Voice actors show enhanced neural tracking of pitch, prosody perception, and music perception.

Experiences with sound that make strong demands on the precision of perception, such as musical training and experience speaking a tone language, can enhance auditory neural encoding. Are high demands on the precision of perception necessary for training to drive auditory neural plasticity? Voice actors are an ideal subject population for answering this question. Voice acting requires exaggerating prosodic cues to convey emotion, character, and linguistic structure, drawing upon attention to sound, memory for sound features, and accurate sound production, but not fine perceptual precision.

Auditory processing as perceptual, cognitive, and motoric abilities underlying successful second language acquisition: Interaction model.

A growing amount of attention has been given to examining the domain-general auditory processing of individual acoustic dimensions as a key driving force for adult L2 acquisition. Whereas auditory processing has traditionally been conceptualized as a bottom-up and encapsulated phenomenon, the interaction model (Kraus & Banai, 2007) proposes auditory processing as a set of perceptual, cognitive, and motoric abilities-the perception of acoustic details (acuity), the selection of relevant and irrelevant dimensions (attention), and the conversion of audio input into motor action (integration). To test this hypothesis, we examined the relationship between each component and the L2 outcomes of 102 adult Chinese speakers of English who varied in age, experience, and working memory background.

Training auditory processing promotes second language speech acquisition.

Recent evidence suggests that domain-general auditory processing (sensitivity to the spectro-temporal characteristics of sounds) helps determine individual differences in L2 speech acquisition outcomes. The current study examined the extent to which focused training could enhance auditory processing ability, and whether this had a concomitant impact on L2 vowel proficiency. A total of 98 Japanese learners of English were divided into four groups: (1) Auditory-Only (F2 discrimination training); (2) Phonetic-Only (English [æ] and [ʌ] identification training); (3) Auditory-Phonetic (a combination of auditory and phonetic training); and (4) Control training.

Auditory precision hypothesis-L2: Dimension-specific relationships between auditory processing and second language segmental learning.

Growing evidence suggests a broad relationship between individual differences in auditory processing ability and the rate and ultimate attainment of language acquisition throughout the lifespan, including post-pubertal second language (L2) speech learning. However, little is known about how the precision of processing of specific auditory dimensions relates to the acquisition of specific L2 segmental contrasts. In the context of 100 late Japanese-English bilinguals with diverse profiles of classroom and immersion experience, the current study set out to investigate the link between the perception of several auditory dimensions (F3 frequency, F2 frequency, and duration) in non-verbal sounds and English [r]-[l] perception and production proficiency.

Slow phase-locked modulations support selective attention to sound.

To make sense of complex soundscapes, listeners must select and attend to task-relevant streams while ignoring uninformative sounds. One possible neural mechanism underlying this process is alignment of endogenous oscillations with the temporal structure of the target sound stream. Such a mechanism has been suggested to mediate attentional modulation of neural phase-locking to the rhythms of attended sounds.

Investigating urban soundscapes of the COVID-19 lockdown: A predictive soundscape modeling approach.

The unprecedented lockdowns resulting from COVID-19 in spring 2020 triggered changes in human activities in public spaces. A predictive modeling approach was developed to characterize the changes in the perception of the sound environment when people could not be surveyed. Building on a database of soundscape questionnaires (N = 1,136) and binaural recordings (N = 687) collected in 13 locations across London and Venice during 2019, new recordings (N = 571) were made in the same locations during the 2020 lockdowns.

Successful second language learning is tied to robust domain-general auditory processing and stable neural representation of sound.

There is a great deal of individual variability in outcome in second language learning, the sources of which are still poorly understood. We hypothesized that individual differences in auditory processing may account for some variability in second language learning. We tested this hypothesis by examining psychoacoustic thresholds, auditory-motor temporal integration, and auditory neural encoding in adult native Polish speakers living in the UK.