In this article, we present a summary of recent research linking speech perception in infancy to later language development, as well as a new empirical study examining that linkage. Infant phonetic discrimination is initially language universal, but a decline in phonetic discrimination occurs for nonnative phonemes by the end of the 1st year. Exploiting this transition in phonetic perception be...

Many experimental studies over the last two decades have suggested that groups of children who suffer signi® cant delay in reading also show a weakness in phoneme discrimination and identi® cation. In order to look further at the relation between type of reading de® cit, auditory acuity, and speech discrimination, a group of 13 children with speci® c reading dif® culty (SRD), 12 chronological-a...

Perceiving speech engages parts of the motor system involved in speech production. The role of the motor cortex in speech perception has been demonstrated using low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress motor excitability in the lip representation and disrupt discrimination of lip-articulated speech sounds (Möttönen and Watkins, 2009). Another form of rTMS, c...

A study of the automatic discrimination of emotion in three different time windows of speech is presented. A large corpus of acted emotional speech in Finnish was collected in five emotional states: neutral, sadness, joy, anger and tenderness. Automatic emotion discrimination tests were performed in speaker-independent scenarios using kNN classifiers with sequential forwards-backwards floating ...

We investigate the discrimination of phrase final pitch contours within a continuum from statement to question in English. Previous work in German [14] and Dutch [13] has raised questions about the relationship between discrimination sensitivity and category structure within this continuum. To clarify the relationship between linguistic category and simple auditory discrimination, we employ bot...

Background Rates of hearing preservation following surgery via middle fossa craniotomy in patients harboring tumors with unfavorable characteristics are significantly lower than for those patients with "favorable" tumors. Objectives We will present two cases both with unfavorable conditions, which underwent endoscopic-assisted middle fossa craniotomy (MFC) resection of intracanalicular vestibul...

To examine the predictive power of Cloninger's psychobiology model of depression, 167 Japanese college students were studied on two occasions, with an interval of approximately three months. At Time 1 (T1), the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS) were distributed. At Time 2 (T2), the SDS was distributed again. The T2 SDS score was positively correlat...

Background: Previous studies showed that one of the complications of rheumatoid arthritis disease was auditory disorder. The goal of the present study was to compare the auditory status in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and healthy individuals. Methods: In the present case-control study, 30 normal persons and 60 persons with rheumatoid arthritis with mean age of 46.72 and standard deviatio...