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Cross-linguistic perception is known to be molded by native and second language (L2) experiences. Yet, the role of prosodic patterns and individual characteristics on how speakers of tonal languages perceive L2 Spanish sentence modalities remains relatively underexplored. This study addresses the gap by analyzing the auditory performance of 75 Mandarin speakers with varying levels of Spanish proficiency. The experiment consisted of four parts: the first three collected sociolinguistic profiles and assessed participants' pragmatic competence and musical abilities. The last part involved an auditory gating task, where participants were asked to identify Spanish broad focus statements and information-seeking yes/no questions with different stress patterns. Results indicated that the shape of intonation contours and the position of the final stressed syllable significantly impact learners' perceptual accuracy, with effects modulated by utterance length and L2 proficiency. Moreover, individual differences in pragmatic and musical competence were found to refine auditory and cognitive processing in Mandarin learners, thereby influencing their ability to discriminate question-statement contrasts. These findings reveal the complex interplay between prosodic and individual variations in L2 speech perception, providing novel insights into how speakers of tonal languages process intonation in a non-native Romance language like Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Previous studies have shown enhanced pitch and impaired time perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether such deviated patterns of auditory processing depending on acoustic dimensions would transfer to the higher level linguistic pitch and time processing. In this study, we compared the categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones and voice onset time (VOT) in Mandarin Chinese, which utilize pitch and time changes, respectively, to convey phonemic contrasts. Method: The data were collected from 22 Mandarin-speaking adolescents with ASD and 20 age-matched neurotypical controls. In addition to the identification and discrimination tasks to test CP performance, all the participants were evaluated with their language ability and phonological working memory. Linear mixed-effects models were constructed to evaluate the identification and discrimination scores across different groups and conditions. Results: The basic CP pattern of cross-boundary benefit when perceiving both native lexical tones and VOT was largely preserved in high-functioning adolescents with ASD. The degree of CP of lexical tones in ASD was similar to that in typical controls, whereas the degree of CP of VOT in ASD was greatly reduced. Furthermore, the degree of CP of lexical tones correlated with language ability and digit span in ASD participants. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the unbalanced acoustic processing capacities for pitch and time can be generalized to the higher level linguistic processing in ASD. Furthermore, the higher degree of CP of lexical tones correlated with better language ability in Mandarin-speaking individuals with ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech perception is a multisensory process: what we hear can be affected by what we see. For instance, the McGurk effect occurs when auditory speech is presented in synchrony with discrepant visual information. A large number of studies have targeted the McGurk effect at the segmental level of speech (mainly consonant perception), which tends to be visually salient (lip-reading based), while the present study aims to extend the existing body of literature to the suprasegmental level, that is, investigating a McGurk effect for the identification of tones in Mandarin Chinese. Previous studies have shown that visual information does play a role in Chinese tone perception, and that the different tones correlate with variable movements of the head and neck. We constructed various tone combinations of congruent and incongruent auditory-visual materials (10 syllables with 16 tone combinations each) and presented them to native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and speakers of tone-naïve languages. In line with our previous work, we found that tone identification varies with individual tones, with tone 3 (the low-dipping tone) being the easiest one to identify, whereas tone 4 (the high-falling tone) was the most difficult one. We found that both groups of participants mainly relied on auditory input (instead of visual input), and that the auditory reliance for Chinese subjects was even stronger. The results did not show evidence for auditory-visual integration among native participants, while visual information is helpful for tone-naïve participants. However, even for this group, visual information only marginally increases the accuracy in the tone identification task, and this increase depends on the tone in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To investigate the amount of laryngeal lift during the pitch glide speech task and during a bolus swallow. Method: Modified Barium Swallows (MBS) videos captured speech tasks and bolus trials. Using SwallowTail®, laryngeal elevation was measured by the amount of laryngeal lift from rest to its maximum excursion during each subject's pitch glide and 5 mL thin liquid, 20 mL thin liquid, and 15 mL puree trials. Paired t-tests, with Bonferroni correction, determined if there was a difference in laryngeal lift between the pitch glide and the bolus trials. Two methods were used to compare the methodology of measuring laryngeal lift. Result: Each subject's pitch glide was compared to their swallows. Laryngeal lift during the bolus swallow was greater than the lift during the pitch glide by an average of 1.10 cm, 1.38 cm, and 1.34 cm for 5 mL thin liquid, 20 mL thin liquid, and 15 mL puree, respectively. There was a significant difference in laryngeal lift between the pitch glide task and the 20 mL thin liquid, 5 mL thin liquid, and 15 mL puree swallows. Measurement tracking the posterior cricoid detected greater differences than the previous methodology using the hyoid. Conclusion: In this group of dysphagic patients, the larynx lifted significantly less during a pitch glide than during bolus swallows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Shanghai Chinese as well as many other Wu dialects, breathy voice is a well-documented accompaniment of the low-register tone syllables with obstruent as well as sonorant onsets. But Shanghai Chinese is rapidly changing and the breathy voice associated with low-register tones tends to disappear in young speakers' productions. In this study, we asked whether breathy voice is nevertheless still perceived and whether it pushes tone identification toward low-register tones. We conducted forced-choice tone identification tests on young native listeners of Shanghai Chinese, using low-high register tone continua--from tone T3 (23) to tone T2 (34)--imposed on base syllables with either modal or breathy voice quality, and beginning with various onset consonants. We used continua constructed from either naturally produced or synthesized syllables. Our results show that breathy voice does bias tone identification responses toward the low-register tone T3. This result held for both synthesized and natural stimuli, except for the /m/-onset stimuli derived from naturally produced syllables. We propose that the phonetic change at issue--loss of breathiness in production--is not due to misperception but reflects the ever-stronger influence of Standard Mandarin Chinese. In other words, this particular case of sound change seems to be led by production rather than perception. It remains an open question whether this kind of sound change is only determined by sociolinguistic factors (here, the dominance of Mandarin Chinese) or is independently motivated by phonetic and/or phonological factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pitch accent serves multiple duties (encoding lexical accent, syntactic structure, and focus) in spoken Japanese. This study investigates how listeners interpret a role-ambiguous pitch prominence surfacing as F0 rise, which could be a cue to the resolution of a