Perception of Filtered Speech by Children with Developmental Dyslexia and Children with Specific Language Impairments.

Here we use two filtered speech tasks to investigate children's processing of slow (<4 Hz) versus faster (∼33 Hz) temporal modulations in speech. We compare groups of children with either developmental dyslexia (Experiment 1) or speech and language impairments (SLIs, Experiment 2) to groups of typically-developing (TD) children age-matched to each disorder group. Ten nursery rhymes were filtered so that their modulation frequencies were either low-pass filtered (<4 Hz) or band-pass filtered (22 - 40 Hz).

Awareness of Rhythm Patterns in Speech and Music in Children with Specific Language Impairments.

Children with specific language impairments (SLIs) show impaired perception and production of language, and also show impairments in perceiving auditory cues to rhythm [amplitude rise time (ART) and sound duration] and in tapping to a rhythmic beat. Here we explore potential links between language development and rhythm perception in 45 children with SLI and 50 age-matched controls. We administered three rhythmic tasks, a musical beat detection task, a tapping-to-music task, and a novel music/speech task, which varied rhythm and pitch cues independently or together in both speech and music.

Basic auditory processing and sensitivity to prosodic structure in children with specific language impairments: a new look at a perceptual hypothesis.

Children with specific language impairments (SLIs) show impaired perception and production of spoken language, and can also present with motor, auditory, and phonological difficulties. Recent auditory studies have shown impaired sensitivity to amplitude rise time (ART) in children with SLIs, along with non-speech rhythmic timing difficulties. Linguistically, these perceptual impairments should affect sensitivity to speech prosody and syllable stress.

Perceptually informed quantification of speech rhythm in pairwise variability indices.

Two previous experiments demonstrated that f0 and duration are interdependent in the perception of rhythmic groups in speech and sentence rhythmicality, and that the relative weighting of tonal and durational cues depends on listeners' native language. The listeners were native speakers of Swiss German, Swiss French, or Metropolitan French (i.e.

The language- specific interdependence of tonal and durational cues in perceived rhythmicality.

This experiment investigated whether fundamental frequency (f0) and duration are interdependent cues for the perceived rhythmicality of sentences, and whether this depends on the native language of listeners. The task required a judgement of which stimulus sentence had the most natural- sounding rhythm. In the stimuli, duration and f0 were manipulated on a certain syllable to test whether a deviant duration results in a less natural- sounding rhythm than a deviant f0 movement, or vice versa.

The interdependence of tonal and durational cues in the perception of rhythmic groups.

This experiment investigated whether rising fundamental frequency (f0) and increased duration are interdependent perceptual cues to rhythmic groups in speech, and whether this depends on listeners' native language. In a two-alternative forced- choice decision task, listeners had to indicate whether they perceived a 3 + 2 or 2 + 3 grouping in 5- syllable- long series of various digits and letters, in which f0 and duration were manipulated in the second and/or third syllable. The listeners were native speakers of Swiss German, Swiss French, or French.