A study involving 36 children and 10 adults investigated development of auditory frequency and temporal resolution using simultaneous and backward masking of a tone. On the measure of frequency resolution, 6- year-olds performed as well as adults. However, for the backward masking task, 6-year-olds had higher threshold than adults. (Contains…

Examined characteristics of the acoustic signature of languages in connection with identification of the target language, Korean. In one experiment, listeners were asked to distinguish spoken samples of Korean from competitor languages sharing syllable based rhythm. In another, listeners attempted to distinguish Korean from languages spoken in the…

Research indicates that attentional deficits exist in aphasic individuals. However, relatively little is known about auditory vigilance performance in individuals with aphasia. The current study explores reaction time (RT) and accuracy in 10 aphasic participants and 10 nonbrain-damaged controls during linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory…

Children affected by dyslexia exhibit a deficit in the categorical perception of speech sounds, characterized by both poorer discrimination of between-category differences and by better discrimination of within-category differences, compared to normal readers. These categorical perception anomalies might be at the origin of dyslexia, by hampering…

This study investigated the perception of voice onset time (VOT) in speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Four normally hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking stimulus words with voiced and voiceless initial consonants embedded in a sentence. Twelve…

This study is an investigation of the effects of multiple listenings on error-detection identification and labeling accuracy among brass and woodwind instrumentalists. Examples derived from band music used balanced four-voice incipits performed with differing timbres, and errors that occurred in one or multiple voices. Response rates for correct…

In the SIMPLE model (Scale Invariant Memory and Perceptual Learning), performance on memory tasks is determined by the locations of items in multidimensional space, and better performance is associated with having fewer close neighbors. Unlike most previous simulations with SIMPLE, the ones reported here used measured, rather than assumed,…

Children with developmental dyslexia appear to be insensitive to basic auditory cues to speech rhythm and stress. For example, they experience difficulties in processing duration and amplitude envelope onset cues. Here we explored the sensitivity of adults with developmental dyslexia to the same cues. In addition, relations with expressive and…

The world's languages display important differences in their rhythmic organization; most particularly, different languages seem to privilege different phonological units (mora, syllable, or stress foot) as their basic rhythmic unit. There is now considerable evidence that such differences have important consequences for crucial aspects of language…

Lip reading is the ability to partially understand speech by looking at the speaker's lips. It improves the intelligibility of speech in noise when audio-visual perception is compared with audio-only perception. A recent set of experiments showed that seeing the speaker's lips also enhances "sensitivity" to acoustic information,…

This study assessed the ability of seven children to accurately judge relative durations of auditory and visual stimuli before and after participation in a language remediation program. The goal of the intervention program is to improve the children's ability to detect and identify rapidly changing auditory stimuli, and thereby improve their…

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS), either before age two (early) or later at school (late), were presented with pseudowords with and without CS. The main goal was to establish the way in which lipreading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts, similar to audiovisual integration in speech perception, when participants are presented with…

Recent neuroimaging studies and neuropsychological data suggest that there are regions in posterior auditory cortex that participate both in speech perception and speech production. An outstanding question is whether the same neural regions support both perception and production or whether there exist discrete cortical fields subserving these…

In three experiments, participants listened for a target's pitch change within recurrent nine-tone patterns having largely isochronous rhythms. Patterns differed in pitch structure of initial (context) and final (target distance) pattern segments. Also varied were: probe timing (Experiments 2 and 3) and instructions about probe timing (Experiments…

Using electopalatography, this study investigated the production of sibilants produced by four adults who have severe-to-profound hearing loss and four speakers with normal hearing. Each speaker wore a Rion[R] semi-flexible electroplate while producing multiple repetitions of the utterances "see, sue, she, shoe." The speakers' productions were…