syntactic ambiguity between two possible branching structures, or a signal of contrastive focus on the constituent accompanied by the rise. Two visual world paradigm experiments tested the same Japanese linguistic stimuli with and without pitch emphasis on the second word of structures of the following form: modifier + N1 + N2. In Experiment 1, the visual context suppressed the availability of the contrastive interpretation; in Experiment 2, the visual context made the contrastive interpretation available. We found that the same pitch event can be interpreted as both syntax-encoding and contrastencoding information within the course of processing the same sentence, as long as contextual information is made visually available. When contrastive focus is pragmatically felicitous, it is computed immediately, as soon as the incoming input is accompanied by a notable pitch prominence (Experiment 2). The same prosodic cue can then be re-interpreted as a signal to syntax after the branching ambiguity is recognized due to subsequent input (Experiments 1 and 2). This is most consistent with the view that an initially assigned prosodic boundary is exploited for re-interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Given the role of auditory perception in voice production, studies have investigated whether impairments in auditory perception may underlie the noted disruptions in speech in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Studies of loudness perception in PD show impairments in the perception of self-generated speech, but not external tones. Studies of pitch perception in PD have only examined external tones, but these studies differed in terms of the interstimulus intervals (ISIs) that were used, did not examine the impact of cognition, and report conflicting results. To clarify pitch perception in PD, this work investigated perception of self-generated vocal pitch, controlling for cognition and ISI. Method: A total of 30 individuals with and without PD completed (a) hearing threshold testing, (b) the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and (c) an adaptive just-noticeable-difference paradigm under two separate ISIs (100 ms and 1,000 ms) to assess acuity to self-generated vocal pitch. Results: There was no significant difference in acuity between individuals with and without PD. Both groups demonstrated significantly worse acuity for longer compared to shorter ISIs. Montreal Cognitive Assessment scores were not a significant predictor of acuity. Conclusions: The results suggest that acuity to self-generated vocal pitch does not differ between individuals with and without PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most children learn a language such as Mandarin Chinese that uses lexical tone to communicate meaning. This study aimed to examine the phonological specificity of tone representations in monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin. Two age-groups were tested: toddlers (2.5 to 3.5 years) and preschoolers (4 to 5 years; N = 80). Using a preferential looking paradigm, children were presented with correct and mispronounced (Cantonese or Mandarin tone substitutions) forms of familiar words. In the aggregate, participants demonstrated preferential fixation to visual targets (naming effects) for correctly pronounced words, words mispronounced with native (Mandarin) tone substitutions, and for words mispronounced with nonnative (Cantonese) tone substitutions. However, naming effects were greater for correct pronunciations and for Cantonese tone mispronunciations relative to Mandarin tone mispronunciations. There were no interactions of responses to each trial type with age or with language exposure. Results are discussed in terms of possible determinants of tone sensitivity in early childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare release from masking (RM) between Mandarin-speaking and Englishspeaking listeners with normal hearing for competing speech when target--masker sex cues, spatial cues, or both were available. Method: Speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) for competing speech were measured in 21 Mandarin-speaking and 15 English-speaking adults with normal hearing using a modified coordinate response measure task. SRTs were measured for target sentences produced by a male talker in the presence of two masker talkers (different male talkers or female talkers). The target sentence was always presented directly in front of the listener, and the maskers were either colocated with the target or were spatially separated from the target (+90°, -90°). Stimuli were presented via headphones and were virtually spatialized using head-related transfer functions. Three masker conditions were used to measure RM relative to the baseline condition: (a) talker sex cues, (b) spatial cues, or (c) combined talker sex and spatial cues. Results: The results showed large amounts of RM according to talker sex and/or spatial cues. There was no significant difference in SRTs between Chinese and English listeners for the baseline condition, where no talker sex or spatial cues were available. Furthermore, there was no significant difference in RM between Chinese and English listeners when spatial cues were available. However, RM was significantly larger for Chinese listeners when talker sex cues or combined talker sex and spatial cues were available. Conclusion: Listeners who speak a tonal language such as Mandarin Chinese may be able to take greater advantage of talker sex cues than listeners who do not speak a tonal language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music perception in cochlear implant (CI) users is far from satisfactory, not only because of the technological limitations of current CI devices but also due to the neurophysiological alterations that generally accompany deafness. Early behavioral studies revealed that similar mechanisms underlie musical and lexical pitch perception in CI-based electric hearing. Although neurophysiological studies of the musical pitch perception of English-speaking CI users are actively ongoing, little such research has been conducted with Mandarin-speaking CI users; as Mandarin is a tonal language, these individuals require pitch information to understand speech. The aim of this work was to study the neurophysiological mechanisms accounting for the musical pitch identification abilities of Mandarin-speaking CI users and normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Behavioral and mismatch negativity (MMN) data were analyzed to examine musical pitch processing performance. Moreover, neurophysiological results from CI users with good and bad pitch discrimination performance (according to the just-noticeable differences (JND) and pitch-direction discrimination (PDD) tasks) were compared to identify cortical responses associated with musical pitch perception differences. The MMN experiment was conducted using a passive oddball paradigm, with musical tone C4 (262 Hz) presented as the standard and tones D4 (294 Hz), E4 (330 Hz), G#4 (415 Hz), and C5 (523 Hz) presented as deviants. CI users demonstrated worse musical pitch discrimination ability than did NH listeners, as reflected by larger JND and PDD thresholds for pitch identification, and significantly increased latencies and reduced amplitudes in MMN responses. Good CI performers had better MMN results than did bad performers. Consistent with findings for English-speaking CI users, the results of this work suggest that MMN is a viable marker of cortical pitch perception in Mandarin-speaking CI users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To assess the recognition of lexical tones in Mandarin-speaking bimodal cochlear implant (CI) subjects. Design: Lexical tone recognition in quiet and noise (SNR= +5 dB) was measured with electric stimulation (CI alone) or bimodal stimulation (CI + hearing aid (HA)). The recognition and confusion rates of the four tones (T1, T2, T3 and T4) were analysed. Spearman correlation analysis was performed to examine the relationship between hearing levels in the contralateral ear and bimodal benefits. Study sample: Twenty native Mandarin-speaking bimodal CI users, with ages ranging from 16–49 years. Results: Relative to the CI alone, mean tone recognition with the CI + HA improved significantly