Development of voicing perception in French: Comparing adults, adolescents, and children

Impairments in speech and nonspeech sound categorization in children with dyslexia are driven by temporal processing difficulties

“…At the nonspeech level, this is in line with (1) physiological animal studies showing that neural coding for temporal aspects of the stimulus reaches maturity later than neural coding for frequency selectivity (Eggermont, 1996), and with (2) behavioral auditory studies in humans providing evidence for a more prolonged development of the sensitivity for temporal than for nontemporal auditory cues (Hartley, Wright, Hogan, & Moore, 2000), even after accounting for the effect of procedure-related skills (Dawes & Bishop, 2008). At the speech level, it coincides with behavioral speech perception studies demonstrating that the identification of stop consonants is not yet mature by the age of 11 (Hazan & Barrett, 2000;Johnson, 2000;Krause, 1982;Simon & Fourcin, 1978;Medina, Hoonhorst, Bogliotti, & Serniclaes, 2010), whereas the identification of vowels does only slightly, though not significantly, improves towards adolescence (Pursell, Swanson, Hedrick, & Nabelek, 2002;Ohde, Haley, & McMahon, 1996;Johnson, 2000, but see Walley and Flege, 1999). Further elaboration on this topic is needed, but the indication that perception of sounds with temporal versus nontemporal cues follows different maturational trajectories in both normal and dyslexic readers, may have practical implications with regard to auditory temporal training programs.…”

Developmental Changes in Mismatch Responses to Mandarin Consonants and Lexical Tones from Early to Middle Childhood

“…Children have also been found to be incapable of using the fine-grained spectral cues under adult-directed speech as well as adults do in discrimination and identification tasks [9]–[10]. Nevertheless, other studies have failed to observe age variations in identification tasks among children from grade 2 to grade 5 and in speech discrimination tasks among school-aged children, teenagers, and adults [11]–[12]. While most studies were conducted in children with non-tonal languages, only limited studies investigated speech perception in young children with tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese [13]–[15].…”

Atypical phonological processing impairs written word recognition in children with cochlear implants

“…The children enrolled in this study received their Cl between 1.5 and 3.5 years, and as phonemic categories develop from birth in typically developing children (Hoonhorst et al, 2009), their central auditory system may already have reorganised in a way that limits an optimal benefit from the implant (Krai & Sharma, 2012;Sharma, Dorman, & Krai, 2005). Alter natively, it might be that the early auditory deficit cannot fully be compensated for within the timeframe during which the phonological system remains plastic (Medina et al, 2010). Overall, poorer phonological processing in children who use a Cl presumably reflects a combination of hearing deprivation and degraded auditory input (Dorman et al, 2002;Shannon et al, 1995;Xu & Zheng, 2007), and this might place some constrains on the way the children learn to read (Kraus & Anderson, 2013).…”

“…The acoustic-to-linguistic mapping hence implies that speech sounds that can perceptually be discriminated may be assigned to the same or to different speech phonemic representational category/ies, which are subsequently used for phoneme/ grapheme mapping when learning to read. In TH children, phonemic categories emerge early in life (Burnham, Eamshaw, & Clark, 1991;Hazan & Barrett, 2000;Hoonhorst et al, 2011) and continue refining during the first six years of life (Bernstein, 1983;Hazan & Barrett, 2000;Nittroucr, 1992Nittroucr, , 1996Nittroucr, , 2002Nittrouer & Miller, 1997;Slawinski & Fitzgerald, 1998), with flexible boundaries up to the beginning of adolescence (Burnham et al, 1991;Hazan & Barrett, 2000;Medina, Hoonhorst, Bogliotti, & Semiclaes, 2010).…”