It has been argued that labels play a special role in cognitive development: hearing the same label associated with different entities facilitates categorization by directing infants’ attention to commonalities. The current study assessed 8-month-olds’ attention to commonalities and processing of visual input more generally when visual stimuli were presented without auditory input (baseline), a...

In the present work, we developed a database of nonlinguistic sounds that mirror prosodic characteristics typical of language and thus carry affective information, but do not convey linguistic information. In a dichotic-listening task, we used these novel stimuli as a means of disambiguating the relative contributions of linguistic and affective processing across the hemispheres. This method wa...

Why do linguistic labels facilitate category learning more than other types of auditory input? From one perspective, it has been argued that effects of labels stem from young infants having broad assumptions that labels and categories are linked. From a different perspective, it is possible that both labels and sounds deplete attentional resources and hinder category learning, with sounds atten...

The aim of these experiments was to compare conceptual priming for linguistic and for a homogeneous class of nonlinguistic sounds, impact sounds, by using both behavioral (percentage errors and RTs) and electrophysiological measures (ERPs). Experiment 1 aimed at studying the neural basis of impact sound categorization by creating typical and ambiguous sounds from different material categories (...

Speech perception is an ecologically important example of the highly context-dependent nature of perception; adjacent speech, and even nonspeech, sounds influence how listeners categorize speech. Some theories emphasize linguistic or articulation-based processes in speech-elicited context effects and peripheral (cochlear) auditory perceptual interactions in non-speech-elicited context effects. ...

We examined the relationship between brain anatomy and the ability to learn nonnative speech sounds, as well as rapidly changing and steady-state nonlinguistic sounds, using voxel-based morphometry in 59 healthy adults. Faster phonetic learners appeared to have more white matter in parietal regions, especially in the left hemisphere. The pattern of results was similar for the rapidly changing b...

Although it is generally accepted that labels facilitate categorization in infancy, recent evidence suggests that infants and young children are more likely to process visual input when presented in isolation than when paired with nonlinguistic sounds or linguistic labels. These findings suggest that auditory input (when compared to a no-auditory baseline) may hinder rather than facilitate cate...

Recent work has found support for two dissociable and parallel neural subsystems underlying object and shape recognition in the visual domain: an abstract-category subsystem that operates more effectively in the left cerebral hemisphere than in the right, and a specific-exemplar subsystem that operates more effectively in the right hemisphere than in the left. Evidence of this asymmetry has bee...

This report. contains fourteen papers on a wide range of current.topics and experiments in,speech research, ranging from the relationshipbetween-speecb:and reading to questions of memory and perception of speech sounds.,The following papers are included: "How Is Language Conveyed by Speech?;" "Reading, the Linguistic Process, and Linquistic_Awareness;" "Misreading:.A. Search for Causes;" "Langu...

How do infants' emerging language abilities affect their organization of objects into categories? The question of whether labels can shape the early perceptual categories formed by young infants has received considerable attention, but evidence has remained inconclusive. Here, 10-month-old infants (N=80) were familiarized with a series of morphed stimuli along a continuum that can be seen as ei...