from 84.1–92.1% correct in quiet (+8 points) and from 57.9–73.1% correct in noise (+15.2 points). Tone confusions between T2 and T3 were the most prominent in all test conditions, and T4 tended to be labelled as T3 in noise. There was no significant correlation between the bimodal benefits for tone recognition and the unaided or HA-aided pure-tone thresholds at 0.25 kHz. Conclusion: Listeners with CI + HA exhibited significantly better tone recognition than with CI alone. The bimodal advantage for tone recognition was greater in noise than in quiet, perhaps due to a ceiling effect in quiet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examined the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on supra-threshold auditory processing abilities in children. Design: Cross-sectional study. Study sample: Ninety children participated in the study, based on the number of languages they know children were assigned into three groups, i.e. monolingual, bilingual and multilingual. Amplitude modulation detection threshold, gap detection threshold, pitch discrimination threshold and spectral ripple discrimination threshold were measured. Results: Results showed superior supra-threshold auditory processing abilities among multilingual and bilingual children than monolingual children. The results further showed that, the supra-threshold auditory processing of multilingual children was better than bilingual children. Conclusion: This finding suggests that knowledge of multiple languages improves supra-threshold auditory processing abilities. This study adds to the growing body of literature supporting the superior supra-threshold auditory processing abilities among bilingual and multilingual individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the hypothesis that languages can be classified by their degree of tonal rhythm (Jun, 2014). The tonal rhythms of English and Italian were quantified using the following parameters: (a) regularity of tonal alternations in time, measured as durational variability in peak-to-peak and valley-to-valley intervals; (b) magnitude of F0 excursions, measured as the range of frequencies covered by the speaker between consecutive F0 maxima and minima; (c) number of tonal target points per intonational unit; and (d) similarity of F0 rising and falling contours within intonational units. The results show that, as predicted by Jun's prosodic typology (2014), Italian has a stronger tonal rhythm than English, expressed by higher regularity in the distribution of F0 minima turning points, larger F0 excursions, and more frequent tonal targets, indicating alternating phonological H and L tones. This cross-language difference can be explained by the relative load of F0 and durational ratios on the perception and production of speech rhythm and prominence. We suggest that research on the role of speech rhythm in speech processing and language acquisition should not be restricted to syllabic rhythm, but should also examine the role of cross-language differences in tonal rhythm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pitch discrimination accuracy has been found to be affected by many factors, including handedness, musical training, interfering stimuli, and spatial location of the auditory stimulus. Separating the stimulus input location of interference tones from initial (reference) and final (comparison) tones leads to more accurate pitch discrimination, but the effects of spatial location relationships between the reference, interference, and comparison tones have not been fully explored. This study examined the impact of stimulus spatial location in 24 young, nonmusician females. Participants determined whether the pitch of reference and comparison tones were the same or different in 20 pitch discrimination conditions with varied interference, spatial relationships, and frequencies. Findings revealed that pitch discrimination accuracy was significantly better when (a) there was no interference, (b) the comparison tone was presented to the contralateral brain hemisphere from reference and interference tones, and (c) the comparison tone was presented to the left ear. We discussed the implications of these findings for therapy programs to strengthen pitch discrimination abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The distribution of pronouns varies cross-linguistically. This distribution has led to conflicting results in studies that investigated pronoun resolution in agrammatic indviduals. In the investigation of pronominal resolution, the linguistic phenomenon of "resumption" is understudied in agrammatism. The construction of pronominal resolution in Akan presents the opportunity to thoroughly examine resumption. Aims: To start, the present study examines the production of (pronominal) resumption in Akan focus constructions (who-questions and focused declaratives). Second, we explore the effect of grammatical tone on the processing of pronominal (resumption) since Akan is a tonal language. Methods & Procedures: First, we tested the ability to distinguish linguistic and non-linguistic tone in Akan agrammatic speakers. Then, we administered an elicitation task to five Akan agrammatic individuals, controlling for the structural variations in the realization of resumption: focused who-questions and declaratives with (i) only a resumptive pronoun, (ii) only a clause determiner, (iii) a resumptive pronoun and a clause determiner co-occurring, and (iv) neither a resumptive pronoun nor a clause determiner. Outcomes & Results: Tone discrimination.both for pitch and for lexical tone was unimpaired. The production task demonstrated that the production of resumptive pronouns and clause determiners was intact. However, the production of declarative sentences in derived word order was impaired; wh-object questions were relatively well-preserved. Conclusions: We argue that the problems with sentence production are highly selective: linguistic tones and resumption are intact but word order is impaired in non-canonical declarative sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social meaning is not conveyed through words alone, but also through how words are produced phonetically. This paper investigates the role of loudness and pitch in determining the perception of politeness-related judgments in Korean. It has been proposed that high pitch is universally associated with polite or deferential social meanings. In contrast to this, Experiment 1 examined the perceptual effect of pitch and found no effect. Experiment 2 tested the effect of loudness, and found that listeners associate quieter speech with deference. Finally, Experiment 3 investigated the simultaneous effects of loudness and pitch, and found again that loudness had a consistent effect, whereas pitch only had a weak effect. Analyses of individual differences suggest that in contrast to loudness, which is interpreted uniformly across Korean listeners, pitch has more variegated social meanings: Some listeners associate high pitch with deferential meaning, others associate low pitch with deferential meaning. Thus, we find loudness to be a more unambiguous indicator of deferential speech than pitch. These findings shed light on how different acoustic properties contribute to the indexing of social stances, and they suggest that the role of pitch in conveying politeness may have been overstated in past research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Theoretical models and substantial research have proposed that general auditory sensitivity is a developmental foundation for speech perception and language acquisition. Nonetheless, controversies exist about the effectiveness of general auditory training in improving speech and language skills. This research investigated the relationships among general auditory sensitivity, phonemic speech perception, and word-level speech perception via the examination of pitch and lexical tone perception in children. Method: Forty-eight typically developing 4- to 6-year-old Cantonese-speaking children were tested on the discrimination of the pitch patterns of lexical tones in synthetic stimuli, discrimination of naturally produced lexical tones, and identification of lexical tone in familiar words. Results: The findings revealed that accurate lexical tone discrimination