This study investigates how task-irrelevant auditory information is processed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eighteen children with ASD and 19 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children were presented with semantically-congruent and incongruent picture-sound pairs, and in separate tasks were instructed to attend to…

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…

Although Skinner (1957) provided a behavioral account of verbal thinking, additional research is needed to evaluate stimuli that may influence covert verbal behavior that occurs between the onset of a verbal stimulus and the emission of a response during an episode of verbal thinking. The present investigation examined the effects of auditory…

Purpose: Reduced intensity is a hallmark of speech production in Parkinson's disease (PD). Previous work has examined the perception of intensity in PD to explain these speech deficits. This study reports loudness ratings of pure tones by individuals with PD and controls, all with normal thresholds for older adults. Method: Twenty individuals with…

We tested 4-6- and 10-12-month-old infants to investigate whether the often-reported decline in infant sensitivity to other-race faces may reflect responsiveness to static or dynamic/silent faces rather than a general process of perceptual narrowing. Across three experiments, we tested discrimination of either dynamic own-race or other-race faces…

Speech perception involves fusion of multiple sensory inputs, but fusion is not automatic, likely depending on several external and internal factors (e.g., attention, noise, age). In this study, we exploited a specific paradigm in which a short audiovisual context made of coherent or incoherent speech material is displayed before an incongruent…

Purpose: An important skill in the development of speech perception is to apply optimal weights to acoustic cues so that phonemic information is recovered from speech with minimum effort. Here, we investigated the development of acoustic cue weighting of amplitude rise time (ART) and formant rise time (FRT) cues in children as measured by mismatch…

Purpose: Published data indicate nearly adultlike frequency discrimination in infants but large child -adult differences for school-age children. This study evaluated the role that differences in measurement procedures and stimuli may have played in the apparent nonmonotonicity. Frequency discrimination was assessed in preschoolers, young…

Adults and toddlers systematically associate pseudowords such as "bouba" and "kiki" with round and spiky shapes, respectively, a sound symbolic phenomenon known as the "bouba-kiki effect." To date, whether this sound symbolic effect is a property of the infant brain present at birth or is a learned aspect of language…

Ascertaining the most effective modes of presenting rhythmic information to students is extremely important in order to facilitate rhythm training. This study examines the effects of different bimodal presentations of rhythmic information on the discrimination of rhythm patterns by primary school students. A 2 × 2 factorial design was conducted…

Addressing the disparate levels of aural skills that students may have acquired through their daily musical experiences prior to formal schooling can be difficult. Placement tests within the Western classical musical tradition typically involve structural decoding and formal concepts of elementary music theory. In this manuscript, we discuss the…

Educational entertainment or edutainment is a popular approach to allow learners experience a fun learning environment while acquiring knowledge. Currently, this approach is widely used and has promising benefits, whereby not only it provides a fun learning environment but also cause learners to hardly notice the learning process. However, as…

COVID-19 pandemic has affected the health of people all over the world. Hong Kong closed schools for face-to-face instruction to minimize spread in February 2020. Schools started teaching via Zoom, a service that offers video conferencing, online meetings, chat, and mobile collaboration. That same month, The Chinese University of Hong Kong…

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) are more likely to struggle with spoken language than their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and new language processing literature suggests that these challenges may be linked to delays in spoken word recognition. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with CIs use…

This study investigated the involvement of the Social Agency Theory within a multimedia learning environment to improve English language proficiency. The primary aim of this study is to find the effects of designing language learning instructional videos following the embodiment principle on language learners' motivation, cognitive load and…