Purpose: Background noise has been categorized as energetic masking due to spectrotemporal overlap of the target and masker on the auditory periphery or informational masking due to cognitive-level interference from relevant content such as speech. The effects of masking on cortical and sensory auditory processing can be objectively studied with…

Williams syndrome is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder with a distinctive phenotype, including cognitive-linguistic features, nonsocial anxiety, and a strong attraction to music. We performed functional MRI studies examining brain responses to musical and other types of auditory stimuli in young adults with Williams syndrome and typically…

Despite intensive work on language-brain relations, and a fairly impressive accumulation of knowledge over the last several decades, there has been little progress in developing large-scale models of the functional anatomy of language that integrate neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and psycholinguistic data. Drawing on relatively recent…