Infants born after fetal growth restriction (FGR)--an obstetric condition defined as the failure to achieve the genetic growth potential--are prone to neurodevelopmental delays, with language being one of the major affected areas. Yet, while verbal comprehension and expressive language impairments have been observed in FGR infants, children and…

When readers are asked to detect a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss it more frequently when it is embedded in a frequent function word than in a less frequent content word. This missing-letter effect has been used to investigate the cognitive processes involved in reading. A similar effect, called the missing-phoneme effect…

The role of the right hemisphere in phonetic processing is thought to be relatively minimal, at least in comparison to the role of the left hemisphere. However, the right hemisphere is known to play a critical role in vocal identity processing, a fact that is striking given that the acoustic-phonetic details of the speech signal can differ…

Recent findings have revealed that very preterm neonates already show the typical brain responses to place of articulation changes in stop consonants, but data on their sensitivity to other types of phonetic changes remain scarce. Here, we examined the impact of 7-8 weeks of extra-uterine life on the automatic processing of syllables in 20 healthy…

Although extensive research has focused on the perceptual abilities of second language (L2) learners, a significant gap persists in understanding how cognitive functions like phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and nonverbal intelligence (IQ) impact L2 speech perception. This study sets out to investigate the discrimination of L2 English…

Purpose: It is generally accepted that adults use visual cues to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments, but findings regarding visual speech benefit in children are mixed. We explored factors that contribute to audiovisual (AV) gain in young children's speech understanding. We examined whether there is an AV benefit to…

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…

Purpose: We sought to examine the contribution of visual cues in audiovisual identification of consonants and vowels--in terms of isolation points (the shortest time required for correct identification of a speech stimulus), accuracy, and cognitive demands--in listeners with hearing impairment using hearing aids. Method: The study comprised 199…

Purpose: The objective was to investigate acoustic cue processing in lexical-tone recognition by pediatric cochlear-implant (CI) recipients who are native Mandarin speakers. Method: Lexical-tone recognition was assessed in pediatric CI recipients and listeners with normal hearing (NH) in 2 tasks. In Task 1, participants identified naturally…

Purpose: Aging is known to influence temporal processing, but its relationship to speech perception has not been clearly defined. To examine listeners' use of contextual and phonetic information, the Revised Speech Perception in Noise test (R-SPIN) was used to develop a time-gated word (TGW) task. Method: In Experiment 1, R-SPIN sentence lists…

The goal of this study was to gain a better understanding of the relationship between non-verbal auditory disorders and developmental dyslexia. This question has led to conflicting results in the literature, which we argued might be due to a failure to consider the heterogeneity of dyslexic profiles. This study included three groups of adult…

Models of speech perception suggest a dorsal stream connecting the temporal and inferior parietal lobe with the inferior frontal gyrus. This stream is thought to involve an auditory motor loop that translates acoustic information into motor/articulatory commands and is further influenced by decision making processes that involve maintenance of…

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were…

Although spoken word recognition is more fundamental to human communication than text recognition, knowledge of word-processing in auditory cortex is comparatively impoverished. This dissertation synthesizes current models of auditory cortex, models of cortical pattern recognition, models of single-word reading, results in phonetics and results in…

Background: Temporal information processing (TIP) underlies many aspects of cognitive functions like language, motor control, learning, memory, attention, etc. Millisecond timing may be assessed by sequencing abilities, e.g. the perception of event order. It may be measured with auditory temporal-order-threshold (TOT), i.e. a minimum time gap…