Speech perception, especially in noise, may be maximized if the perceiver observes the naturally occurring visual-plus-auditory cues inherent in the production of spoken language. Evidence is conflicting, however, about which aspects of visual information mediate enhanced speech perception in noise. For this reason, we investigated the relative contributions of audibility and the type of visual...

Nonnative speech poses a challenge to speech perception, especially in challenging listening environments. Audiovisual (AV) cues are known to improve native speech perception in noise. The extent to which AV cues benefit nonnative speech perception in noise, however, is much less well-understood. Here, we examined native American English-speaking and native Korean-speaking listeners' perception...

Children with reading impairments have deficits in phonological awareness, phonemic categorization, speech-in-noise perception, and psychophysical tasks such as frequency and temporal discrimination. Many of these children also exhibit abnormal encoding of speech stimuli in the auditory brainstem, even though responses to click stimuli are normal. In typically developing children the auditory b...

OBJECTIVE To determine the impact of the fixed and adaptive beamforming technology of the new MED-EL SONNET cochlear implant audio processor on speech perception in noise. METHODS The study cohort comprises 18 postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant recipients with at least six months of experience. Speech reception thresholds were measured with the Oldenburg Sentence Test in continuous...

PURPOSE This study investigated whether adults with dyslexia show evidence of a consistent speech perception deficit by testing phoneme categorization and word perception in noise. METHOD Seventeen adults with dyslexia and 20 average readers underwent a test battery including standardized reading, language and phonological awareness tests, and tests of speech perception. Categorization of a p...

Musicians have increased resilience to the effects of noise on speech perception and its neural underpinnings. We do not know, however, how early in life these enhancements arise. We compared auditory brainstem responses to speech in noise in 32 preschool children, half of whom were engaged in music training. Thirteen children returned for testing one year later, permitting the first longitudin...

We investigated training-related improvements in listening in noise and the biological mechanisms mediating these improvements. Training-related malleability was examined using a program that incorporates cognitively based listening exercises to improve speech-in-noise perception. Before and after training, auditory brainstem responses to a speech syllable were recorded in quiet and multitalker...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) perception abilities in quiet and noise of native Japanese listeners who acquired English late in life and lived in the United States. The study addressed two primary questions: (1) whether native Japanese listeners who developed some fluency in English showed poorer English speech perception abilit...

Can we model speech recognition in noise by exploring higher order statistics of the combined signal? How will changes in these statistics affect speech perception in noise? This study addresses these questions in two experiments. One investigated the relationship between an established ”glimpsing” model and the fourth order statistic, kurtosis. The glimpsing model [1] proposes that listeners c...