Differences Between French and English in the Use of Suprasegmental Cues for the Short-Term Recall of Word Lists.

Purpose: Greater recognition of the impact of hearing loss on cognitive functions has led speech/hearing clinics to focus more on auditory memory outcomes. Typically evaluated by scoring participants' recall on a list of unrelated words after they have heard the list read out loud, this method implies pitch and timing variations across words. Here, we questioned whether these variations could impact performance differentially in one language or another.

Cross-modal plasticity in children with cochlear implant: converging evidence from EEG and functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

Over the first years of life, the brain undergoes substantial organization in response to environmental stimulation. In a silent world, it may promote vision by (i) recruiting resources from the auditory cortex and (ii) making the visual cortex more efficient. It is unclear when such changes occur and how adaptive they are, questions that children with cochlear implants can help address.

OFC neurons do not represent the negative value of a conditioned inhibitor.

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is often proposed to function as a value integrator; however, alternative accounts focus on its role in representing associative structures that specify the probability and sensory identity of future outcomes. These two accounts make different predictions about how this area should respond to conditioned inhibitors of reward, since in the former, neural activity should reflect the negative value of the inhibitor, whereas in the latter, it should track the estimated probability of a future reward based on all cues present. Here, we assessed these predictions by recording from small groups of neurons in the lateral OFC of rats during training in a conditioned inhibition design.

Audiovisual integration in children with cochlear implants revealed through EEG and fNIRS.

Sensory deprivation can offset the balance of audio versus visual information in multimodal processing. Such a phenomenon could persist for children born deaf, even after they receive cochlear implants (CIs), and could potentially explain why one modality is given priority over the other. Here, we recorded cortical responses to a single speaker uttering two syllables, presented in audio-only (A), visual-only (V), and audio-visual (AV) modes.

Motor Processing in Children With Cochlear Implants as Assessed by Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

Auditory-motor and visual-motor networks are often coupled in daily activities, such as when listening to music and dancing; but these networks are known to be highly malleable as a function of sensory input. Thus, congenital deafness may modify neural activities within the connections between the motor, auditory, and visual cortices. Here, we investigated whether the cortical responses of children with cochlear implants (CI) to a simple and repetitive motor task would differ from that of children with typical hearing (TH) and we sought to understand whether this response related to their language development.

Dynamic networks differentiate the language ability of children with cochlear implants.

Background: Cochlear implantation (CI) in prelingually deafened children has been shown to be an effective intervention for developing language and reading skill. However, there is a substantial proportion of the children receiving CI who struggle with language and reading. The current study-one of the first to implement electrical source imaging in CI population was designed to identify the neural underpinnings in two groups of CI children with good and poor language and reading skill.

Grouping by Time and Pitch Facilitates Free but Not Cued Recall for Word Lists in Normally-Hearing Listeners.

Auditory memory is an important everyday skill evaluated more and more frequently in clinical settings as there is recently a greater recognition of the cost of hearing loss to cognitive systems. Testing often involves reading a list of unrelated items aloud; but prosodic variations in pitch and timing across the list can affect the number of items remembered. Here, we ran a series of online studies on normally-hearing participants to provide normative data (with a larger and more diverse population than the typical student sample) on a novel protocol characterizing the effects of suprasegmental properties in speech, namely investigating pitch patterns, fast and slow pacing, and interactions between pitch and time grouping.

Visual biases in evaluation of speakers' and singers' voice type by cis and trans listeners.

Introduction: A singer's or speaker's (voice type) should be appraised based on acoustic cues characterizing their voice. Instead, in practice, it is often influenced by the individual's physical appearance. This is especially distressful for transgender people who may be excluded from formal singing because of perceived mismatch between their voice and appearance.

Auditory evoked response to an oddball paradigm in children wearing cochlear implants.

Objective: Although children with cochlear implants (CI) achieve remarkable success with their device, considerable variability remains in individual outcomes. Here, we explored whether auditory evoked potentials recorded during an oddball paradigm could provide useful markers of auditory processing in this pediatric population.

Methods: High-density electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded in 75 children listening to standard and odd noise stimuli: 25 had normal hearing (NH) and 50 wore a CI, divided between high language (HL) and low language (LL) abilities.

Luminance effects on pupil dilation in speech-in-noise recognition.

There is an increasing interest in the field of audiology and speech communication to measure the effort that it takes to listen in noisy environments, with obvious implications for populations suffering from hearing loss. Pupillometry offers one avenue to make progress in this enterprise but important methodological questions remain to be addressed before such tools can serve practical applications. Typically, cocktail-party situations may occur in less-than-ideal lighting conditions, e.

Effect of Frequency Response Manipulations on Musical Sound Quality for Cochlear Implant Users.

Cochlear implant (CI) users commonly report degraded musical sound quality. To improve CI-mediated music perception and enjoyment, we must understand factors that affect sound quality. In the present study, we utilize frequency response manipulation (FRM), a process that adjusts the energies of frequency bands within an audio signal, to determine its impact on CI-user sound quality assessments of musical stimuli.

Specificity of Affective Responses in Misophonia Depends on Trigger Identification.

Individuals with misophonia, a disorder involving extreme sound sensitivity, report significant anger, disgust, and anxiety in response to select but usually common sounds. While estimates of prevalence within certain populations such as college students have approached 20%, it is currently unknown what percentage of people experience misophonic responses to such "trigger" sounds. Furthermore, there is little understanding of the fundamental processes involved.

Voice emotion recognition by Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant users in Taiwan.

