Humans find some sounds more pleasing than others; such preferences may underlie our enjoyment of music. To gain insight into the evolutionary origins of these preferences, we explored whether they are present in other animals. We designed a novel method to measure the spontaneous sound preferences of cotton-top tamarins, a species that has been…

In this paper we attempt to relate the prelexical processing of speech, with particular emphasis on functional neuroimaging studies, to the study of auditory perceptual systems by disciplines in the speech and hearing sciences. The elaboration of the sound-to-meaning pathways in the human brain enables their integration into models of the human…

Auditory comprehension is commonly measured with multiple choice tasks. The sensitivity of these tasks in identifying deficits, however, is limited by credit given for correct guesses by forced choice. In this study, we compare performance on the multiple choice task to an alternative word/picture verification task, in 122 subjects with acute left…

A number of studies reported that developmental dyslexics are impaired in speech perception, especially for speech signals consisting of rapid auditory transitions. These studies mostly made use of a categorical-perception task with synthetic-speech samples. In this study, we show that deficits in the perception of synthetic speech do not…

We present data from four experiments using cross-modal priming to examine the effects of competitor environment on lexical activation during the time course of the perception of a spoken word. The research is conducted from the perspective of a distributed model of speech perception and lexical representation, which focuses on activation at the…

Recent research has demonstrated that students with normal hearing ability benefit from the use of classroom amplification systems. Amplification systems allow teachers to control, stabilize, and equalize the classroom acoustical environment so their voices are clearly audible over background noise at all locations within the classroom. Studies…

Purpose: To examine reductions in performance on auditory tasks by aphasic and neurologically intact individuals as a result of concomitant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner noise. Method: Four tasks together forming a continuum of linguistic complexity were developed. They included complex-tone pitch discrimination, same-different…

Phonology has been a central concept in the scientific study of dyslexia over the past decades. Despite its central position, however, it is a concept with no precise definition or status. The present article investigates the notion of "phonology" in the tradition of cognitive psychology. An attempt is made to characterize the basic assumptions of…

Nonword repetition skills were examined in 24 pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users and 18 normal-hearing (NH) adult listeners listening through a CI simulator. Two separate groups of NH adult listeners assigned accuracy ratings to the nonword responses of the pediatric CI users and the NH adult speakers. Overall, the nonword repetitions of…

Many factors that contribute towards the perception of second language (L2) sounds and the subsequent establishment of L2 phonetic categories have been the focus of past research. However, learning a third language, unlike SLA, may be influenced by additional factors attributed to the presence of two language systems in a bilingual instead of one…

The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural…

Developments within education, psychology and the neurosciences have shed a great deal of light on how we learn while, at the same time, confirming for us all that learning is a profoundly complex process and far from understood. Against this background, and in this position article, we consider the recent rise in interest in the concept of…

Speech production involves the integration of auditory, somatosensory, and motor information in the brain. This article describes a model of speech motor control in which a feedforward control system, involving premotor and primary motor cortex and the cerebellum, works in concert with auditory and somatosensory feedback control systems that…

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f-s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual…

The present paper reviews a set of studies designed to investigate different aspects of the capacity for processing Western music. This includes perceiving the relationships between a theme and its variations, perceiving musical tensions and relaxations, generating musical expectancies, integrating local structures in large-scale structures,…