Purpose: This study investigated the categorical perception of Mandarin tones and consonant aspiration contrasts in babble noise among adults and adolescents aged 12-14 years, and explored the association between working memory and categorical perception. Method: Twenty-four adults and 20 adolescents with Mandarin as their native language were…

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorders have more difficulties producing speech sounds accurately than same-age peers. In addition, they often have difficulties with speech perception, and weaker phonological awareness skills than their peers and are at risk for negative long-term academic and socio-emotional outcomes. In this tutorial, we…

This study investigated the degree to which Japanese learners of English accurately perceive English fricatives over time and the extent to which fricatives were misidentified. To train and measure perception skills, an online high-variability phonetic training program was used in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class in Japan for eight…

Dyslexia is a neuro-sensory issue that makes reading challenging. However, Dyslexic Phonemic R[subscript 3] is a novel approach that improved the phonological development and resolved the reading challenges of dyslexia. The primary goal of the study was (1) to evaluate the current state of the phonemic and auditory symptoms of children with…

Purpose: The overall goal of the current study was to determine whether noise type plays a role in perceptual quality ratings. We compared quality ratings using various noise types and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ranges using hearing aid simulations to consider the effects of hearing aid processing features. Method: Ten older adults with bilateral…

Purpose: Psychoacoustical studies on transmission characteristics related to bone-conducted (BC) speech, perceived by speakers during vocalization, are important for further understanding the relationship between speech production and perception, especially auditory feedback. For exploring how the outer ear part contributes to BC speech…

Purpose: This study assessed state anxiety as a function of speech recognition testing using three clinical measures of speech in noise and one clinical measure of dichotic speech recognition. Method: Thirty young adults, 30 middle-age adults, and 25 older adults participated. State anxiety was measured pre-and post-speech recognition testing…

Purpose: For colocated targets and maskers, binaural listening typically offers a small but significant advantage over monaural listening. This study investigated how monaural asymmetry and target--masker similarity may limit binaural advantage in adults and children. Method: Ten Mandarin-speaking Chinese adults (aged 22-27 years) and 12 children…

Purpose: Weighting of acoustic cues for perceiving placeof-articulation speech contrasts was measured to determine the separate and interactive effects of age and use of cochlear implants (CIs). It has been found that adults with normal hearing (NH) show reliance on fine-grained spectral information (e.g., formants), whereas adults with CIs show…

Children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often fail to show equivalence class formation. This may be related to their difficulty in learning the programmed baseline conditional discriminations. The present study investigated equivalence class formation after training visual identity-matching performance with auditory…

In the present research we look into the mechanisms which facilitate integrated functioning of speech and music components within a song. To understand the underlying mechanisms of such interaction we investigate poems set to music, analyzing the components of both speech and music intonation. The study is performed within the scope of Speech…

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) is a temporal lobe structure that contributes to a host of behaviors. In particular, it is a central player in learning about aversive events and thus assigning emotional valence to sensory events. It is a cortical-like structure and contains glutamatergic pyramidal neurons and GABAergic interneurons. It is divided…

Purpose: A growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to the development of speech sound disorder (SSD). However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech perception deficits in this population. The primary aim of this study was to compare the neural…

Purpose: Children with hearing loss (HL), including those with hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs), often have difficulties contrasting words like "beach" versus "peach" and "dog" versus "dock" due to challenges producing systematic voicing contrasts. Even when acoustic contrasts are present,…

Anticipatory coarticulation is an indispensable feature of speech dynamics contributing to spoken language fluency. Research has shown that children speak with greater degrees of vowel anticipatory coarticulation than adults -- that is, greater vocalic influence on previous segments. The present study examined how developmental differences in…