Age, babble noise, and working memory have been found to affect the recognition of emotional prosody based on non-tonal languages, yet little is known about how exactly they influence tone-language-speaking children's recognition of emotional prosody. In virtue of the tectonic theory of Stroop effects and the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU)…

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: 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: Studies of speech and text interruption indicate that the interruption rate influences the perceptual information available, from whole words at slow rates to subphonemic cues at faster interruptions rates. In young adults, the benefit obtained from text supplementation of speech may depend on the type of perceptual information available…

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…

Purpose: Psychoacoustic data indicate that infants and children are less likely than adults to focus on a spectral region containing an anticipated signal and are more susceptible to remote masking of a signal. These detection tasks suggest that infants and children, unlike adults, do not listen selectively. However, less is known about children's…

This study examined the effects of a 9-week auditory intervention on the auditory skills of five children with hearing loss who experienced prolonged auditory deprivation before receiving hearing aids. A single-case multiple baseline design across participants was used to examine the effect of the intervention on the children's auditory skills…

Introduction: Baddeley's model of working memory establishes the basis for identifying components that intervene in immediate repetition verbal tasks. Based on this model, the overall aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between auditory sequential memory and verbal memory in students with intellectual disabilities and thereby…

Purpose: We aim to identify the possible sources for age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the distinct roles of semantics (words) and prosody (tone of speech) and their interaction. Method: We implement the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (Ben-David, Multani, Shakuf, Rudzicz, & van Lieshout, 2016).…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare masked English speech recognition thresholds between Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual children and to evaluate effects of age, maternal education, and English receptive language abilities on individual differences in masked speech recognition. Method: Forty-three Spanish-English…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to compare comprehension of spectrally degraded (noise-vocoded [NV]) speech and perceptual learning of NV speech between adolescents and young adults and examine the role of phonological processing and executive functions in this perception. Method: Sixteen younger adolescents (11-13 years), 16 older adolescents…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate how deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the caudal zona incerta (cZi) affects speech intelligibility in persons with essential tremor. Method: Thirty-five participants were evaluated: off stimulation, on chronic stimulation optimized to alleviate tremor, and during unilateral stimulation at increasing…

Children in Austria are exposed to a large amount of variation within the German language. Most children grow up with a local dialect, German standard language and 'intermediate' varieties summarized as 'Umgangssprache'. Using an ABX design, this study analyses when Austrian children are able to discriminate native varieties of their L1 German…

Purpose: A new literature has suggested that speech rate can influence the parsing of words quite strongly in speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between younger adults and older adults in the use of context speech rate in word segmentation, given that older adults perceive timing information differently from younger…

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…