High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) is a perception-based pronunciation training which has brought about progress in both perception and production in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. This could be due to the increased exposure to second language sound varieties presented at random, which is unique to HVPT. Progress in…

One hypothesis to explain perceptual narrowing in speech perception is the distributional learning account. This account claims that both infants and adults are able to infer the number of phonemic categories through observations of frequency distributions of individual phones in their speech input (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002). Although the…

This study tested whether individuals with autism spectrum conditions (n = 23) show enhanced discrimination of acoustic differences that signal a linguistic contrast (i.e., /g/ versus /k/ as in "goat" and "coat") and whether they process such differences in a less categorical fashion as compared with 23 IQ-matched typically…

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder manifested in deficits in reading and spelling skills that is consistently associated with difficulties in phonological processing. Dyslexia is genetically transmitted, but its manifestation in a particular individual is thought to depend on the interaction of epigenetic and environmental factors. We adopt…

Older adults often face decline in cognitive resources. How does this impact their decision making--especially under high cognitive demands from concurrent activities? Do older adults' decision processes uniformly decline with increasing mental strain relative to younger adults, or do they compensate for decline by strategically reallocating…

This study examines second (L2) and third (L3) language learners' pitch perception. We test the hypothesis that a listener's discrimination of and sensitivity (d') to Japanese pitch accent reflects how pitch cues inform all words a listener knows in an additive, nonselective manner rather than how pitch cues inform words in a selective,…

Onomatopoeia are disproportionately high in number in infants' early words compared to adult language. Studies of infant language perception have proposed an iconic advantage for onomatopoeia, which may make them easier for infants to learn. This study analyses infants' early word production to show a phonological motivation for onomatopoeia in…

Purpose: We aim to identify the possible sources for age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the distinct roles of semantics (words) and prosody (tone of speech) and their interaction. Method: We implement the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (Ben-David, Multani, Shakuf, Rudzicz, & van Lieshout, 2016).…

In learning language, children must discover how to interpret the linguistic significance of phonetic variation. On some accounts, receptive phonology is grounded in perceptual learning of phonetic categories from phonetic distributions drawn over the infant's sample of speech. On other accounts, receptive phonology is instead based on phonetic…

Although hearing often declines with age, prior research has shown that older adults may benefit from multisensory input to a greater extent when compared to younger adults, a concept known as inverse effectiveness. While there is behavioral evidence in support of this phenomenon, less is known about its neural basis. The present functional MRI…

Prosody is a linguistic feature in spoken English that is complex yet plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, many EFL pronunciation classes in Thailand have not adequately emphasized the importance and functions of prosody to learners. This research study aims to investigate effect of an oral fluency instructional method…

Recent studies suggest that infants' audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants' emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds…

Purpose: Natural speech comes with variation in pitch, which serves as an important cue for speech recognition. The present study investigated older listeners' dynamic pitch perception with a focus on interindividual variability. In particular, we asked whether some of the older listeners' inability to perceive dynamic pitch stems from the higher…

In the current work, we conducted an immunocytochemical search for markers of ongoing neurogenesis (e.g. nestin) in auditory cortex from postmortem sections of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and age-matched control donors. We found nestin labeling in cells of the vascular system, indicating blood vessels plasticity. Evidence of angiogenesis was…

Studies indicate thoughtfully planned chants integrated with shared book reading help young children remember concepts and vocabulary they hear in literature, capture children's imagination, develop their rhyming acuity, and background knowledge, and increase their sense of story structure, understanding of story sequence, phonological awareness,…