Purpose: The aim of this study was to assess the effect of eight different facemasks on speech perception and listening effort in listeners with normal hearing (NH) and hearing loss by manipulating both mask type and background noise levels. Method: Forty adults listened to Quick Speech-in-Noise Test sentences recorded by a female talker through…

Purpose: Mixed historical data on how listening effort is affected by reverberation and listener-to-speaker distance challenge existing models of listening effort. This study investigated the effects of reverberation and listener-to-speaker distance on behavioral and subjective measures of listening effort: (a) when listening at a fixed…

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…

Tuning fork tests, particularly the Rinne and Weber tests, are fundamental in assessing hearing loss. However, medical students often struggle with key auditory physiology concepts, such as the auditory masking effect and sound lateralization. This study evaluated a simulation-based teaching method to enhance first-year medical students'…

Purpose: Understanding children's speech perception strategies in noise is very important for improving their living environment. Previous studies with adults reported that closing the eyes improves speech understanding in noise by increasing the activation of cortical systems involved in listening and attention, while increased cognitive load…

The advent of various interactive multimedia networks in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom (Grabe & Grabe, 2007) has led to the emergence of new learning methodologies (Ming-Hung et al., 2017). Accordingly, new ways of learning are present in a multimodal environment , and have caused an effect on students' degree of…

Purpose: This descriptive cohort pilot study, using a convenience sample, examined whether evidence from vocal function measures, auditory-perceptual ratings, and/or endoscopic signs of aging supported singing in senior chorales as a possible intervention to preserve the speaking voice in aging adults. Method: Thirteen singers and five nonsinging…

Emotional competence (EC) refers to a set of skills to identify, understand, and respond to one's own emotions and those of others. It plays a fundamental role in socialization processes, where children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) show marked deficits. However, due to the similarities between these…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if there are age-related differences in semantic processing with linguistic and nonlinguistic masking, as measured by the N400. Method: Sixteen young (19-31 years) and 16 middle-aged (41-57 years) adults with relatively normal hearing sensitivity were asked to determine whether word pairs were…

Purpose: This study aimed to conduct a scoping review of research exploring the effects of slight hearing loss on auditory and speech perception in children. Method: A comprehensive search conducted in August 2023 identified a total of 402 potential articles sourced from eight prominent bibliographic databases. These articles were subjected to…

Purpose: Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch processing. Its linguistic consequences have been examined separately for speech intonations and lexical tones. However, in a tonal language such as Chinese, the processing of intonations and lexical tones interacts with each other during online speech perception. Whether and…

Background & aims: Communicative and sensory differences are core autistic traits, yet speech-perception abilities and difficulties among autistic individuals remain poorly understood. Laboratory studies have produced mixed and inconclusive results, in part because of the lack of input from autistic individuals in defining the hypotheses and…

Posthumanism points towards a relational understanding of embodied processes of becoming musical in and with the world which readily combine with existing aspects of early years music practice. In this article I describe the potential of this resonant encounter to develop alternative approaches to listening, opening further possibilities for both…

A critical aspect of spoken language development is learning to categorize the sounds of the child's language(s). This process was thought to develop early during infancy to set the stage for the later development of higher-level aspects of language (e.g., vocabulary, syntax). However, many recent studies have shown that speech categorization…