Purpose: Effects of clicks and tonebursts on early and late auditory middle latency response (AMLR) components were evaluated in young and older cigarette smokers and nonsmokers. Method: Participants ( n = 49) were categorized by smoking and age into 4 groups: (a) older smokers, (b) older nonsmokers, (c) young smokers, and (d) young nonsmokers.…

Purpose: Several acoustic cues specify any single phonemic contrast. Nonetheless, adult, native speakers of a language share weighting strategies, showing preferential attention to some properties over others. Cochlear implant (CI) signal processing disrupts the salience of some cues: In general, amplitude structure remains readily available, but…

Purpose: A phonological deficit is thought to affect most individuals with developmental dyslexia. The present study addresses whether the phonological deficit is caused by difficulties with perceptual learning of fine acoustic details. Method: A demanding test of nonverbal auditory memory, "noise learning," was administered to both…

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: The objectives of this study were to determine (a) whether school-age children with typical hearing demonstrate poorer auditory working memory performance in multitalker babble at degraded signal-to-noise ratios than in quiet; and (b) whether the amount of cognitive demand of the task contributed to differences in performance in noise. It…

Purpose: Two studies examined learning of grammar-like visual sequences to determine whether a general deficit in statistical learning characterizes this population. Furthermore, we tested the hypothesis that difficulty in sustaining attention during the learning task might account for differences in statistical learning. Method: In Study 1,…

Purpose: In the present study, the authors aimed to investigate the language confounds of filtered words tests by examining the repetition of real words versus nonsense words as a function of level of filtering. Method: Fifty-five young, native-English-speaking women with normal hearing were required to repeat 80 real-word and 80 nonsense-word…

Purpose: The present study examined cochlear implant (CI) users' perception of vowels presented concurrently (i.e., "double vowels") to further our understanding of auditory grouping in electric hearing. Method: Identification of double vowels and single vowels was measured with 10 CI subjects. Fundamental frequencies (F0s) of…

Purpose: The objective of the study was to investigate the influence of noise (energetic) and speech (energetic plus informational) maskers on the head shadow (HS), squelch (SQ), and binaural summation (SU) effect in bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant (CI) users. Method: Speech recognition was measured in the presence of either a competing…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify whether differences in dynamic range (DR) are evident across the spoken languages of Korean, English, and Mandarin. Method: Recorded sentence-level speech materials were used as stimuli. DR was quantified using different definitions of DR (defined as the range in decibels from the highest to the…

Purpose: The factors affecting frequency discrimination in school-age children are poorly understood. The goal of the present study was to evaluate developmental effects related to memory for pitch and the utilization of temporal fine structure. Method: Listeners were 5.1- to 13.6-year-olds and adults, all with normal hearing. A subgroup of…

Purpose: This study investigated the development of spatial release from masking in children using closed-set Mandarin disyllabic words and monosyllabic words carrying lexical tones as test stimuli and speech spectrum-weighted noise as a masker. Method: Twenty-six children ages 4-9 years and 12 adults, all with normal hearing, participated in…

Purpose: Previously, Gygi and Shafiro (2011) found that when environmental sounds are semantically incongruent with the background scene (e.g., horse galloping in a restaurant), they can be identified more accurately by young normal-hearing listeners (YNH) than sounds congruent with the scene (e.g., horse galloping at a racetrack). This study…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the ability of subjects with cochlear implants (CIs) to discriminate voice gender and how this ability evolved as a function of CI experience. Method: The authors presented a continuum of voice samples created by voice morphing, with 9 intermediate acoustic parameter steps between a typical male and a…

Purpose: Previous research has demonstrated that children weight the acoustic cues to many phonemic decisions differently than do adults and gradually shift those strategies as they gain language experience. However, that research has focused on spectral and duration cues rather than on amplitude cues. In the current study, the authors examined…