Purpose: Several investigators have compared infants' detection of speech in speech and nonspeech maskers to evaluate developmental differences in masking. Such comparisons have produced contradictory results, possibly because each investigation used different stimuli. The current study examined target and masker effects on infants' and adults'…

The current study sought to evaluate the efficacy of a stimulus equivalence training procedure in establishing auditory-tactile-visual stimulus classes with 2 children with autism and developmental delays. Participants were exposed to vocal-tactile (A-B) and tactile-picture (B-C) conditional discrimination training and were tested for the…

Purpose: A frequent complaint by older adults is difficulty communicating in challenging acoustic environments. The purpose of this work was to review and summarize information about how speech perception in complex listening situations changes across the adult age range. Method: This article provides a review of age-related changes in speech…

Purpose: Most research examining long-term-memory effects on nonword repetition (NWR) has focused on lexical-level variables. Phoneme-level variables have received little attention, although there are reasons to expect significant sublexical effects in NWR. To further understand the underlying processes of NWR, this study examined effects of…

Background: Stroke is currently the leading cause of long-term disability in adults in the United States. There is a need for accessible, low-cost treatments of stroke-related disabilities such as aphasia. Aims: To explore an intervention for aphasia utilizing mindfulness meditation (MM). This preliminary study examines the feasibility of teaching…

It has been recently theorized that atypical sensory processing in autism relates to difficulties in social communication. Through a series of tasks concurrently assessing multisensory temporal processes, multisensory integration and speech perception in 76 children with and without autism, we provide the first behavioral evidence of such a link.…

Purpose: Our goal is to present the relationships between working memory (WM) and auditory processing abilities in school-age children. Review and Discussion: We begin with an overview of auditory processing, the conceptualization of auditory processing disorder, and the assessment of auditory processing abilities in children. Next, we describe a…

To understand spoken language, listeners combine acoustic-phonetic input with expectations derived from context (Dahan & Magnuson, 2006). Eye-tracking studies on semantic context have demonstrated that the activation levels of competing lexical candidates depend on the relative strengths of the bottom-up input and top-down expectations (cf.…

This study examines whether Japanese native (L1) listeners can implicitly learn stress pattern regularities, not present in their L1, after a brief auditory exposure. In the exposure phase, the participants listened to and repeated words bearing stress patterned after Latin, but with a highly restricted consonant inventory. They performed a…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to examine the neural mechanisms associated with increases in speech intelligibility brought about through alphabet supplementation. Method: Neurotypical participants listened to dysarthric speech while watching an accompanying video of a hand pointing to the 1st letter spoken of each word on an alphabet…

Purpose: The objectives of the current study were to examine the effect of noise (-5 dB SNR) on auditory comprehension and to examine its relationship with working memory. It was hypothesized that noise has a negative impact on information processing, auditory working memory, and comprehension. Method: Children with normal hearing between the ages…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine cognitive flexibility for semantic and perceptual information in preschool children who stutter (CWS) and who do not stutter (CWNS). Method: Participants were 44 CWS and 44 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months). Cognitive flexibility was measured using semantic and perceptual…

Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

This study investigates how second language (L2) listeners' perception is affected by two factors: the listeners' experience with the target dialect -- North American English (NAE) vs. Standard Southern British English (SSBE) -- and talkers' language background: native vs. non-native talkers; i.e. interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit…