Purpose: Sentence comprehension deficits are common following a left hemisphere stroke and have primarily been investigated under optimal listening conditions. However, ample work in neurotypical controls indicates that background noise affects sentence comprehension and the cognitive resources it engages. The purpose of this study was to examine…

Purpose: This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in…

Purpose: Fatigue related to speech processing is an understudied area that may have significant negative effects, especially in children who spend the majority of their school days listening to classroom instruction. Method: This study examined the feasibility of using auditory P300 responses and behavioral indices (lapses of attention and…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine explanations for pure-tone average-spondee threshold differences in functional hearing loss. Method: Loudness magnitude estimation functions were obtained from 24 participants for pure tones (0.5 and 1.0 kHz), vowels, spondees, and speech-shaped noise as a function of level (20-90 dB SPL).…

Purpose: Our goal was to test prevailing assumptions about the underlying biomechanical and aeroacoustic mechanisms associated with phonotraumatic lesions of the vocal folds using a numerical lumped-element model of voice production. Method: A numerical model with a triangular glottis, posterior glottal opening, and arytenoid posturing is…

Purpose: Fatigue related to speech processing is an understudied area that may have significant negative effects, especially in children who spend the majority of their school days listening to classroom instruction. Method: This study examined the feasibility of using auditory P300 responses and behavioral indices (lapses of attention and…

Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the case of incidental learning. One hundred and…

Purpose: A central question about auditory perception concerns how acoustic information is represented at different stages of processing. The auditory brainstem response (ABR) provides a potentially useful index of the earliest stages of this process. However, it is unclear how basic acoustic characteristics (e.g., differences in tones spanning a…

Purpose: Human auditory nerve (AN) activity estimated from the amplitude of the first prominent negative peak (N1) of the compound action potential (CAP) is typically quantified using either a peak-to-peak measurement or a baseline-corrected measurement. However, the reliability of these 2 common measurement techniques has not been evaluated but…

Purpose: Researchers have long noted speech recognition variability that is not explained by the pure-tone audiogram. Previous work (Souza, Wright, Blackburn, Tatman, & Gallun, 2015) demonstrated that a small number of listeners with sensorineural hearing loss utilized different types of acoustic cues to identify speechlike stimuli,…

Can a bodily engagement with music affect the process of musical meaning formation and, as such, affect children's graphic representation of music? To address this question a comparative study was conducted in which primary school children (n = 52; age = 9-10) without any formal music education participated in a verbal-based (describe the music…

This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The…

Theories of working memory often disagree on the relationships between processing and storage, particularly on how heavily they rely on an attention-based limited resource. Some posit separation and specialization of resources resulting in minimal interference to memory when completing an ongoing processing task, while others argue for a greater…

Sequences of auditory objects such as one-syllable words or brief sounds disrupt serial recall of visually presented targets even when the auditory objects are completely irrelevant for the task at hand. The "token set size effect" is a label for the claim that disruption increases only when moving from a 1-token distractor sequence…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to introduce a method of eliciting conversational behavior with many aspects of realism, which may be used to study the impacts of hearing impairment and noise on verbal communication; to describe the characteristics of speech and language participants produced during the task; and to assess participants'…