Studying early language development has been a challenging task throughout the years. Earlier studies mostly documented language competence only after toddlers had started producing their first words. Theoretical and methodological advances in this domain brought about more sophisticated ways of probing into early development by exploiting overt…

Purpose: The significance of extended high-frequency (EHF) hearing (> 8 kHz) is not well understood so far. In this study, we aimed to understand the relationship between EHF hearing loss (EHFHL) and speech perception in noise (SPIN) and the associated physiological signatures using the speech-evoked frequency-following response (sFFR). Method:…

Although vocabulary size is thought to index children's language abilities, an increasing body of work suggests that regularities in children's vocabulary composition, particularly the proportion of shape-based nouns (e.g., cup), support language development. Here we examine initial vocabulary composition in children with hearing loss following…

Background: Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) has been used in the treatment of stuttering, providing different results across different populations and age groups. Aims: This study examines the impact of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) on stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) in the spontaneous speech of Jordanian individuals who stutter. Methods…

Elevated "neural noise" has been advanced as an explanation of autism and autistic sensory experiences. However, functional neuroimaging measures of neural noise may be vulnerable to contamination by recording noise. This study explored variability of electrophysiological responses to tones of different intensities in 127 autistic and 79…

Previous studies reported mixed findings on autistic individuals' pitch perception relative to neurotypical (NT) individuals. We investigated whether this may be partly due to individual differences in cognitive abilities by comparing their performance on various pitch perception tasks on a large sample (n = 164) of autistic and NT children and…

Current theories of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) suggest atypical use of context in ASD, but little is known about how these atypicalities influence speech perception. We examined the influence of contextual information (lexical, spectral, and temporal) on phoneme categorization of people with ASD and in typically developed (TD) people. Across…

Audio description (AD) plays a crucial role in making audiovisual media accessible to people with a visual impairment, enhancing their experience and understanding. This study employs an event segmentation task to examine how people without sight perceive and segment narrative events in films with AD, compared to sighted viewers without AD. Two AD…

Purpose: "Dynamic pitch," which is defined as the variation in fundamental frequency in speech, is one of the acoustic cues that affect speech recognition in noise. Built on the evidence that a symmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch led to poorer speech recognition, the present study examined the effect of an asymmetrical manipulation…

Auditory steady-state response (ASSR) has been studied as a potential biomarker for abnormal auditory sensory processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with mixed results. Motivated by prior somatosensory findings of group differences in inter-trial coherence (ITC) between ASD and typically developing (TD) individuals at twice the steady-state…

This paper reports on a set of three recent experiments utilizing large-scale speech models to assess the oral reading fluency (ORF) of students in Ghana. While ORF is a well-established measure of foundational literacy, assessing it typically requires one-on-one sessions between a student and a trained rater, a process that is time-consuming and…

Purpose: Neurotypical individuals show a robust "global precedence effect (GPE)" when processing hierarchically structured visual information. However, the auditory domain remains understudied. The current research serves to fill the knowledge gap on auditory global-local processing across the broader autism phenotype under the tonal…

The basic timescales governing animal life are generally determined by body size. Pauses in naturally occurring human speech were investigated to determine if pause timescales are also sensitive to body size. Reported is an analysis of pause duration allometry in recorded interviews of 61 athletes. Pauses were divided into three classes based on…

This study examined the effect of attention on auditory processing in autistic individuals. Electroencephalography data were recorded during two attention conditions (passive and active) from 24 autistic adults and 24 neurotypical controls, ages 17-30 years. The passive condition involved only listening to the clicks and the active condition…

The sounds of birds form the outdoor playlist of our lives. Birds appeal to the public, in part because of the wide variety of interesting sounds they make. This popularity has led to a long history of amateur participation in ornithology, which has recently produced rapid increases in freely available online databases with hundreds of thousands…