Purpose: Amplitude modulations (AMs) are important for speech intelligibility, and deficits in speech intelligibility are a leading source of impairment in childhood listening difficulties (LiD). The present study aimed to explore the relationships between AM perception and speech-in-noise (SiN) comprehension in children and to determine whether…

This dissertation examines native speakers' word recognition of, differentiation between, and social attitudes toward varieties of Arabic. It is a particularly interesting test case because of the Arabic unique regional variation situation and the available literature lacks data on how Arabic speakers perceive different accents, with a particular…

Newborns are able to neurally discriminate between speech and nonspeech right after birth. To date it remains unknown whether this early speech discrimination and the underlying neural language network is associated with later language development. Preterm-born children are an interesting cohort to investigate this relationship, as previous…

Previous research on training auditory-visual conditional discriminations (AVCDs) have compared several prompt types including gestural, positional, and identity-matching prompts. Other prompting procedures, such as those that involve the manipulation of the comparison array, have received less attention in the applied literature. For example, the…

Autism is a condition manifested by persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, and, sensory processing difficulties may further affect childhood-occupation and hinders their overall development. This study examines the sensory-processing and childhood participation of children with autism (6 to 10…

Enhanced pitch perception has been identified in autistic individuals, but it remains understudied whether such enhancement can be observed in the lexical tone perception of language-delayed autistic children. This study examined the categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones in 23 language-delayed autistic children and two groups of…

This dissertation had two purposes: (1) to create and document the development of a new music achievement test entitled the Musical Discrimination and Styles Task (MDAST), and (2) to describe the strength of the evidence supporting the validity and reliability of this new developmentally appropriate music aptitude and achievement instrument. I…

Purpose: This research was carried out to create a new realistic speech-in-noise test designed to be sensitive to several causes of difficulty understanding speech in noise. The test, conducted under headphones, simulates listening in a typically reverberant classroom. It comprises a frontal target talker speaking high-context sentences and six…

Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre-verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word-unit…

This study purports to bridge the gap in research directed at people with Low Functioning Autism (LFA) by exploring if sensory discrimination ability can be used to assess cognitive functioning in children with LFA. The study was done in two phases: (i) a pilot phase (with 4 male participants; mean age = 3 years 6.5 months)--which tried to…

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to investigate the impacts of a surgical mask and a transparent mask on audio-only and audiovisual speech intelligibility in noise (i.e., 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio) in individuals with mild-to-profound hearing loss. The study also examined if individuals with hearing loss can benefit from using a transparent…

Executive functions are higher order mental processes individuals use during academic tasks (Diamond, 2013). Few studies examined executive functions in braille reading. Additionally, most studies located by the primary researcher were studies analyzing group differences between individuals with visual impairments and those who are sighted and…

This article proposes a conceptual and measurement framework for postpubertal, L2 speech learning aptitude that is centered around domain-general auditory processing (i.e., representing spectral and temporal characteristics of sounds). To this end, we examine the construct and reliability of a battery of auditory processing tests by presenting the…

Infants undergo fundamental shifts in perception that are reported to be critical for language acquisition. In particular, infants' perception of native and non-native sounds begins to align with the properties of their native sound system. Thus far, empirical evidence for this transition--perceptual narrowing--has drawn from socio-economically…

We assessed different aspects of tactile perception in young children (3-6 years) with autism. Autistic and neurotypical children completed vibrotactile tasks assessing reaction time, amplitude discrimination (sequential and simultaneous) and temporal discrimination (temporal order judgment and duration discrimination). Autistic children had…