Short-term training can lead to improvements in behavioral discrimination of auditory and visual stimuli, as well as enhanced EEG responses to those stimuli. In the auditory domain, fluency with tonal languages and musical training has been associated with long-term cortical and subcortical plasticity, but less is known about the effects of shorter-term training. This study combined electroence...

1. We have stimulated responses of stellate cells in the anteroventral cochlear nucleus (AVCN) to single-formant stimuli (SFSs) with the use of recorded auditory-nerve fiber (ANF) responses as inputs. In particular, two important features of temporal discharge patterns, the phase locking to best frequency (BF) tones and to stimulus envelopes, were examined in the model output. Our earlier exper...

Separation of speech sources is fundamental for robust communication. In daily conversations, signals reaching our ears generally consist of target speech sources, interference signals from competing speakers and ambient noise. Take an example, talking with someone in a cocktail party and making a phone call in a train compartment. Fig. 1 shows a typical indoor environment having multiple sound...

This study explored the effect of input vs. collaborative output tasks on Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy and their willingness to communicate (WTC). In so doing, the study utilized 3 input (i.e., textual enhancement, processing instruction, and discourse) and 3 collaborative output (i.e., dictogloss, reconstruction cloze task, and jigsaw) tasks and compared their effects on 5 Englis...

We studied changes to the pattern of speech errors as a function of selectively attending to one word in a sequence to learn how attention is implemented in language production. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) attention specifically inhibits the past, (2) attention enhances the activation of the present without affecting the past or the future, and (3) attention decreases priming of the futur...

In this paper, a review of the role of input, output and instruction in second language acquisition is provided. Several pedagogical interventions in grammar instruction (e.g., processing instruction, input enhancement, structured output and collaborative output tasks) are presented and their effectiveness reviewed. A final and overall evaluation is provided at the end of the paper.

Audio-assisted reading (reading-while-listening) was commonly used as a pedagogical method in English (L2) learning. Numerous studies had reported its efficacy reading. Its comprehension has been inconclusive due to the lack of on relationship among attention, cognitive load and L2 comprehension, with possibility that synchronous auditory input lessens attention visual input. We present study 4...

Feature-specific enhancement refers to the process by which selectively attending to a particular stimulus feature specifically increases the response in the same region of the brain that codes that stimulus property. Whereas there are many demonstrations of this mechanism in the visual system, the evidence is less clear in the auditory system. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging ...

Temporal and spatial correlations between auditory and visual stimuli facilitate the perception of unitary events and improve behavioral responses. However, it is not clear how combined visual and auditory information is processed in single neurons. Here we studied responses of multisensory neurons in the barn owl's optic tectum (the avian homologue of the superior colliculus) to visual, audito...