and identification did not necessarily entail the accurate discrimination of nonlinguistic stimuli that followed the pitch levels and pitch shapes of lexical tones. Although pitch discrimination and tone discrimination abilities were strongly correlated, accuracy in pitch discrimination was lower than that in tone discrimination, and nonspeech pitch discrimination ability did not precede linguistic tone discrimination in the developmental trajectory. Conclusions: Contradicting the theoretical models, the findings of this study suggest that general auditory sensitivity and speech perception may not be causally or hierarchically related. The finding that accuracy in pitch discrimination is lower than that in tone discrimination suggests that comparable nonlinguistic auditory perceptual ability may not be necessary for accurate speech perception and language learning. The results cast doubt on the use of nonlinguistic auditory perceptual training to improve children’s speech, language, and literacy abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the ability to recognise speech-in-noise and its relation to the ability to discriminate vocal pitch in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developed adults (matched pairwise on age, sex, and IQ). Typically developed individuals understood speech in higher noise levels as compared to the ASD group. Within the control group but not within the ASD group, better speech-in-noise recognition abilities were significantly correlated with better vocal pitch discrimination abilities. Our results show that speech-in-noise recognition is restricted in people with ASD. We speculate that perceptual impairments such as difficulties in vocal pitch perception might be relevant in explaining these difficulties in ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports findings on the effects of processing resources and learning context on the perceptual learning of lexical pitch accent in beginning nonnative Japanese learners. Native English speakers in at-home and study-abroad contexts were tested twice during a semester of Japanese study on their ability to judge the correctness of and categorize nouns by their pitch pattern. Regression analyses indicated that the ability to store nonnative-like sound sequences in phonological short-term memory (PSTM), as well as auditory processing ability, predicted a significant degree of perceptual gains made over a 12-week interval. However, these predictors were task specific in that PSTM capacity predicted correctness judgment gains, while auditory processing accounted for variation in categorization. Furthermore, despite learners in the at-home context performing slightly better overall, processing resources adhered to the same predictive pattern when context was taken into account. The results suggest that (a) neither increased input during study-abroad nor targeted instruction is sufficient for most learners to acquire lexical accent; (b) processing resources support the acquisition of lexical prosody, but these may depend on how learning is assessed; and (c) PSTM operates across learning contexts, suggesting it to be a domain-general capacity in early-stage nonnative language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant users have difficulty perceiving tonal changes in speech with current signal processing strategies. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether English-speaking cochlear implant and normal hearing listeners can be trained to recognise closed-set Mandarin tones. The validity of using native-English speakers to evaluate Mandarin tone perception in cochlear implants was tested. Design: Two groups of native-English speaking participants were evaluated. All listeners were given training rounds and evaluation rounds in which their tonal identification was tested. The normal-hearing group was also tested with acoustic simulations of the traditional Continuous Interleaved Sampling (CIS) strategy. Study sample: Ten normal-hearing English speakers and seven cochlear implant listeners participated. Results: The normal-hearing group correctly identified unprocessed tones at 87% and CIS-processed tones at 58% on average. The cochlear implant listeners achieved 56% correct identification on average. Conclusions: This level of performance for native English speaking CI users was comparable to previous studies using native Mandarin-speaking CI listeners, which showed a mean of 59% in 19 CI users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how pitch accent type and additive particles affect the activation of contrastive alternatives. In Experiment 1, German listeners heard declarative utterances (e.g., The swimmer wanted to put on flippers) and saw four printed words displayed on screen: one that was a contrastive alternative to the subject noun (e.g., diver), one that was non-contrastively related (e.g., pool), the object (e.g., flippers), and an unrelated distractor. Experiment 1 manipulated pitch accent type, comparing a broad focus control condition to two narrow focus conditions: with a contrastive or non-contrastive accent on the subject noun (nuclear L+H* vs. H+L*, respectively, followed by deaccentuation). In Experiment 2, the utterances in the narrow focus conditions were preceded by the unstressed additive particle auch ("also"), which may trigger alternatives itself. It associated with the accented subject. Results showed that, compared to the control condition, participants directed more fixations to the contrastive alternative when the subject was realized with a contrastive accent (nuclear L+H*) than when it was realized with non-contrastive H+L*, while additive particles had no effect. Hence, accent type is the primary trigger for signaling the presence of alternatives (i.e., contrast). Implications for theories of information structure and the processing of additive particles are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is often a mismatch for bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users between the electrodes in the two ears that receive the same frequency allocation and the electrodes that, when stimulated, yield the same pitch. Studies with CI users who have extreme mismatches between the two ears show that adaptation occurs in terms of pitch matching, reducing the difference between which electrodes receive the same frequency allocation and which ones produce the same pitch. The considerable adaptation that occurs for these extreme cases suggests that adaptation should be sufficient to overcome the relatively minor mismatches seen with typical bilateral CI users. However, even those with many years of bilateral CI use continue to demonstrate a mismatch. This may indicate that adaptation only occurs when there are large mismatches. Alternatively, it may indicate that adaptation occurs regardless of the magnitude of the mismatch, but that adaptation is proportional to the magnitude of the mismatch, and thus never fully counters the original mismatch. To investigate this, six bilateral CI users with initial pitch-matching mismatches of less than 3 mm completed a pitch-matching task near the time of activation, 6 months after activation, and 1 year after activation. Despite relatively small initial mismatches, the results indicated that adaptation still occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine developmental trends in spectral ripple discrimination (SRD) and to compare the performance of typically developing children to children with auditory processing disorder (APD). Study design: Cross-sectional study. Study sample: Fifteen children with APD, as well as 17 typically developing children and 14 adults reporting no listening or academic difficulties participated. Results: Typically developing children showed poor SRD thresholds compared to adults, indicating prolonged maturation of spectral shape recognition. Both typically developing children and APD children showed a maturational trend in SRD, but a General Linear Model fit to their thresholds showed that children with APD displayed SRD thresholds that were significantly poorer than those of typically developing children when controlling for age. This suggests that in APD children, SRD maturation lags behind typically developing children. Conclusion: Poor spectral ripple