The auditory scaffolding hypothesis states that early experience with sound underpins the development of domain-general sequence processing abilities, supported by studies observing impaired sequence processing in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. To test this hypothesis, we administered a sequence processing task to 77 DHH children who use…

Purpose: Assessment of strained voice quality is difficult due to the weak reliability of auditory-perceptual evaluation and lack of strong acoustic correlates. This study evaluated the contributions of relative fundamental frequency (RFF) and mid-to-high frequency noise to the perception of strain. Method: Stimuli were created using recordings of…

Purpose: Semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) exercises with tubes or straws have been widely used for a variety of voice disorders. Yet, the effects of longer periods of SOVT exercises (lasting for weeks) on the aging voice are not well understood. This study investigated the effects of a 6-week straw phonation in water (SPW) exercise program.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether speech perception would reflect small latency changes in subcortical speech representation. Method: Twelve native Japanese listeners participated in the experiment. Those listeners participated in speech identification task and auditory brainstem response (ABR) measurement using…

Some listeners exhibit higher sensitivity to subphonemic acoustic differences (i.e., higher speech gradiency). Here, we asked whether higher gradiency in a listener's first language (L1) facilitates foreign language learning and explored the possible sources of individual differences in L1 gradiency. To address these questions, we tested 164…

Objective: The purpose of this study was to describe normative aspects of wideband acoustic immittance (WAI) measures obtained from healthy White neonates. Method: In this cross-sectional study, wideband absorbance (WBA), admittance magnitude, and admittance phase were measured under ambient pressure condition in 326 ears from 203 neonates (M age…

Background: Several studies have revealed that prosody contributes to reading acquisition. However, the relation between awareness of prosodic patterns and different facets of language ability (e.g., vocabulary knowledge) in school-age children remains unclear. This study measured awareness of prosodic patterns using non-speech and speech stimuli.…

The present study investigates the time course of acoustic cue integration in the processing of the Korean three-way laryngeal stop contrast by native Korean listeners and English second language (L2) learners of Korean. As such, this study seeks to understand how native listeners and L2 learners weight and integrate fine-grained acoustic…

Autism spectrum disorder is a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder that has been linked to a range of perceptual processing alterations, including hypo- and hyperresponsiveness to sensory stimulation. A recently proposed theory that attempts to account for these symptoms, states that autistic individuals have a decreased ability to anticipate…

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary mappings between the sounds of words and their meanings and is often studied by pairing auditory pseudowords such as "maluma" and "takete" with rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. However, it is unclear what auditory properties of pseudowords contribute to their perception as…

Purpose: Reduced intensity is a hallmark of speech production in Parkinson's disease (PD). Previous work has examined the perception of intensity in PD to explain these speech deficits. This study reports loudness ratings of pure tones by individuals with PD and controls, all with normal thresholds for older adults. Method: Twenty individuals with…

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…

Purpose: This study assessed the extent to which 6- to 8.5-month-old infants and 18- to 30-year-old adults detect and discriminate auditory syllables in noise better in the presence of visual speech than in auditory-only conditions. In addition, we examined whether visual cues to the onset and offset of the auditory signal account for this…

Purpose: For elderly listeners, it is more challenging to listen to 1 voice surrounded by other voices than for young listeners. This could be caused by a reduced ability to use acoustic cues--such as slight differences in onset time--for the segregation of concurrent speech signals. Here, we study whether the ability to benefit from onset…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify common clinical practice patterns for providing advanced noise management features in children with cochlear implants (CIs) and evaluate trends in consideration of clinician experience and comfort with CI manufacturer-specific technology. Method: A mixed-model survey including quantitative and…