Purpose: An important skill in the development of speech perception is to apply optimal weights to acoustic cues so that phonemic information is recovered from speech with minimum effort. Here, we investigated the development of acoustic cue weighting of amplitude rise time (ART) and formant rise time (FRT) cues in children as measured by mismatch…

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder manifested in deficits in reading and spelling skills that is consistently associated with difficulties in phonological processing. Dyslexia is genetically transmitted, but its manifestation in a particular individual is thought to depend on the interaction of epigenetic and environmental factors. We adopt…

Because different musical scales use different sets of intervals and, hence, different musical pitches, how do music listeners learn those that are in their native musical system? One possibility is that musical pitches are acquired in the same way as phonemes, that is, via distributional learning, in which learners infer knowledge from the…

Purpose: The authors investigated the effects of acoustic cues (i.e., pitch height, pitch contour, and pitch onset and offset) and phonetic context cues (i.e., syllable onsets and rimes) on lexical tone perception in Cantonese-speaking children. Method: Eight minimum pairs of tonal contrasts were presented in either an identical phonetic context…