discrimination may explain some of the listening difficulties experienced by children with APD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that a central difficulty in dyslexia may be impaired rapid temporal processing. Good temporal processing is also needed for musical perception, which relies on the ability to detect rapid changes. Our study is the first to measure the perception of adults with and without dyslexia on all three dimensions of music (rhythm, pitch, and spectrum), as well as their capacity for auditory imagery and detection of slow changes, while controlling for working memory. Participants were undergraduate students, aged 20-35 years: 26 readers with dyslexia and 30 typical readers. Participants completed a battery of tests measuring aptitude for recognizing the similarity/difference in tone pitch or rhythm, spectral resolution, vividness/control of auditory imagination, the ability to detect slow changes in auditory stimuli, and working memory. As expected, readers with dyslexia showed poorer performance in pitch and rhythm than controls, but outperformed them in spectral perception. The data for each test was analyzed separately while controlling for the letter-number sequencing score. No differences between groups were found in slow-change detection or auditory imagery. Our results demonstrated that rapid temporal processing appears to be the main difficulty of readers with dyslexia, who demonstrated poorer performance when stimuli were presented quickly rather than slowly and better performance on a task when no temporal component was involved. These findings underscore the need for further study of temporal processing in readers with dyslexia. Remediation of temporal processing deficits may unmask the preserved or even superior abilities of people with dyslexia, leading to enhanced ability in all areas that utilize the temporal component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments explored how pitch influences perception of vowel duration as a cue to voicing in light of (1) psychoacoustic interactions between pitch and duration and (2) predicted compensatory effects based on the patterning of pitch and duration in the accentual/prominence-marking system of English. Listeners categorized a "coat"–"code" vowel duration continuum with pitch height on the vowel manipulated. In experiment 1 the expected psychoacoustic effect was observed. In experiment 2 the continuum was altered, highlighting pitch as a prosodic property, resulting in predicted compensatory effects. Results thus indicate prosodic patterns can mediate the perception of durational cues in isolated words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of nonmodal phonation on estimates of subglottal pressure (Ps) derived from the magnitude of a neck-surface accelerometer (ACC) signal and to confirm previous findings regarding the impact of vowel contexts and pitch levels in a larger cohort of participants. Method: Twenty-six vocally healthy participants (18 women, 8 men) were asked to produce a series of p-vowel syllables with descending loudness in 3 vowel contexts (/a/, /i/, and /u/), 3 pitch levels (comfortable, high, and low), and 4 elicited phonatory conditions (modal, breathy, strained, and rough). Estimates of Ps for each vowel segment were obtained by averaging the intraoral air pressure plateau before and after each segment. The root-mean-square magnitude of the neck-surface ACC signal was computed for each vowel segment. Three linear mixed-effects models were used to statistically assess the effects of vowel, pitch, and phonatory condition on the linear relationship (slope and intercept) between Ps and ACC signal magnitude. Results: Results demonstrated statistically significant linear relationships between ACC signal magnitude and Ps within participants but with increased intercepts for the nonmodal phonatory conditions; slopes were affected to a lesser extent. Vowel and pitch contexts did not significantly affect the linear relationship between ACC signal magnitude and Ps. Conclusion: The classic linear relationship between ACC signal magnitude and Ps is significantly affected when nonmodal phonation is produced by a speaker. Future work is warranted to further characterize nonmodal phonatory characteristics to improve the ACC-based prediction of Ps during naturalistic speech production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution of speech throughout history, and it mentions writer Eric Lenneberg's monograph entitled "The Biological Foundations of Language" from 1967, the human brain's role in data processing, and an ontogentic perspective on language which was developed by the late man of letters Charles de Brosses. The deceased linguist Heymann Steinthal and the late naturalist Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law recapitulation theory are assessed.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether merging the clinical pitch pattern test procedure with psychoacoustic adaptive methods would create a new tool feasible to capture individual differences in pitch temporal processing and patterning capacity of children and adults. Method: Sixty-six individuals, young children (ages 10-- 12 years, n = 22), older children (ages 13--15 years, n = 23), and adults (ages 18--33 years, n = 21), were recruited and assigned to subgroups based on reported duration (years) of instrumental music instruction. Additional background information was collected in order to assess if the pitch temporal processing and patterning span developed, the Pspan, was sensitive to individual differences across participants. Results: The evaluation of the Pspan task as a scale indicated good parallel reliability across runs assessed by Cronbach's alpha, and scores were normally distributed. Between- subjects analysis of variance indicated main effects for both age groups and music groups recruited for the study. A multiple regression analysis with the Pspan scores as the dependent variable found that 3 measures of music instruction, age in years, and paternal education were predictive of enhanced temporal processing and patterning capacity for pitch input. Conclusions: The outcomes suggest that the Pspan task is a time-efficient data collection tool that is sensitive to the duration of instrumental music instruction, maturation, and paternal education. In addition, results indicate that the task is sensitive to age-related auditory temporal processing and patterning performance changes during adolescence when children are 10--15 years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acoustic analysis and playback studies have greatly advanced our understanding of between-individual differences in nonverbal communication. Yet, researchers have only recently begun to investigate within-individual variation in the voice, particularly how people modulate key vocal parameters across various social contexts, with most of this research focusing on mating contexts. Here, we investigated whether men and women modulate the frequency components of their voices in a professional context, and how this voice modulation affects listeners' assessments of the speakers' competence and authority. Research assistants engaged scientists working as faculty members at various universities in two types of speech conditions: (1) Control speech, wherein the subjects were asked how to get to the administrative offices on that given campus; and (2) Authority speech, wherein the same subjects were asked to provide commentary for a radio program for young scholars titled, "How to become a scientist, and is it worth it?". Our results show that male (n = 27) and female (n = 24) faculty members lowered their mean voice pitch (measured as fundamental frequency, F0) and vocal tract resonances (measured as formant position, Pf) when asked to provide their expert opinion compared to when giving directions. Notably, women lowered their mean voice pitch more than did men (by 33 Hz vs. 14 Hz) when giving expert advice. The results of a playback experiment further indicated that foreign-speaking listeners judged the voices of faculty members as relatively more competent and more authoritative based on authority speech than control speech, indicating that the observed nonverbal voice modulation effectively altered