Normal-hearing (NH) listeners make use of context, speech redundancy and top-down linguistic processes to perceptually restore inaudible or masked portions of speech. Previous research has shown poorer perception and restoration of interrupted speech in CI users and NH listeners tested with acoustic simulations of CIs. Three hypotheses were investigated: (1) training with CI simulations of inte...

Previous cue integration studies have examined continuous perceptual dimensions (e.g., size) and have shown that human cue integration is well described by a normative model in which cues are weighted in proportion to their sensory reliability, as estimated from single-cue performance. However, this normative model may not be applicable to categorical perceptual dimensions (e.g., phonemes). In ...

Phonemic length contrasts, which are signaled mostly by durational cues, are quite common in the segmental inventories of the world's languages. In phonological theory, they are encoded by means of one or two timing slots. The current study aimed at testing (a) whether listeners can redeploy an existing phonemic length distinction in their L1 to a new class of sounds in an L2 (e.g. from vowel l...

The nature and frequency of speech production errors in neurodegenerative disease have not previously been precisely quantified. In the present study, 16 patients with a progressive form of non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) were asked to tell a story from a wordless children's picture book. Errors in production were classified as either phonemic, involving language-based deformations that nevertheless ...

BACKGROUNDS An early and transient verbal fluency (VF) decline and impairment in frontal executive function, suggesting a cognitive microlesion effect may influence the cognitive repercussions related to subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS). METHODS Neuropsychological tests including semantic and phonemic verbal fluency were administered both before surgery (baseline), the thi...

Cross-language studies have shown that Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a sufficient cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study used VOT as a linguistic cue in examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Canadian French, unilingual Canadian English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was stud...

The language environment modifies the speech perception abilities found in early development. In particular, adults have difficulty perceiving many nonnative contrasts that young infants discriminate. The underlying perceptual reorganization apparently occurs by 10-12 months. According to one view, it depends on experiential effects on psychoacoustic mechanisms. Alternatively, phonological deve...

Recent evidence shows that listeners use abstract prelexical units in speech perception. Using the phenomenon of lexical retuning in speech processing, we ask whether those units are necessarily phonemic. Dutch listeners were exposed to a Dutch speaker producing ambiguous phones between the Dutch syllable-final allophones approximant [r] and dark [l]. These ambiguous phones replaced either fina...