Gesture and prosody are considered to be important precursors in early language development. In the present study, we ask whether those cues play a similar role later in children's acquisition of more complex pragmatic skills, such as politeness. 64 three- to five-year-old Catalan-dominant children participated in a request production task in four…

Purpose: Three experiments were carried out to evaluate the low-frequency pitch perception of adults with unilateral hearing loss who received a cochlear implant (CI). Method: Participants were recruited from a cohort of CI users with unilateral hearing loss and normal hearing in the contralateral ear. First, low-frequency pitch perception was…

Purpose: Recent studies confirm the utility of speech-language intervention in primary progressive aphasia (PPA); however, long-term outcomes, ideal dosage parameters, and relative benefits of intervention across clinical variants warrant additional investigation. The purpose of this study was to determine whether naming treatment affords…

Purpose: Previous evidence supports benefits of bilateral hearing aids, relative to unilateral hearing aid use, in laboratory environments using audio-only (AO) stimuli and relatively simple tasks. The purpose of this study was to evaluate bilateral hearing aid benefits in ecologically relevant laboratory settings, with and without visual cues. In…

It was shown previously that observers can learn to exploit an uneven spatial distribution of singleton distractors to better shield visual search from distractors in the frequent versus the rare region (i.e., distractor location probability cueing; Sauter, Liesefeld, Zehetleitner, & Müller, 2018). However, with distractors defined in the same…

The ability to enact cognitive control under changing environmental demands is commonly studied using set-shifting paradigms. While the control processes required for task set reconfiguration (switch costs) have been studied extensively, less research has focused on the control required during task repetition in blocks containing multiple tasks as…

Given the well-documented consonant primacy established in Roman script, this study examined the role of consonants and vowels in lexical decision of Korean "Hangul" among skilled Korean readers in order to identify whether the salient role of consonants over vowels would be script-universal or script-specific. Three experiments were…

Previous findings indicate that bilingual Catalan/Spanish-learning infants attend more to the highly salient audiovisual redundancy cues normally available in a talker's mouth than do monolingual infants. Presumably, greater attention to such cues renders the challenge of learning two languages easier. Spanish and Catalan are, however,…

Purpose: For listeners with single-sided deafness, a cochlear implant (CI) can improve speech understanding by giving the listener access to the ear with the better target-to-masker ratio (TMR; head shadow) or by providing interaural difference cues to facilitate the perceptual separation of concurrent talkers (squelch). CI simulations presented…

Previous studies have provided evidence that introspection about dual-task performance in the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm is severely limited. The present study investigated introspection at the other pole of the multitasking continuum, namely task switching. In 2 experiments, participants provided estimates of their response…

Technological agents could be effective tools to be used in interventions for enhancing social orienting for some young children with ASD. We examined response to social bids in preschool children with ASD and typical development (TD) at a very early age (i.e., around 3 years) using social prompts presented by technological agents of various forms…

Listeners are known to track statistical regularities in speech. Yet, which temporal cues are encoded is unclear. This study tested effects of talker-specific habitual speech rate and talker-independent average speech rate (heard over a longer period of time) on the perception of the temporal Dutch vowel contrast /?/-/a:/. First, Experiment 1…

Research has shown a bi-directional association between the (perceived) amount of invested effort to learn or retrieve information (e.g., time, mental effort) and metacognitive monitoring judgments. The direction of this association likely depends on how learners allocate their effort. In self-paced learning, effort allocation is usually data…

This study explored the effects of prior knowledge and cueing on the learning (retention, transfer, and matching) and mental effort of learners who studied an instructional animation with accompanying narration about photosynthesis. A 4 × 2 between-subjects factorial design with four levels of cueing (no cueing, label cueing, picture cueing, and…

Failure to learn and generalize abstract relational rules has critical implications for education. In this study, we aimed to determine which training conditions facilitate relational transfer in a relatively simple (patterning) discrimination versus a relatively complex (biconditional) discrimination. The amount of training participants received…