listeners' perceptions. Our results support the prediction that people modulate their voices in social contexts in ways that are likely to elicit favorable social appraisals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To test the channel discrimination of cochlear implant (CI) users along all contacts of the electrode array and assess whether this is related to speech perception. Design: CI recipients were tested with a custom-made channel discrimination test. They were asked to distinguish a target stimulus from two reference stimuli in a three-alternative forced choice (3AFC) task. The target stimulus was evoked using current steering, with current steering coefficients (α) of 1, 0.5 and 0.25. The test provided a discrimination score (Dα) for each electrode contact along the array. Study sample: Thirty adults implanted with a CI from Advanced Bionics. Results: Large variations in Dα scores were observed, both across the electrode array and between subjects. Statistical analysis revealed a significant channel-to-channel variability in Dα score (p < 0.01). Further, there was a significant relationship between subjects' Dα scores and their speech perception in quiet (p < 0.001). Conclusions: The large variations in Dα score emphasise the importance of testing pitch discrimination across the complete electrode array. The relationship between Dα score and speech perception indicates that pitch discrimination might be a contributing factor to the performance of individual implant users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the lexical use of Japanese pitch accent in Japanese‐learning infants. A word–object association task revealed that 18‐month‐old infants succeeded in learning the associations between two nonsense objects paired with two nonsense words minimally distinguished by pitch pattern (Experiment 1). In contrast, 14‐month‐old infants failed (Experiment 2). Eighteen‐month‐old infants succeeded even for sounds that contained only the prosodic information (Experiment 3). However, a subsequent experiment revealed that 14‐month‐old infants succeeded in an easier single word–object task using pitch contrast (Experiment 4). These findings indicate that pitch pattern information is robustly available to 18‐month‐old Japanese monolingual infants in a minimal pair word‐learning situation, but only partially accessible in the same context for 14‐month‐old infants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tested the hypothesis that even the simplest cognitive tasks require the storage of information in working memory (WM), distorting any information that was previously stored in WM. Experiment 1 tested this hypothesis by requiring observers to perform a simple letter discrimination task while they were holding a single orientation in WM. We predicted that performing the task on the interposed letter stimulus would cause the orientation memory to become less precise and more categorical compared to when the letter was absent or when it was present but could be ignored. This prediction was confirmed. Experiment 2 tested the modality specificity of this effect by replacing the visual letter discrimination task with an auditory pitch discrimination task. Unlike the interposed visual stimulus, the interposed auditory stimulus produced little or no disruption of WM, consistent with the use of modality‐specific representations. Thus, performing a simple visual discrimination task, but not a simple auditory discrimination task, distorts information about a single feature being maintained in visual WM. We suggest that the interposed task eliminates information stored within the focus of attention, leaving behind a WM representation outside the focus of attention that is relatively imprecise and categorical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Highlights • English 14-month-olds map some non-native pitch contours to objects, but not others. • The acoustic distinctiveness of pitch contour labels does not drive word learning. • Infants only demonstrate learning if one of the labels has a rising pitch contour. • English-learners may initially over-interpret rising pitch in object-label mapping. Abstract Infants show interesting patterns of flexibility and constraint early in word learning. Here, we explore perceptual and experiential factors that drive associative learning of labels that differ in pitch contour. Contrary to the salience hypothesis proposed in Experiment 1, English-learning 14-month-olds failed to map acoustically distinctive level and dipping labels to novel referents, even though they discriminated the labels when no potential referents were present. Conversely, infants readily mapped the less distinctive rising and dipping labels. In Experiment 2, we found that the degree of pitch variation in labels also does not account for learning. Instead, English-learning infants only learned if one of the labels had a rising pitch contour. We argue that experience with hearing and/or producing native language prosody may lead infants to initially over-interpret the role rising pitch plays in differentiating words. Together, our findings suggest that multiple factors contribute to whether specific acoustic forms will function as candidate object labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monaural noise edge pitch (NEP) is evoked by a broadband noise with a sharp falling edge in the power spectrum. The pitch is heard near the spectral edge frequency but shifted slightly into the frequency region of the noise. Thus, the pitch of a lowpass (LP) noise is matched by a pure tone typically 2%–5% below the edge, whereas the pitch of highpass (HP) noise is matched a comparable amount above the edge. Musically trained listeners can recognize musical intervals between NEPs. The pitches can be understood from a temporal pattern-matching model of pitch perception based on the peaks of a simplified autocorrelation function. The pitch shifts arise from limits on the autocorrelation window duration. An alternative place-theory approach explains the pitch shifts as the result of lateral inhibition. Psychophysical experiments using edge frequencies of 100 Hz and below find that LP-noise pitches exist but HP-noise pitches do not. The result is consistent with a temporal analysis in tonotopic regions outside the noise band. LP and HP experiments with high-frequency edges find that pitch tends to disappear as the edge frequency approaches 5000 Hz, as expected from a timing theory, though exceptional listeners can go an octave higher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional understanding plays an important role in the physical and mental health of children. To determine whether the development of emotional understanding is delayed in children with a cochlear implant (CI), 30 children with a CI and 30 matched children with typical hearing aged between 3 and 9 years old completed three tasks (facial expression, tone expression and scene of emotion matching), in which they identified four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear). The participants included 40 preschool children and 20 school-aged children. Compared with the children with typical hearing, the children with a CI were significantly delayed in the ability to understand emotion; the tone expression matching task was the most difficult task for all participants; and the school-aged children performed better than the preschool children, but this trend was only observed in the typical hearing group; and happiness was the easiest emotion to identify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Chronic tinnitus ("ringing in the ears") is a phantom auditory perception with no cure. A goal of treatment is often to reduce the loudness of tinnitus. However, tinnitus loudness cannot be measured objectively. It is most commonly assessed by obtaining a loudness match (LM) with a pure tone and by using a numeric rating scale (NRS). Constrained loudness scaling (CLS) is a more recent measure of tinnitus loudness that utilizes auditory training of a fixed loudness scale to guide tinnitus loudness judgments. The purpose of this study was to compare results using these 3 measures of tinnitus loudness. Method: This study obtained tinnitus loudness measures of LM, NRS, and CLS with 170 participants. These