Both the timing (i.e., ‘when’) and amount (i.e., ‘how much’) of language exposure have been shown to affect language-learning outcomes. Monolinguals and (most) bilinguals confound these two factors of early exposure and extended exposure (i.e., their first-acquired language is their most used or dominant language), making it difficult to isolate...
An amazing characteristic of the speech signal is that it contains a variety of temporal features that occur simultaneously in the signal, and each of these features provides unique and essential information for speech perception. An equally astonishing fact is that, in most cases, the human auditory system is able...
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is a highly heterogeneous and pervasive developmental disorder that affects nearly 1 in 150 children. A primary indicator of ASD is behavioral language impairment with respect to social communication, but the neurophysiology behind this impairment is not well understood. Both the perception and production of prosody...
When we speak, we communicate not only with the words we choose, but also with the patterns of sound we create. As auditory experts, musicians are especially adept at making sense of sound, and accumulating research reveals that this extends to their processing of speech and other communication signals. Much...
The mechanisms underlying the discovery of abstract rules like those found in natural language may be evolutionarily tuned to speech, according to previous research. When infants hear speech sounds, they can learn rules that govern their combination, but when they hear non-speech sounds such as sine-wave tones, they fail to...