Purpose: Atypical temporal processing is thought to be involved in the phonological difficulties that characterize children with developmental dyslexia (DYS). The temporal sampling (TS) theory of dyslexia posits that the processing of low-frequency envelope modulations is impaired, but the processing of binaural temporal fine structure (TFS) is…

Cognitive conceptions of action and perception have been seen for a long time as separate, peripheral processes. Here, we will introduce a new perspective on perception and action as an interacting developmental process. Evolutionary and neurophysiological research studies have demonstrated that cognitive processes arise from motor development.…

Humans implicitly pick up on probabilities of stimuli and events, yet it remains unclear how statistical learning builds expectations that affect perception. Across 29 experiments, we examine the influence of task-irrelevant distributions--defined across acoustic frequency--on both tone detection in noise and tone duration judgments. The shape and…

Studying early language development has been a challenging task throughout the years. Earlier studies mostly documented language competence only after toddlers had started producing their first words. Theoretical and methodological advances in this domain brought about more sophisticated ways of probing into early development by exploiting overt…

Purpose: The significance of extended high-frequency (EHF) hearing (> 8 kHz) is not well understood so far. In this study, we aimed to understand the relationship between EHF hearing loss (EHFHL) and speech perception in noise (SPIN) and the associated physiological signatures using the speech-evoked frequency-following response (sFFR). Method:…

Although vocabulary size is thought to index children's language abilities, an increasing body of work suggests that regularities in children's vocabulary composition, particularly the proportion of shape-based nouns (e.g., cup), support language development. Here we examine initial vocabulary composition in children with hearing loss following…

This dissertation examines the associations between pragmatic meaning categories in English and specific realizations of prosodic prominence. It has been well-established that in Mainstream American English (MAE), prominence is often used to convey contrast. A more limited set of studies suggests that prosodic prominence may also be capable of…

Background: Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) has been used in the treatment of stuttering, providing different results across different populations and age groups. Aims: This study examines the impact of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) on stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) in the spontaneous speech of Jordanian individuals who stutter. Methods…

Elevated "neural noise" has been advanced as an explanation of autism and autistic sensory experiences. However, functional neuroimaging measures of neural noise may be vulnerable to contamination by recording noise. This study explored variability of electrophysiological responses to tones of different intensities in 127 autistic and 79…

Previous studies reported mixed findings on autistic individuals' pitch perception relative to neurotypical (NT) individuals. We investigated whether this may be partly due to individual differences in cognitive abilities by comparing their performance on various pitch perception tasks on a large sample (n = 164) of autistic and NT children and…

Current theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suggest atypical use of context in ASD, but little is known about how these atypicalities influence speech perception. We examined the influence of contextual information (lexical, spectral, and temporal) on phoneme categorization of people with ASD and in typically developed (TD) people. Across…

Audio description (AD) plays a crucial role in making audiovisual media accessible to people with a visual impairment, enhancing their experience and understanding. This study employs an event segmentation task to examine how people without sight perceive and segment narrative events in films with AD, compared to sighted viewers without AD. Two AD…

This narrative review analyzes the visual and auditory advantages that autistic people with speech divergence (A-SD) may have compared with autistic people without speech divergence (A-NoSD) or non-autistic people. Importantly, A-SDs' intelligence and communication skills are often underestimated in research and practice. Further, this paper…

Purpose: "Dynamic pitch," which is defined as the variation in fundamental frequency in speech, is one of the acoustic cues that affect speech recognition in noise. Built on the evidence that a symmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch led to poorer speech recognition, the present study examined the effect of an asymmetrical manipulation…

Auditory steady-state response (ASSR) has been studied as a potential biomarker for abnormal auditory sensory processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with mixed results. Motivated by prior somatosensory findings of group differences in inter-trial coherence (ITC) between ASD and typically developing (TD) individuals at twice the steady-state…