participants are part of a larger study obtaining repeated measures over 6 months. Only baseline data are presented. Results: Correlations between all measures were weak to moderate: LM versus CLS (r = .46), CLS versus NRS (r = .49), and LM versus NRS (r = .38). Conclusion: Further systematic research is needed to more fully understand the relationships between these different measures and to establish a valid measure of tinnitus loudness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: An experiment was conducted to investigate the possibility that speech perception could be improved for some cochlear implant (CI) users by adjustment of the frequency allocation to the electrodes, following assessment of pitch perception along the electrode array. Study sample: Thirteen adult CI users with MED-EL devices participated in the study. Design: Pitch perception was assessed for individual CI electrode pairs using the Pitch Contour Test (PCT), giving information on pitch discrimination and pitch ranking for adjacent electrodes. Sentence perception in noise was also assessed with ten different frequency allocations, including the default. Results: Pitch perception was found to be poorer for both discrimination and ranking scores at either end of the electrode array. A significant effect of frequency allocation was found for sentence scores [F(4.24,38.2) = 7.14, p < 0.001] and a significant interaction between sentence score and PCT ranking score for basal electrodes was found [F(4.24,38.2) = 2.95, p = 0.03]. Participants with poorer pitch perception at the basal end had poorer scores for some allocations with greater basal shift. Conclusions: The results suggest that speech perception could be improved for CI users by assessment of pitch perception using the PCT and subsequent adjustment of pitch-related stimulation parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To study the effectiveness of bimodal stimulation coupled to FM system on the speech discrimination in noise, temporal discrimination and temporal resolution in patients with unilateral cochlear implant. Method: A total number of 28 subjects were examined in this study, they were divided into group I (19 subjects) with pre-lingual hearing loss and group II (9 subjects) with post-lingual hearing loss. Both groups had a residual hearing in the non-implanted ear that permits benefit from amplification. Full history taking, Questionnaire, Aided warble tone response, Arabic monosyllabic word test in quiet and in presence of background noise, Pitch discrimination test, Pitch pattern sequence test and Auditory fusion test-subtest 3. Results: There is significant statistical difference in CI patients' performance in most of tests while using bimodal stimulation with FM system coupled to CI than with bimodal stimulation alone or CI alone condition. Conclusions: It is recommended to use hearing aid in non-implanted ear in order to improve speech discrimination in noise, temporal discrimination and temporal resolution abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Congenital amusia is a neurological dysfunction which is defined as an anomaly in pitch processing. This dysfunction might negatively affect individuals' pitch perception in both musical contexts and in speaking. Methods: In this study, an on-line MBEA test is used in order to evaluate musical pitch perception of 38 stutterers who receive speech therapy and 31 stutterers who do not receive speech therapy, in comparison with 70 fluent speaking individuals. Results: Between online MBEA scores of speech therapy receiving group and non- speech therapy group, any statistically substantial relation could not be detected (p >.05). Speech therapy receiving group scored better in online MBEA test that non- speech therapy group. Especially, together with the decrease in intensity of stuttering, the mean average of the test increases. A statistically substantial relation between the online MBEA scores of stutterer groups and the control group has been detected (p >.05). A linear relationship was seen between patients' age and online MBEA scores, at the rate of 28.3%. Conclusions: With accordance to findings in the study, it has been hypothesized that stuttering individuals might have problems in terms of musical pitch perception. Individuals who stuttering has tone deafness The Tone Deafness Evaluation Test will be an alternate evaluation instrument for developmental stuttering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) determine if untrained, normal-hearing listeners could learn, with regimented practice trials, to localise a dissonant tonal complex while wearing electronic hearing protectors and achieve equivalent performance to the unoccluded ear, (2) determine if different protector designs affect the localisation learning curve, and (3) determine if a sequential training regimen could be used to determine whether a device is not amenable to training effects. All subjects completed paired training and testing trials, in 12 Learning Units (LU), first with the open ear., then half with device A, a US Army TCAPS (INVISIO® X50), and the other half with device B (a prototype). Both groups then finished with the opposite device. Ten subjects participated, with thresholds below 25 dBHL, bilateral symmetry below 15 dBHL, and naivety with electronic protectors and localisation testing. Subjects eventually approached their open ear capability with device A, but never reached equivalent open ear nor asymptotic performance with device B. Depending upon a protector's sound transduction, frequency response, and other characteristics, different amounts of training are required to adapt. The training protocol has value in determining device acceptability based on the training burden required, especially when mission-related localisation performance is important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this observational study was to investigate the properties of sentence-final prosody in yes/no questions produced by cochlear implant (CI) users in order to determine whether and how the age at CI implantation impacts CI users' production of question intonation later in life. Method: We acoustically analyzed recordings from 46 young adult CI users and 10 young adults with normal hearing who read yes/no questions. Of the 46 CI users, 20 had received their CI before the age of 4.0 years (early implantation group), 15 between ages 4.0 and 8.11 years (midimplantation group), and 11 at the age of 9.0 years or later (late implantation group). We assessed the prosodic properties of the produced questions for each implantation group and the normal hearing comparison group (a) by measuring the sentence-final rise in fundamental frequency, (b) by labeling the question-final intonation contour using the Tones and Breaks Index (Beckman & Ayers, 1994; Silverman, Beckman, et al., 1992; Veilleux, Shattuck-Hufnagel, & Brugos, 2006), and (c) by assessing phrase-final lengthening. Results: The fundamental frequency rises produced by all CI users exhibited a smaller magnitude than those produced by the normal hearing comparison group, although the difference between early implanted CI users and the normal hearing group did not reach statistical significance. Early implanted CI users were more comparable in their use of question-final intonation contours to the individuals with typical hearing than to those users with CI implanted later in life. All CI users exhibited significantly less phrase-final lengthening than the normal hearing comparison group, regardless of age at CI implantation. Conclusion: The results of this investigation of question intonation produced by CI users suggest that those CI users who were implanted with CI earlier in life produce yes/no question intonation in a manner that is more similar to, albeit not the same as, individuals with normal hearing when compared to the productions of those users with CI implanted after 4.0 years of age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the relation between vocal emotion and vocal pitch perception abilities in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and pairwise matched adults with typical development. The ASD group had impaired vocal but typical non-vocal pitch and vocal timbre perception abilities. The ASD group showed