BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The mechanism underlying the perception of music has been the subject of study for many years. We investigated the role of the anterior portion of the temporal lobes in the perception of music in nonmusicians by use of positron emission tomography (PET). METHODS We used the subtraction technique for PET to investigate the role of the anterior portion of the bilateral te...

Healthy aging is accompanied by listening difficulties, including decreased speech comprehension, that stem from an ill-understood combination of sensory and cognitive changes. Here, we use electroencephalography to demonstrate that auditory neural oscillations of older adults entrain less firmly and less flexibly to speech-paced (∼3 Hz) rhythms than younger adults' during attentive listening. ...

This study aimed at investigating the comparative effect of using self-assessment vs. peer-assessment on young EFL learners’ performance on selective and productive reading tasks. To do so, 56 young learners from among 70 students in four intact classes were selected based on their performance on the A1 Movers Test. Then, the participants were randomly divided into two groups, self-assessment a...

The effect of unattended task-irrelevant auditory stimuli in the context of an auditory task is not well understood. Using human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we compared blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal changes resulting from monotic task-irrelevant stimulation, monotic task-relevant stimulation and dichotic stimulation with an attended task-relevant stream to one...

Listening tests and Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) are the most commonly used techniques for the evaluation of speech synthesis quality and naturalness. These are invaluable in the assessment of subjective qualities of machine generated stimuli. However, there are a number of challenges in understanding the MOS scores that come out of listening tests. Primarily, we advocate for the use of non-parame...

Listening, the very basic language skill is consistently interrelated and intervened with the other language skills speaking, reading and writing. Until the late nineteenth century written mode is predominant in language learning and then onwards listening began to gain its significance in language teaching. The challenges towards teaching listening are now better understood because of the new ...

Previous research has demonstrated that psychopaths exhibit abnormal language lateralization, and it has been proposed that psychopaths may be characterized by abnormal processing asymmetries in other domains as well [Hare, (1998). Psychopathy, affect, and behavior. In D. J. Cooke, A. E. Forth, & R. D. Hare (Eds.), Psychopathy: theory, research and implications for society (pp. 105–137). Nether...

People increasingly live their lives in an online setting. This observation is fundamental to a growing body of work that aims at describing, understanding and exploiting the abundance of online personal information. The strong potential of social media platforms for understanding people’s behavior has already played an important role in scientific literature and as we increasingly integrate so...

Over the past two decades, there has been a great deal of attention devoted to the teaching, learning, and testing of second language (L2) listening ability. This increased attention is due (at least in part) to the realization of the importance of listening in language learning (Rubin, 1994). For first language learners, virtually all linguistic input is through the aural mode. While the lingu...