Purpose: For elderly listeners, it is more challenging to listen to 1 voice surrounded by other voices than for young listeners. This could be caused by a reduced ability to use acoustic cues--such as slight differences in onset time--for the segregation of concurrent speech signals. Here, we study whether the ability to benefit from onset…

This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production studies have shown that both Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children mark focus by prosodic information (Ouyang and Kaiser in Lang Cogn Neurosc 30(1-2):57-72, 2014; Yang and…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate limited playfulness. Their difficulty engaging in meaningful interaction with others renders playful engagement in social interactions a challenge. Although little direct evidence exists regarding the promotion of these children's playful engagement, links can be established with many traits…

Touch cues might facilitate infants' early word comprehension and explain the early understanding of body part words. Parents were instructed to teach their infants, 4- to 5-month-olds or 10- to 11-month-olds, nonce words for body parts and a contrast object. Importantly, they were given no instructions about the use of touch. Parents…

This article examines how semantic memory processes influence the items that are considered by decision makers in memory-based preferential choice. Experiments 1A through 1C ask participants to list the choice items that come to their minds while deliberating in a variety of everyday choice settings. These experiments use semantic space models to…

The hypothesis that known words can serve as anchors for discovering new words in connected speech has computational and empirical support. However, evidence for how the bootstrapping effect of known words interacts with other mechanisms of lexical acquisition, such as statistical learning, is incomplete. In 3 experiments, we investigated the…

Children and adults use established global knowledge to generate real-time linguistic predictions, but less is known about how listeners generate predictions in circumstances that semantically conflict with long-standing event knowledge. We explore these issues in adults and 5- to 10-year-old children using an eye-tracked sentence comprehension…

Cued Speech (CS) is a communication system developed for deaf people, which exploits hand cues to complement speechreading at the phonetic level. Currently, it is estimated that CS has been adapted to over 60 languages; however, no official CS system is available for Mandarin Chinese. This article proposes a novel and efficient Mandarin Chinese CS…

Language plays a crucial role in remembering, storing, maintaining, accessing, and sharing of memories. This evidence comes from the disciplines of psychoanalysis (Javier et al., 1993; Schwaneberg, 2010), developmental psychology (Fivush, 2011; Nelson, 2004), and bilingual memory (Larsen et al., 2002; Marian & Neisser, 2000). Some of the most…

When a smart device talks, what should its voice sound like? Voice-enabled devices are becoming a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. Simultaneously, speech synthesis technology is rapidly improving, making it possible to generate increasingly varied and realistic computerized voices. Despite the flexibility and richness of expression that…

Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are heterogeneous in nature and commonly result in deficits to multiple areas of cognition including memory, linguistic processing, and executive functioning. For individuals with TBI, returning to everyday activities can be a challenge with their quality of life reduced by a variety of impairments including…

Visual conduct, including the use of gaze to attend to bodily-visual cues and other semiotic resources in interaction, has long been a topic of interest in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA). Past EMCA work has examined visual conduct in face-to-face interaction, shedding light on the use of gaze to secure recipiency, facilitate…

Presentation of a previously trained Pavlovian conditioned stimulus while an organism is engaged in operant responding can moderate the rate of responding, a phenomenon known as Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer. Although it is well known that Pavlovian contingencies will generate conditioned behavior that is temporally organized with respect to…

In cocaine use disorder, relapse can be elicited by drug-associated cues despite long periods of abstinence. The persistence of drug-associated cues in eliciting drug seeking suggests enduring changes in structural and functional plasticity, which may be mediated by basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF, FGF2). Stimulant drug use increases bFGF…

Repeatedly studying information is a good way to strengthen memory storage. Nevertheless, testing recall often produces superior long-term retention. Demonstrations of this testing effect, typically with verbal stimuli, have shown that repeated retrieval through testing reduces forgetting. Sleep also benefits memory storage, perhaps through…