Behavioural and electrophysiological studies give differing impressions of when auditory discrimination is mature. Ability to discriminate frequency and speech contrasts reaches adult levels only around 12 years of age, yet an electrophysiological index of auditory discrimination, the mismatch negativity (MMN), is reported to be as large in…

We examined categorical speech perception in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or Specific Language Impairment (SLI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Stimuli consisted of synthetic speech tokens in which place of articulation varied from "b" to "d". Children were tested on categorization, categorization in noise, and…

Previous research indicates that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds show deficits in aspects of attention, including a reduced ability to filter irrelevant information and to suppress prepotent responses. However, less is known about the neural mechanisms of group differences in attention, which could reveal the stages of processing at…

Behavioral data establish a dramatic change in infants' phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months of age. Foreign-language phonetic discrimination significantly declines with increasing age. Using a longitudinal design, we examined the electrophysiological responses of 7- and 11-month-old American infants to native and non-native consonant…