Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) facilitate the detection of environmental information through enhancement of touch and/or hearing capabilities. Research has demonstrated that several tasks can be successfully completed using acoustic, vibrotactile, and multimodal devices. The suitability of a substituting modality is also mediated by the type…

Purpose: Dysphonic voices typically present multiple voice quality dimensions. This study investigated potential interactions between perceived breathiness and roughness and their contributions to overall dysphonia severity. Method: Synthetic stimuli based on four talkers were created to systematically map out potential interactions. For each…

Learning new information constitutes a fundamental part of children's school years. Recently, studies have found beneficial effects of emotion on learning and memory. Here, we specifically examined the effect of positive emotional prosody on content learning in two groups of Swedish school children (ages 8-10 and 11-13 years). The participants…

Mind-wandering (MW) is a universal cognitive process that is estimated to comprise [approximately] 30% of our everyday thoughts. Despite its prevalence, the functional utility of MW remains a scientific blind spot. The present study sought to investigate whether MW serves a functional role in cognition. Specifically, we investigated whether MW…

A lack of response to voices, and a great interest for music are part of the behavioral expressions, commonly (self-)reported in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These atypical interests for vocal and musical sounds could be attributable to different levels of acoustical noise, quantified in the harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR). No previous study has…

Emotion labels can be helpful for creating emotion categories. Russell and Widen (2002) demonstrated the label superiority effect; that is, emotion labels produce a more precise categorization of emotional faces than the corresponding emotional faces. The current study aimed to test the label superiority effect on emotional voices and examined…

The Listen to Learn for Life Assessment Framework outlines how to systematically assess the links between the classroom environment, listening, learning, and wellbeing. The aims of this paper were to (i) understand what is known and what is not known about how the characterised activity impacts primary school children's learning and wellbeing, and…

Objectives: This study aimed to determine the cognitive awareness of digital drugs as a phenomenon among Sultan Qaboos University undergraduate students. It also aimed to identify differences based on certain variables such as gender, college affiliation, ownership of social media accounts, and average Internet usage among students. Method: This…

Purpose: Maturation of the ability to recognize target speech in the presence of a two-talker speech masker extends into early adolescence. This study evaluated whether children benefit from differences in fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) contour depth between the target and masker speech, a cue that has been shown to improve recognition in…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group.…

This exploratory study quantitatively assesses the behavioral components of listening as enacted through silence and grounds that analysis in the framework of culture as shared listening cognitive constructs. We analyzed the listening practices in video-recorded focus group interactions to determine whether quantifiable listening behaviors…

Purpose: Current models of speech development argue for an early link between speech production and perception in infants. Recent data show that young infants (at 4-6 months) preferentially attend to speech sounds (vowels) with infant vocal properties compared to those with adult vocal properties, suggesting the presence of special "memory…

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological…

Purpose: Envelope following responses (EFRs) could be useful for objectively evaluating audibility of speech in children who are unable to participate in routine clinical tests. However, relative to adults, the characteristics of EFRs elicited by frequency-specific speech and their utility in predicting audibility in children are unknown. Method:…

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…