Purpose: The present study evaluated the effects of inherent envelope modulation and the availability of cues across frequency on behavioral gap detection with noise-band stimuli in school-age children. Method: Listeners were 34 normal-hearing children (ages 5.2-15.6 years) and 12 normal-hearing adults (ages 18.5-28.8 years). Stimuli were…

Purpose: Despite the apparent primacy of syntactic deficits, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often also evidence lexical impairments. In particular, it has been argued that this population have difficulty forming lexical representations that are detailed enough to support effective spoken word processing. In order to better…

Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were…

In this study, we investigated which componential skills can be distinguished in the second language (L2) development of 140 bilingual children with specific language impairment in the Netherlands, aged 6-11 years, divided into 3 age groups. L2 development was assessed by means of spoken language tasks representing different language skills…

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N = 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control,…

Purpose: This article describes the development and initial validation of an objective measure of nasal air emission (NAE) using nasal accelerometry. Method: Nasal acceleration and nasal airflow signals were simultaneously recorded while an expert speech language pathologist modeled NAEs at a variety of severity levels. In addition, microphone and…

Purpose: This study evaluated the degree to which children benefit from the acoustic modifications made by talkers when they produce speech in noise. Method: A repeated measures design compared the speech perception performance of children (5-11 years) and adults in a 2-talker masker. Target speech was produced in a 2-talker background or in…

Do learners of a second language (L2) need frequent contact with native speakers of that language in order to master its phonology? What if they hear audio recordings of native speakers and receive immediate corrective feedback about their perception? We used a randomized controlled experiment with 135 Chinese speakers (with English as their L2)…

Atypical sensory response patterns are common in children with autism and developmental delay. Expanding on previous work, this observational electroencephalogram study assessed auditory event-related potentials and their associations with clinically evaluated sensory response patterns in children with autism spectrum disorder (n = 28),…

Previous studies indicate that at least some aspects of audiovisual speech perception are impaired in children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, whether audiovisual processing difficulties are also present in older children with a history of this disorder is unknown. By combining electrophysiological and behavioral measures, we…

Background: The spoken language difficulties of children with moderate or severe to profound hearing loss are mainly related to limited auditory speech perception. However, degraded or filtered auditory input as evidenced in children with cochlear implants (CIs) may result in less efficient or slower language processing as well. To provide insight…

In vision, typically-developing (TD) individuals perceive "global" (whole) before "local" (detailed) features, whereas individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit a local bias. However, auditory global-local distinctions are less clear in ASD, particularly in terms of age and attention effects. To these aims, here…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to determine whether children with dyslexia (hereafter referred to as "DYS children") are more affected than children with average reading ability (hereafter referred to as "AR children") by talker and intonation variability when perceiving speech in noise. Method: Thirty-four DYS and 25 AR children were…

This study evaluated stressors and coping strategies in 70 children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) or with auditory processing disorder (APD) attending Grades 5 and 6 of a school for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. Everyday general stressors and more hearing-specific stressors were examined in a hearing-specific modified stress and…

Previous studies have indicated that visual-auditory temporal acuity is reduced in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) in comparison to neurotypicals. In the present study we investigated temporal acuity for all possible bimodal pairings of visual, tactile and auditory information in adults with ASC (n = 18) and a matched control group…