Purpose: The effect of onset asynchrony on dichotic vowel segregation and identification in normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners was examined. We hypothesized that fusion would decrease and identification performance would improve with increasing onset asynchrony. Additionally, we hypothesized that HI listeners would gain more…

Using a semi-spontaneous speech corpus, we present evidence from computational modelling of tonal productions from Mandarin-speaking children (4- to 11-years old) and adults, showing that children exceed the adult-level tonal distinction at the age of 7 to 8 years using F0 cues, but do not reach the high adult-level distinction using spectral cues…

Purpose: Maturation of the ability to recognize target speech in the presence of a two-talker speech masker extends into early adolescence. This study evaluated whether children benefit from differences in fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) contour depth between the target and masker speech, a cue that has been shown to improve recognition in…

Purpose: Some speech recognition data suggest that children rely less on voice pitch and harmonicity to support auditory scene analysis than adults. Two experiments evaluated development of speech-in-speech recognition using voiced speech and whispered speech, which lacks the harmonic structure of voiced speech. Method: Listeners were 5- to…

The perception and encoding of voice cues in consonants have been well studied, whereas there has been relatively little research on aspiration. The current study examined the encoding and perception of aspiration and voicing in Hindi, American English, and Tamil listeners when relevant cues were and were not degraded by noise. This study is novel…

Purpose: Three experiments were carried out to evaluate the low-frequency pitch perception of adults with unilateral hearing loss who received a cochlear implant (CI). Method: Participants were recruited from a cohort of CI users with unilateral hearing loss and normal hearing in the contralateral ear. First, low-frequency pitch perception was…

This study tested whether individual sensitivity to an auditory perceptual cue called amplitude rise time (ART) facilitates novel word learning. Forty adult native speakers of Polish performed a perceptual task testing their sensitivity to ART, learned associations between nonwords and pictures of common objects, and were subsequently tested on…

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: Using naturalistic synthesized speech, we determined the relative importance of acoustic cues in voice gender and age perception in cochlear implant (CI) users. Method: We investigated 28 CI users' abilities to utilize fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in perceiving voice gender (Experiment 1) and vocal age (Experiment 2).…

In two artificial language learning experiments with four groups of highly proficient Basque-Spanish bilinguals and two groups of Spanish monolinguals, we examine the cues that allow adult listeners to parse new input into phrases. In addition, we investigate which factors lead bilinguals to switch between the segmentation strategies…

Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents' immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or…

Purpose: This study tested the hypothesis that audiovisual training benefits children more than it does adults and that it improves Japanese-speaking children's English /r/-/l/ perception to a native-like level. Method: Ten sessions of audiovisual English /r/-/l/ identification training were conducted for Japanese-speaking adults and children.…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method: Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic…

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their "yes/no" questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the…

Purpose: Short-term and working memory vary across individuals and life span. Studies of how cochlear implant (CI) users remember spoken words often do not fully disentangle perceptual influences from memory assessment because stimulus identification is rarely checked; instead, correct perception is assumed by using simple or practiced stimuli.…