People who are visually impaired (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) use a wide variety of sensory information to understand the world around them. Hearing is a particularly useful sense because of its range. Many visually impaired people use some form of echolocation to monitor the space around them (for example, the sound of a cane…

We examined the relationship between interval identification skill and error detection skill in preservice teachers, accounting for timbral differences by including piano and vocal stimuli. The interval identification test was comprised of 33 items spanning from C2 to B5. Fifteen error detection items were monophonic melodies, two measures long,…

Infants acquiring their native language are adept at discovering grammatical patterns. However, it remains unknown whether these learning abilities are limited to language, or available more generally for sequenced input. The current study is a conceptual replication of a prior language study, and was designed to ask whether infants can track…

Purpose: A Bayesian adaptive procedure, that is, the quick auditory filter (qAF) procedure, has been shown to improve the efficiency for estimating auditory filter shapes of listeners with normal hearing. The current study evaluates the accuracy and test-retest reliability of the qAF procedure for naïve listeners with a variety of ages and hearing…

The acquisition of a second language (L2) may be challenging in adulthood, as the phonological system of the native language (L1) can sometimes limit the perception of phonological contrasts in L2. The present study aimed to (a) examine the influence of an L1 (Hebrew) that lacks a phonemic contrast for vowel length on the ability to discriminate…

The extent to which exposure to new phonemic contrasts (i.e. contrasts that are present in the L2 but not in the L1) will lead to the creation of a new phonemic category in L2 speakers, as well as the phonological nature of these categories, remains an open question insofar as there is no consensus on whether acquiring a new contrast would result…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effects of dysphonic voice on speech intelligibility in Cantonese-speaking adults. Method: Speech recordings from three speakers with dysphonia secondary to phonotrauma and three speakers with healthy voices were presented to 30 healthy listeners (15 men and 15 women; M[subscript age] = 22.7 years) under…

Auditory speech discrimination is essential for normal language development. Children born preterm are at greater risk of language developmental delays. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy at term-equivalent age, the present study investigated early discrimination of speech prosody in 62 neonates born between week 23 and 41 of gestational…

This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic…

Conflicting recommendations exist in the literature regarding the optimal order of stimulus presentation when teaching auditory-visual conditional discriminations. The present study examined the generality of a previously demonstrated advantage of presenting the auditory sample before visual comparisons (sample-first condition) over the reverse…

In lexical development, the specificity of phonological representations is important. The ability to build phonologically specific lexical representations predicts the number of words a child knows (vocabulary breadth), but it is not clear if it also fosters how well words are known (vocabulary depth). Sixty-six children were studied in…

Upon acquiring or learning another language, cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is an inevitable phenomenon with which a bilingual speaker lives. One key aspect of CLI is its bidirectionality, flowing between both the first (L1) and second languages (L2) mutually affecting each other. However, investigations of L1 CLI on L2 have dominated previous…

Purpose: Previous studies have shown enhanced pitch and impaired time perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether such deviated patterns of auditory processing depending on acoustic dimensions would transfer to the higher level linguistic pitch and time processing. In this study, we compared…

Children with autism spectrum disorders have been reported to be less influenced by a speaker's face during speech perception than those with typically development. To more closely examine these reported differences, a novel visual phonemic restoration paradigm was used to assess neural signatures (event-related potentials [ERPs]) of audiovisual…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of diplophonia using an auditory perception and multimodal simultaneous examination, which included sound waveform analysis, electroglottography (EGG), digital kymography (DKG), and 2-dimensional scanning digital kymography (2D DKG). Additionally, we compared the diagnostic…