Purpose: A relevant aspect of listening is the effort required during speech processing, which can be assessed by pupillometry. Here, we assessed the pupil dilation response of normal-hearing (NH) and hard of hearing (HH) individuals during listening to clear sentences and masked or degraded sentences. We combined this assessment with functional…

The current study examined to what extent face and speech processing interact with each other and whether they enhance or impair the processing of the other in 5-year-olds (n = 51) and adults (n = 34). Using a computer-based speeded sorting task allowed to directly test the influence of auditory speech on face processing and the influence of face…

Background: Word retrieval skills change across the lifespan. Permanent alterations in the form of decreased accuracy or increased response time can be a consequence of both normal ageing processes or the presence of acquired and neurodegenerative disorders (e.g., aphasia and dementia). Despite the extensive literature exploring the…

Purpose: Language abilities have long been thought to be weaker in adults who stutter (AWS) compared to adults who do not stutter (AWNS). However, it is unknown whether modality affects language performance by AWS in time pressure situations. This study aimed to examine lexical access and retrieval abilities of AWS in oral and typed modes. Method:…

This research addressed the question of whether children understand proper names differently from descriptions. We examined how children extend these two types of expressions from an initial object (a truck) owned by the experimenter to two identical objects created by transforming the initial object, both owned by the experimenter. Adults and…

Background and aims: Humans communicate primarily through spoken language and speech perception is a core function of the human auditory system. Among the autistic community, atypical sensory reactivity and social communication difficulties are pervasive, yet the research literature lacks in-depth self-report data on speech perception in this…

Purpose: This article aimed at investigating the neural underpinnings of music-to-language transfer effects at the pre-attentive level of processing. Method: We conducted a longitudinal experiment with a test-training-retest procedure. Non-musician adults were trained either on frequency (experimental group) or on intensity (control group) of…

Purpose: Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and…

This study investigates whether cross-linguistic differences affect how adult second language (L2) learners use different types of verb subcategorization information for prediction in real-time sentence comprehension. Using visual world eye-tracking, we tested if first language (L1) German and L1 Turkish intermediate-to-advanced learners of L2…

In Spanish, the plural form in plural dominant frequency pairs, like "diente/dientes" [tooth/teeth], occurs more frequently than the corresponding singular form. On the other hand, for the singular dominant frequency pairs such as "cometa/cometas" [kite/kites], the singular form is more common than the plural. The recognition…

Voice banking involves recording an inventory of sentences produced via natural speech. The recordings are used to create a synthetic text-to-speech voice that can be installed on speech-generating devices. This study highlights a minimally researched, clinically relevant issue surrounding the development and evaluation of Singaporean-accented…

This study investigated the effects of semantic transparency of Chinese suon Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners' incidental learning of word meanings in sentence-level reading and passage-level reading. The accuracy of the learners' lexical inferencing was compared among various types of words (transparent, semi-transparent, and opaque…

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from…

While morphology constitutes a crucial component of the human language system, the neural bases of morphological processing in the human brain remains to be elucidated. The current study aims at exploring the extent to which the second language (L2) morphological processing would resemble or differ from that of their first language (L1) in adult…

Antilocality effects provide strong evidence for expectation-based sentence parsing models. Previous discussion of the antilocality effect, however, largely focused on the argument-verb dependencies in verb-final constructions, for which a memory retrieval-based account has been argued to be equally adequate. To test whether the principles of…