The sounds of birds form the outdoor playlist of our lives. Birds appeal to the public, in part because of the wide variety of interesting sounds they make. This popularity has led to a long history of amateur participation in ornithology, which has recently produced rapid increases in freely available online databases with hundreds of thousands…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability to discriminate yes/no questions from statements in three groups of children--bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users, nontraditional CI users with aidable hearing preoperatively in the ear to be implanted, and controls with normal hearing. Half of the nontraditional CI users had…

Interactions between stimuli from different sensory modalities and their integration are central to daily life, contributing to improved perception. Being born prematurely and the subsequent hospitalization can have an impact not only on sensory processes, but also on the manner in which information from different senses is combined--i.e.,…

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e., via…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate infants' neural responses to changes in emotional prosody in spoken words. The focus was on understanding developmental changes and potential sex differences, aspects that were not consistently observed in previous behavioral studies. Method: A modified multifeature oddball paradigm was used with emotional…

Purpose: Bound morphemes are challenging for children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) to acquire and to use successfully. The challenge arises in part from limited access to spoken word forms as a result of reduced audibility during perception, but successful comprehension requires access to both the morphological forms and the mapping…

Purpose: This registered report aimed to replicate previous findings showing that years of music training predicts speech-perception-in-noise (SPIN) skills in children. In addition, it aimed to investigate whether the musician SPIN advantage is influenced by cognitive factors such as general intelligence or working memory. Method: Following…

Auditory alarm deafness is a failure to notice a salient auditory signal in a high-load context, which is one of the major causes of flight accidents. Therefore, it is of great practical significance for aviation safety to explore ways to avoid auditory alarm deafness under a high-load scenario. One potential reason for its occurrence could be the…

Purpose: The contributions from the central auditory and cognitive systems play a major role in communication. Understanding the relationship between auditory and cognitive abilities has implications for auditory rehabilitation for clinical patients. The purpose of this systematic review is to address the question, "In adults, what is the…

Purpose: Reading disability (RD) is frequently associated with deficits in auditory processing (i.e., processing speech and non-linguistic sounds). Several hypotheses exist regarding the link between RD and auditory processing, but none fully account for the range/variety of auditory impairments reported in the literature. These impairments have…

Sensory Over-Responsivity (SOR) is an increasingly recognized challenge among children with neurodevelopmental concerns (NDC). To investigate, we characterized the incidence of auditory and tactile over-responsivity (AOR, TOR) among 82 children with NDC. We found that 70% of caregivers reported concern for their child's sensory reactions. Direct…

Purpose: Speakers use auditory feedback to guide their speech output, although individuals differ in the magnitude of their compensatory response to perceived errors in feedback. Little is known about the factors that contribute to the compensatory response or how fixed or flexible they are within an individual. Here, we test whether manipulating…

Cognitive systems face a tension between stability and plasticity. The maintenance of long-term representations that reflect the global regularities of the environment is often at odds with pressure to flexibly adjust to short-term input regularities that may deviate from the norm. This tension is abundantly clear in speech communication when…

The present study aims to investigate the identification of native vowel categories by adult individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and estimate their reaction times in both normal and whisper registers; their responses were compared with those of typically developing individuals. The results demonstrated that there was no deficit for…

Purpose: The /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ productions of young children acquiring American English are highly variable and often inaccurate, with [w] as the most common substitution error. One acoustic indicator of the goodness of children's /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ productions is the difference between the frequency of the second…