less accurate vocal emotion perception than the comparison group and vocal emotion perception abilities were correlated with traits and symptoms associated with ASD. Vocal pitch and vocal emotion perception abilities were significantly correlated in the comparison group only. Our results suggest that vocal emotion recognition difficulties in ASD might not only be based on difficulties with complex social tasks, but also on difficulties with processing of basic sensory features, such as vocal pitch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Pitch pattern sequence (PPS) and duration pattern sequence (DPS) tests are frequently used in the assessment of auditory processing disorder. Current recommendations suggest alternate, interchangeable modes for responding to stimuli. Purpose: The objective of the study is to evaluate the influence of response mode (i.e., humming, pointing, and labeling) and age on PPS and DPS performance of 7- to 11-year-old children. Research Design: Laboratory-based testing of school children. Cross-sectional comparison of age, with repeated measures of age, test, ear, and response mode. Study Sample: From 452 children recruited, 228 right-handed children (109 girls) aged 7 years to 11 years 11 months (mean age 9 years 4 months) completed at least one test (PPS: 211, DPS: 198), and 181 children completed both tests. Audiology inclusion criteria include normal hearing thresholds (≤15 dB HL at octave frequencies 250-8000 Hz); word recognition in quiet ≥92%; tympanogram peak compensated static acoustic compliance 0.4-1.6 mmhos; and tympanometric peak pressure -100 to +50 daPa, all in both ears. Other inclusion criteria were Portuguese as first language; right handed; no musical training; no related, known, or observed phonological, learning, neurologic, psychiatric, or behavioral disorder; otologic history; and delayed neuropsychomotor or language development. Data Collection and Analysis: PPS: 30 trials per ear and response condition of three consecutive 500 msec duration intermixed high (1430 Hz) or low (880 Hz) frequency tones presented monaurally at 50 dB HL. The first response condition was humming followed by labeling (naming: high or low). DPS: As per PPS except 1000 Hz tones of intermixed 500 (long) and 250 msec (short) duration. First response was pointing (at a symbolic object) followed by labeling. Trends across age and between tests were assessed using repeated measures generalized linear mixed models. Correlation coefficients were calculated to assess relations among test scores. The two-sided significance level was 0.05. Results: Older children performed better than younger children in all tasks. Humming the tone pattern (PPS humming) produced generally better performance than either articulating the attributes of the tones (labeling) or pointing to objects representing tone duration. PPS humming produced ceiling performance for many children of all ages. For both labeling tasks and DPS pointing, performance was better on the PPS than on the DPS, for stimulation of the right than the left ear, and in boys than girls. Individual performance on the two tasks was highly correlated. Conclusions: Response mode does matter in the PPS and DPS. Results from humming should not be combined with or be a substitute for results obtained from a labeling response. Tasks that rely on labeling a tonal stimulus should be avoided in testing hearing in children or other special populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the perceptual trade-off between knowledge of a language’s statistical regularities and reliance on the acoustic signal during L2 spoken word recognition. We test how early learners track and make use of segmental and suprasegmental cues and their relative frequencies during non-native word recognition. English learners of Mandarin were taught an artificial tonal language in which a tone’s informativeness for word identification varied according to neighborhood density. The stimuli mimicked Mandarin’s uneven distribution of syllable+tone combinations by varying syllable frequency and the probability of particular tones co-occurring with a particular syllable. Use of statistical regularities was measured by four-alternative forced-choice judgments and by eye fixations to target and competitor symbols. Half of the participants were trained on one speaker, that is, low speaker variability while the other half were trained on four speakers. After four days of learning, the results confirmed that tones are processed according to their informativeness. Eye movements to the newly learned symbols demonstrated that L2 learners use tonal probabilities at an early stage of word recognition, regardless of speaker variability. The amount of variability in the signal, however, influenced the time course of recovery from incorrect anticipatory looks: participants exposed to low speaker variability recovered from incorrect probability-based predictions of tone more rapidly than participants exposed to greater variability. These results motivate two conclusions: early L2 learners track the distribution of segmental and suprasegmental co-occurrences and make predictions accordingly during spoken word recognition; and when the acoustic input is more variable because of multi-speaker input, listeners rely more on their knowledge of tone-syllable co-occurrence frequency distributions and less on the incoming acoustic signal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The auditory dorsal stream has been implicated in sensorimotor integration and concatenation of sequential sound events, both being important for processing of speech and music. The auditory ventral stream, by contrast, is characterized as subserving sound identification and recognition. We studied the respective roles of the dorsal and ventral streams, including recruitment of basal ganglia and medial temporal lobe structures, in the processing of tone sequence elements. A sequence was presented incrementally across several runs during functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans, and we compared activation by sequence elements when heard for the first time ("novel") versus when the elements were repeating ("familiar"). Our results show a shift in tone-sequence-dependent activation from posterior-dorsal cortical areas and the basal ganglia during the processing of less familiar sequence elements towards anterior and ventral cortical areas and the medial temporal lobe after the encoding of highly familiar sequence elements into identifiable auditory objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both music and speech perception rely on hearing out one pitch in the presence of others. Pitch discrimination of narrowband sounds based only on temporal-envelope cues is rendered nearly impossible by introducing interferers in both normal-hearing listeners and cochlear-implant (CI) users. This study tested whether performance improves in normal-hearing listeners if the target is presented over a broad spectral region. The results indicate that performance is still strongly affected by spectrally remote interferers, despite increases in bandwidth, suggesting that envelope-based pitch is unlikely to allow CI users to perceive pitch when multiple harmonic sounds are presented at once. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on infant language discrimination has focused primarily on the role of prosody, specifically rhythmic timing cues. This, however, ignores the potentially useful role that intonation, another aspect of prosody, might play in aiding discrimination. In this article, we investigated how and when American English‐learning infants discriminate between prosodically similar languages, specifically American English and German, focusing on the role of intonation in infant language discrimination. We found that the ability to distinguish American English and German develops between 5 and 7 months. However, 7‐month‐olds failed to discriminate the two languages when the natural pitch variation was replaced by a monotone. Thus, intonation is necessary for infants' discrimination of American English and German. Based on these results, we argue for a greater role of intonation in supporting language discrimination by infants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]