Children with severe hearing loss most likely receive the greatest benefit from a cochlear implant (CI) when implanted at less than 2 years of age. Children with a hearing loss may also benefit greater from binaural sensory stimulation. Four children who received their first CI under 12 months of age were included in this study. Effects on auditory development were determined using the German L...

This study examined two possible sources of individual differences in crosslanguage speech perception, the capacity to phonologically encode speech and short-term memory span. Phonological coding was defined as the ability to encode non-native contrasts as distinct phonemes based on representations in long-term memory. Short-term memory was defined as a fixed capacity regulating the extent of e...

Many studies have reported variability data for tests of speech discrimination, and the disparate results of these studies have not been given a simple explanation. Arguments over the relative merits of 25- vs 50-word tests have ignored the basic mathematical properties inherent in the use of percentage scores. The present study models performance on clinical tests of speech discrimination as a...

The literature suggests that, within several months of birth, infants develop the ability to distinguish between different speech sounds. However, the time frame for discrimination of a specific phonological system remains unclear. In order to clarify this, the discrimination responses of 211 preschool children were examined. The test battery consisted of 16 pairs of Japanese words, of which ea...

The clinical assessment of speech discrimination by professional audiologists is resource intensive. Yet discrepancies in language or dialect between the test subject and the audiologist may cause a significant bias in the test result. To address these issues, a speech audiometric test (SAT) has been designed to be language/dialect independent and to allow automated scoring by means of an MFCC-...

Perceptual narrowing is a highly significant development associated with the first year of life. It conventionally refers to an orientation toward nativeness whereby infant's perceptual sensitivities begin to align with the phonetic properties of their native environment. Nativeness effects, such as perceptual narrowing, have been observed in several domains, most notably, in face discriminatio...