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…

Scholars have extensively investigated the effectiveness of high variability phonetic training (HVPT), that is, identification and discrimination of second language speech sounds produced by multiple speakers followed by trial-by-trial feedback. Building on the notion of incidental and multimodal learning in cognitive psychology (e.g., Lim &…

Research on native Arabic speakers' perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts has manifested various conclusions. Some studies have revealed that native Arabic speakers experience difficulty in the perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts, where others have concluded that they largely do not experience such difficulty. Due to…

Every sound is made up of pitch, intensity and length (P, I and L). These universal parameters work together to give a sound its sensation. This paper presents a case of using P, I and L, and a hypothetical measure, "S[subscript c]" ("Stress Composite"), to appraise the effect of prosodic training. The main question this paper…

Much research has explored developing sound representations in language, but less work addresses developing representations of other sound patterns. This study examined preschool children's musical representations using two different tasks: discrimination and sound--picture association. Melodic contour--a musically relevant property--and…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine the precision of forced-choice (closed-set) and open-ended (open-set) word recognition (WR) tasks for identifying a change in hearing. Method: WR performance for closed-set (4 and 6 choices) and open-set tasks was obtained from 70 listeners with normal hearing. Speech recognition was degraded by…

Non-native phoneme perception can be challenging for adult learners. This article explores two routes to strengthening early representations of non-native targets: perceptual training, which focuses on auditory discrimination of novel contrasts, and articulatory training, which highlights the articulatory gestures of non-native categories. Of…

Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing interest in third language (L3) phonology (Cabrelli Amaro, 2012; Cabrelli Amaro & Wrembel, 2016). However, research so far has been primarily directed at specific stages of learning and has independently explored either production (e.g., Llama, Cardoso, & Collins, 2010; Llama &…

The present dissertation analyzed speech production and perception in early heritage Spanish-English bilingual children. Specifically, I investigated how perception and production of lexical stress develops in bilingual children. Current models of second language (L2) speech perception do not include heritage bilinguals or suprasegmental aspects…

Purpose: Working memory capacity and language ability modulate speech reception; however, the respective roles of peripheral and cognitive processing are unclear. The contribution of individual differences in these abilities to utilization of spatial cues when separating speech from informational and energetic masking backgrounds in children has…

This dissertation research examines the acquisition of second language vowels. For second language learners, learning a new languages' sound inventory, particularly its vowels, presents a challenge perceptually and in terms of production. Incorrectly perceiving and producing sounds in a second language results in a foreign accent in many adult…

Our aim was to investigate perceptual attunement (PA) in vowel perception of Dutch-learning infants (6-8-10-month-olds) using the hybrid visual fixation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007). Infants were habituated to one phoneme and subsequently tested on items in which a token of the habituated phoneme alternated with either another token of the same…

This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate developmental and noise-induced changes in central auditory processing indexed by event-related potentials in typically developing children. Method: P1, N2, and N4 responses as well as mismatch negativities (MMNs) were recorded for standard syllables and consonants, frequency, intensity, vowel, and…

Distinguishing threatening from nonthreatening stimuli is essential for survival and stimulus generalization is a hallmark of anxiety disorders. While auditory threat learning produces long-lasting plasticity in primary auditory cortex (Au1), it is not clear whether such Au1 plasticity regulates memory specificity or generalization. We used…