The Impact of Hearing Experience on Children's Use of Phonological and Semantic Information During Lexical Access.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which phonological competition and semantic priming influence lexical access in school-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs) and children with normal acoustic hearing. Method Participants included children who were 5-10 years of age with either normal hearing ( = 41) or bilateral severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss and used CIs ( = 13). All participants completed a two-alternative forced-choice task while eye gaze to visual images was recorded and quantified during a word recognition task.

Belief Shift or Only Facilitation: How Semantic Expectancy Affects Processing of Speech Degraded by Background Noise.

Individuals use semantic expectancy - applying conceptual and linguistic knowledge to speech input - to improve the accuracy and speed of language comprehension. This study tested how adults use semantic expectancy in quiet and in the presence of speech-shaped broadband noise at -7 and -12 dB signal-to-noise ratio. Twenty-four adults (22.

Word segmentation from noise-band vocoded speech.

Spectral degradation reduces access to the acoustics of spoken language and compromises how learners break into its structure. We hypothesised that spectral degradation disrupts word segmentation, but that listeners can exploit other cues to restore detection of words. Normal-hearing adults were familiarised to artificial speech that was unprocessed or spectrally degraded by noise-band vocoding into 16 or 8 spectral channels.