When visual information is available, human adults, but not children, have been shown to reduce sensory uncertainty by taking a weighted average of sensory cues. In the absence of reliable visual information (e.g. extremely dark environment, visual disorders), the use of other information is vital. Here we ask how humans combine haptic and…

Binding is key in multisensory perception. This study investigated the audio-visual (A-V) temporal binding window in 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children (total N = 120). Children watched a person uttering a syllable whose auditory and visual components were either temporally synchronized or desynchronized by 366, 500, or 666 ms. They were asked…

Purpose: The present study evaluated the effects of inherent envelope modulation and the availability of cues across frequency on behavioral gap detection with noise-band stimuli in school-age children. Method: Listeners were 34 normal-hearing children (ages 5.2-15.6 years) and 12 normal-hearing adults (ages 18.5-28.8 years). Stimuli were…

Do learners of a second language (L2) need frequent contact with native speakers of that language in order to master its phonology? What if they hear audio recordings of native speakers and receive immediate corrective feedback about their perception? We used a randomized controlled experiment with 135 Chinese speakers (with English as their L2)…

Purpose: This article describes the development and initial validation of an objective measure of nasal air emission (NAE) using nasal accelerometry. Method: Nasal acceleration and nasal airflow signals were simultaneously recorded while an expert speech language pathologist modeled NAEs at a variety of severity levels. In addition, microphone and…

Research has shown that young infants use contrasting acoustic information to distinguish consonants. This has been used to argue that by 12 months, infants have homed in on their native language sound categories. However, this ability seems to be positionally constrained, with contrasts at the beginning of words (onsets) discriminated earlier.…

How does phonological development differ in children exposed to one versus two variants of a single language? If children receive mixed evidence for a phonological contrast (i.e., one language variant in the environment maintains a contrast while another neutralizes it), will they treat this contrast as noncontrastive (i.e., as allophonic)? Or…

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by reduced holistic processing (HP), which depends mainly on writing rather than reading experience. Here we show that, while simplified and traditional Chinese readers demonstrated a similar level of HP when processing characters shared between the simplified and traditional scripts, simplified…

Much of what we know about the development of listeners' word segmentation strategies originates from the artificial language-learning literature. However, many artificial speech streams designed to study word segmentation lack a salient cue found in all natural languages: utterance boundaries. In this study, participants listened to a…

Purpose: Given the potential significance of speech naturalness to functional and social rehabilitation outcomes, the objective of this study was to examine the effect of listener perceptions of monopitch on speech naturalness and intelligibility in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Two short utterances were extracted from…

Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were…

Progress in applied neuroscience and neuropsychology in the educational context has revealed efficient methodologies for preventing academic failure and developing the potential of students. The aim of this work is to adopt a neuropsychological perspective to study learning-related differences between students with learning difficulties (LD),…

Purpose: Reading requires the ability to decode and comprehend. Impairments in working memory (WM) are often implicated in students who are poor decoders. It is unclear whether this is a domain-specific issue or a task-specific issue. Therefore, this study examined how auditory-verbal (AV) WM, visual-spatial (VS) WM, and cognitive load affected…

The infant brain may be predisposed to identify perceptually salient cues that are common to both signed and spoken languages. Recent theory based on spoken languages has advanced sonority as one of these potential language acquisition cues. Using a preferential looking paradigm with an infrared eye tracker, we explored visual attention of hearing…

The present study examined second language (L2) development in the perceptual identification of a dialectal sound of the target language, through an investigation of the role of individual learner experiences in L2 phonological development. A total of 213 English-speaking learners of Spanish across five levels of study and with varying dialect…