The development of speech perception shows a dramatic transition between infancy and adulthood. Between 6 and 12 months, infants' initial ability to discriminate all phonetic units across the world's languages narrows-native discrimination increases while non-native discrimination shows a steep decline. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine whether brain oscillations in the theta band...

management needs qualitative and comprehensive information for decision making. managers are always searching for useful information in order to reach their firm's goals and strategies. the development in technology, globalization and focusing on costumers needs has changed the information that managers need to maintain their position in a competitive environment and take advantage of prof...

Abstract Listeners are sensitive to speech sounds’ probability distributions. Distributional training (DT) studies with adults typically involve conscious activation of phoneme labels. We show that distributional exposure can shift existing boundaries (Spanish /e/–/i/) pre-attentively. Using a DT paradigm involving two bimodal distributions we assessed listener's neural discrimination across th...

An MEG experiment was carried out in order to compare the processing of lexical-tonal and intonational contrasts, based on the tonal dialect of Roermond (the Netherlands). A set of words with identical phoneme sequences but distinct pitch contours, which represented different lexical meanings or discourse meanings (statement vs. question), were presented to native speakers as well as to a contr...

Non-native speech can cause perceptual difficulty for the native listener, but experience can moderate this difficulty. This study explored the perceptual benefits of brief exposure to non-native speech. A cross-modal word matching paradigm was used to investigate perception of foreign-accented speech by native English listeners during the first moments of exposure. In 5 experiments, processing...

Colour polymorphism is a recurrent feature of natural populations, and its maintenance has been studied in a range of taxa in their native ranges. However, less is known about whether (and how) colour polymorphism is maintained when populations are removed from their native environments, as in the case of introduced species. We here address this issue by analyzing variation in colour patterns i...

Sensory-specific cortices appear to be sensitive to information from another modality. Here we investigate whether the human brain automatically extracts the phonological information in visual words in early visual processing. We continuously presented native Chinese speakers peripherally with Chinese homophone characters in an oddball paradigm, while they performed a visual detection task pres...

French speaking learners of English encounter persistent difficulty acquiring English [h], thus confusing words like eat and heat in both production and perception. We assess the hypothesis that the acoustic properties of [h] may render detection of this segment in the speech stream insufficiently reliable for second language acquisition. We use the mismatch negativity (MMN) in event-related po...

This study investigates whether people can infer a speaker's social affective expressions in a language that is not their native language, by examining the variable lexical labels used to identify them. A freelabeling paradigm shows evidence of culturalspecificity in the perceptual behavior of listeners. Subjects were 16 US English listeners, asked to name the affective expressions carried by a...

Engineered calmodulins (CaMs), rendered Ca2+-insensitive by mutations, function as dominant negatives in heterologous systems, and have revealed mechanisms of ion channel modulation by Ca2+/CaM. The use of these CaMs in native mammalian cells now emerges as a strategy to unmask the biology of such Ca2+ feedback. Here, we developed recombinant adenoviruses bearing engineered CaMs to facilitate t...