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: The aim of this study was to develop and validate a large Korean sentence set with varying degrees of semantic predictability that can be used for testing speech recognition and lexical processing. Method: Sentences differing in the degree of final-word predictability (predictable, neutral, and anomalous) were created with words selected…

Purpose: Processing real-world sounds requires acoustic and higher-order semantic information. We tested the theory that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced processing of acoustic features and impaired processing of semantic information. Methods: We used a change deafness task that required detection of speech and…

Purpose: When listening to speech under adverse conditions, older adults, even with "age-normal" hearing, face challenges that may lead to poorer speech recognition than their younger peers. Older listeners generally demonstrate poorer suprathreshold auditory processing along with aging-related declines in neurocognitive functioning that…

Purpose: Verbal fluency tasks assess the ability to quickly and efficiently retrieve words from the mental lexicon by requiring subjects to rapidly generate words within a phonological or semantic category. This study investigated differences between cochlear implant users and normal-hearing peers in the clustering and time course of word…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Purpose: Three experiments were conducted to better understand the role of between-word coarticulation in masked speech recognition. Specifically, we explored whether naturally coarticulated sentences supported better masked speech recognition as compared to sentences derived from individually spoken concatenated words. We hypothesized that…

Purpose: A dual-task paradigm was implemented to investigate how noise type and sentence context may interact with age and hearing loss to impact word recall during speech recognition. Method: Three noise types with varying degrees of temporal/spectrotemporal modulation were used: speech-shaped noise, speech-modulated noise, and three-talker…

We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive "("Mary didn't blick the…

Pitch perception plays a more important role in emotional communication in English than in Korean. Interpreting the semantic aspects of pitch levels therefore presents a challenge for Korean learners of English. This study investigated how 49 Korean learners of English perceived 20 English emotional utterances. Participants were asked to complete…

Purpose: This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

Purpose: Speech perception in noise becomes difficult with age but can be facilitated by audiovisual (AV) speech cues and sentence context in healthy older adults. However, individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) may present with deficits in AV integration, potentially limiting the extent to which they can benefit from AV cues. This study…