of targeted auditory training. We also consider the effect of age on any such advantage, comparing musicians and nonmusicians (age range: 18-66 years), all of whom had normal hearing. We manipulate the degree of fundamental…

Purpose: Reduced use of visible articulatory information on a speaker's face has been implicated as a possible contributor to language deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We employ an audiovisual (AV) phonemic restoration paradigm to measure behavioral performance (button press) and event-related potentials (ERPs) of visual speech…

Purpose: Current evidence regarding the influence of hearing loss on the pupil response elicited by speech perception is inconsistent. This might be partially due to confounding effects of age. This study aimed to compare pupil responses in age-matched groups of normal-hearing (NH) and hard of hearing (HH) listeners during listening to speech.…

Purpose: The ability to understand speech under adverse listening conditions is highly variable across listeners. Despite this, studies have found that listeners with normal hearing display consistency in their ability to perceive speech across different types of degraded speech, suggesting that, for at least these listeners, global skills may be…

Purpose: Auditory feedback is thought to contribute to the online control of speech production. Yet, the standard method of estimating auditory feedback control (i.e., reflexive responses to auditory-motor perturbations), although sound, requires specialized instrumentation, meticulous calibration, unnatural tasks, and specific acoustic…

We examined how movement impacted listeners' perceptions of choral performances. Participants (N = 115; n = 60 nonmusic majors, n = 55 music majors) viewed excerpts of Moses Hogan's "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" under four conditions: good tone/expressive movement (GT/EM), good tone/static movement (GT/SM), poor tone/expressive…

Purpose: The effect of onset asynchrony on dichotic vowel segregation and identification in normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners was examined. We hypothesized that fusion would decrease and identification performance would improve with increasing onset asynchrony. Additionally, we hypothesized that HI listeners would gain more…

Purpose: To better understand hypernasality (HN), we explored the relations between velopharyngeal orifice, auditory perception of HN, and acoustic-spectral measures in an in vivo within-subject design: (1) with a normally functioning velum as the control condition; and (2) with a temporarily paralyzed velum as the experimental condition. Method:…

Before they even talk, infants become sensitive to the speech sounds of their native language and recognize the auditory form of an increasing number of words. Traditionally, these early perceptual changes are attributed to an emerging knowledge of linguistic categories such as phonemes or words. However, there is growing skepticism surrounding…

The present study examined the posited structure of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Fifth Edition (WISC-V) ancillary index scores with normative sample participants aged 6-16 years (N = 2200) using a series of confirmatory factor analyzes (CFA) with maximum likelihood estimation. CFA results supported the retention of auditory…

Speech perception research has commonly relied on untrained listeners to provide impressionistic judgments of second language (L2) speech, and training listeners has been rare. The current study therefore explores the implications of training novice listeners (NLs) to rate accented speech. A total of 60 listeners were recruited, 30 who remained…

Purpose: Developmental dyslexia is proposed to involve selective procedural memory deficits with intact declarative memory. Recent research in the domain of category learning has demonstrated that adults with dyslexia have selective deficits in Information-Integration (II) category learning that is proposed to rely on procedural learning…

Purpose: This study examined speech changes induced by deep-brain stimulation (DBS) in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) using a set of auditory-perceptual and acoustic measures. Method: Speech recordings from nine speakers with PD and DBS were compared between DBS-On and DBS-Off conditions using auditory-perceptual and acoustic analyses.…

Purpose: This study builds upon an established effective training method to investigate the advantages of high variability phonetic identification training for enhancing lexical tone perception and production in Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who typically face ongoing challenges in these areas. Method: Thirty-two…

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…