After several years of exposure to musical instrument practice, musicians acquire a great expertise in processing auditory features like tonal pitch or timbre. Here we compared the performance of musicians and non-musicians in two timbre discrimination tasks: one using instrumental timbres, the other using voices. Both accuracy (d-prime) and reaction time measures were obtained. The results ind...

The present study examined the effect of caregivers' experiences of racial discrimination on their adolescent children's psychological functioning among a sample of 264 African American dyads. Potential relations between caregiver discrimination experiences and a number of indicators of adolescents' (aged 12-17) psychological functioning over time were examined. It was found that caregiver disc...

Rodents can robustly distinguish fine differences in texture using their whiskers, a capacity that depends on neuronal activity in primary somatosensory "barrel" cortex. Here we explore how texture was collectively encoded by populations of three to seven neuronal clusters simultaneously recorded from barrel cortex while a rat performed a discrimination task. Each cluster corresponded to the si...

The present investigation explored the relation between the amount of language input and neural responses in English monolingual (N=18) and Spanish-English bilingual (N=19) infants. We examined the mismatch negativity (MMN); both the positive mismatch response (pMMR) and the negative mismatch response (nMMR), and identify a relationship between amount of language input and brain measures of spe...

Groups of 4-day-old neonates were tested for dichotic discrimination and ear differences with the High-Amplitude-Sucking procedure. In the first experiment, dichotic speech discrimination was attested by comparison with a control group. Furthermore, among those subjects who showed a substantial recovery of sucking response at least after one of the two syllable changes, it was observed that sig...

It was found out that allophones of vowel phonemes /i/ and /e/, surrounded by palatalized consonants, differed significantly in their duration, though their openness – the major articulator correlate of inherent vowel duration (IVD) – was practically the same. It is hypothesized that duration contrast between [i] and [e] is controlled by speakers of Russian to set off the lack of spectral disti...

The problem of speech/music discrimination has become increasingly important as automatic speech recognition system are applied to more real-world multimedia domains. One of the issue in the design of a signal classifier is the selection of an appropriate feature set that captures the temporal and spectral structures of the signal. Many features have been used in speech/music discrimination. Th...

Two experiments on same-different vowel discrimination are reported. In each, the main variable was the duration of a silent delay between the two items being judged. As would be expected from the assumption that such judgements depend at least partly on auditory sensory memory, longer delays led to poorer discrimination than shorter delays. The auditory memory loss seems to be asymptotic at ab...