Objectives: To explore the effects of obligatory lexical tone learning on speech emotion recognition and the cross-culture differences between United States and Taiwan for speech emotion understanding in children with cochlear implant.

Methods: This cohort study enrolled 60 cochlear-implanted (cCI) Mandarin-speaking, school-aged children who underwent cochlear implantation before 5 years of age and 53 normal-hearing children (cNH) in Taiwan. The emotion recognition and the sensitivity of fundamental frequency (0) changes for those school-aged cNH and cCI (6-17 years old) were examined in a tertiary referred center.

Factors Associated with Speech-Recognition Performance in School-Aged Children with Cochlear Implants and Early Auditory-Verbal Intervention.

Background: Considerable variability exists in the speech recognition abilities achieved by children with cochlear implants (CIs) due to varying demographic and performance variables including language abilities.

Purpose: This article examines the factors associated with speech recognition performance of school-aged children with CIs who were grouped by language ability.

Research Design: This is a single-center cross-sectional study with repeated measures for subjects across two language groups.

Cochlear Implant Compression Optimization for Musical Sound Quality in MED-EL Users.

Objectives: Variations in loudness are a fundamental component of the music listening experience. Cochlear implant (CI) processing, including amplitude compression, and a degraded auditory system may further degrade these loudness cues and decrease the enjoyment of music listening. This study aimed to identify optimal CI sound processor compression settings to improve music sound quality for CI users.

Changes in Spoken and Sung Productions Following Adaptation to Pitch-shifted Auditory Feedback.

Objective: Using voice to speak or to sing is made possible by remarkably complex sensorimotor processes. Like any other sensorimotor system, the speech motor controller guides its actions with maximum performance at minimum cost, using available sources of information, among which, auditory feedback plays a major role. Manipulation of this feedback forces the speech monitoring system to refine its expectations for further actions.

Disentangling listening effort and memory load beyond behavioural evidence: Pupillary response to listening effort during a concurrent memory task.

Recent research has demonstrated that pupillometry is a robust measure for quantifying listening effort. However, pupillary responses in listening situations where multiple cognitive functions are engaged and sustained over a period of time remain hard to interpret. This limits our conceptualisation and understanding of listening effort in realistic situations, because rarely in everyday life are people challenged by one task at a time.

Adaptation to pitch-altered feedback is independent of one's own voice pitch sensitivity.

Monitoring voice pitch is a fine-tuned process in daily conversations as conveying accurately the linguistic and affective cues in a given utterance depends on the precise control of phonation and intonation. This monitoring is thought to depend on whether the error is treated as self-generated or externally-generated, resulting in either a correction or inflation of errors. The present study reports on two separate paradigms of adaptation to altered feedback to explore whether participants could behave in a more cohesive manner once the error is of comparable size perceptually.

Neural Correlates of Vocal Pitch Compensation in Individuals Who Stutter.

Stuttering is a disorder that impacts the smooth flow of speech production and is associated with a deficit in sensorimotor integration. In a previous experiment, individuals who stutter were able to vocally compensate for pitch shifts in their auditory feedback, but they exhibited more variability in the timing of their corrective responses. In the current study, we focused on the neural correlates of the task using functional MRI.

Perception of Child-Directed Versus Adult-Directed Emotional Speech in Pediatric Cochlear Implant Users.

Objectives: Cochlear implants (CIs) are remarkable in allowing individuals with severe to profound hearing loss to perceive speech. Despite these gains in speech understanding, however, CI users often struggle to perceive elements such as vocal emotion and prosody, as CIs are unable to transmit the spectro-temporal detail needed to decode affective cues. This issue becomes particularly important for children with CIs, but little is known about their emotional development.

Processing of Acoustic Information in Lexical Tone Production and Perception by Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients.

This study examined the utilization of multiple types of acoustic information in lexical tone production and perception by pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients who are native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Lexical tones were recorded from CI recipients and their peers with normal hearing (NH). Each participant was asked to produce a disyllabic word, , with which the first syllable was pronounced as Tone 3 (a low dipping tone) while the second syllable was pronounced as Tone 1 (a high level tone, meaning "eyes") or as Tone 4 (a high falling tone, meaning "eyeglasses").

Adults who stutter and metronome synchronization: evidence for a nonspeech timing deficit.

Speech timing deficits have been proposed as a causal factor in the disorder of stuttering. The question of whether individuals who stutter have deficits in nonspeech timing is one that has been revisited often, with conflicting results. Here, we uncover subtle differences in a manual metronome synchronization task that included tempo changes with adults who stutter and fluent speakers.

Segregation of voices with single or double fundamental frequencies.

In cocktail-party situations, listeners can use the fundamental frequency (F0) of a voice to segregate it from competitors, but other cues in speech could help, such as co-modulation of envelopes across frequency or more complex cues related to the semantic/syntactic content of the utterances. For simplicity, this (non-pitch) form of grouping is referred to as "articulatory." By creating a new type of speech with two steady F0s, it was examined how these two forms of segregation compete: articulatory grouping would bind the partials of a double-F0 source together, whereas harmonic segregation would tend to split them in two subsets.

A Randomized Controlled Crossover Study of the Impact of Online Music Training on Pitch and Timbre Perception in Cochlear Implant Users.

Cochlear implant (CI) biomechanical constraints result in impoverished spectral cues and poor frequency resolution, making it difficult for users to perceive pitch and timbre. There is emerging evidence that music training may improve CI-mediated music perception; however, much of the existing studies involve time-intensive and less readily accessible in-person music training paradigms, without rigorous experimental control paradigms. Online resources for auditory rehabilitation remain an untapped potential resource for CI users.