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Purpose: Processing real-world sounds requires acoustic and higher-order semantic information. We tested the theory that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced processing of acoustic features and impaired processing of semantic information., Methods: We used a change deafness task that required detection of speech and non-speech auditory objects being replaced and a speech-in-noise task using spoken sentences that must be comprehended in the presence of background speech to examine the extent to which 7-15 year old children with ASD (n = 27) rely on acoustic and semantic information, compared to age-matched (n = 27) and IQ-matched (n = 27) groups of typically developing (TD) children. Within a larger group of 7-15 year old TD children (n = 105) we correlated IQ, ASD symptoms, and the use of acoustic and semantic information., Results: Children with ASD performed worse overall at the change deafness task relative to the age-matched TD controls, but they did not differ from IQ-matched controls. All groups utilized acoustic and semantic information similarly and displayed an attentional bias towards changes that involved the human voice. Similarly, for the speech-in-noise task, age-matched-but not IQ-matched-TD controls performed better overall than the ASD group. However, all groups used semantic context to a similar degree. Among TD children, neither IQ nor the presence of ASD symptoms predict the use of acoustic or semantic information., Conclusion: Children with and without ASD used acoustic and semantic information similarly during auditory change deafness and speech-in-noise tasks., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Music and language are two fundamental forms of human communication. Many studies examine the development of music- and language-specific knowledge, but few studies compare how listeners know they are listening to music or language. Although we readily differentiate these domains, how we distinguish music and language-and especially speech and song- is not obvious. In two studies, we asked how listeners categorize speech and song. Study 1 used online survey data to illustrate that 4- to 17-year-olds and adults have verbalizable distinctions for speech and song. At all ages, listeners described speech and song differences based on acoustic features, but compared with older children, 4- to 7-year-olds more often used volume to describe differences, suggesting that they are still learning to identify the features most useful for differentiating speech from song. Study 2 used a perceptual categorization task to demonstrate that 4-8-year-olds and adults readily categorize speech and song, but this ability improves with age especially for identifying song. Despite generally rating song as more speech-like, 4- and 6-year-olds rated ambiguous speech-song stimuli as more song-like than 8-year-olds and adults. Four acoustic features predicted song ratings: F0 instability, utterance duration, harmonicity, and spectral flux. However, 4- and 6-year-olds' song ratings were better predicted by F0 instability than by harmonicity and utterance duration. These studies characterize how children develop conceptual and perceptual understandings of speech and song and suggest that children under age 8 are still learning what features are important for categorizing utterances as speech or song. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children and adults conceptually and perceptually categorize speech and song from age 4. Listeners use F0 instability, harmonicity, spectral flux, and utterance duration to determine whether vocal stimuli sound like song. Acoustic cue weighting changes with age, becoming adult-like at age 8 for perceptual categorization and at age 12 for conceptual differentiation. Young children are still learning to categorize speech and song, which leaves open the possibility that music- and language-specific skills are not so domain-specific., (© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Few studies comparing music and language processing have adequately controlled for low-level acoustical differences, making it unclear whether differences in music and language processing arise from domain-specific knowledge, acoustic characteristics, or both. We controlled acoustic characteristics by using the speech-to-song illusion, which often results in a perceptual transformation to song after several repetitions of an utterance. Participants performed a same-different pitch discrimination task for the initial repetition (heard as speech) and the final repetition (heard as song). Better detection was observed for pitch changes that violated rather than conformed to Western musical scale structure, but only when utterances transformed to song, indicating that music-specific pitch representations were activated and influenced perception. This shows that music-specific processes can be activated when an utterance is heard as song, suggesting that the high-level status of a stimulus as either language or music can be behaviorally dissociated from low-level acoustic factors., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Adults across cultures speak to infants in a specific infant-directed manner. We asked whether infants use this manner of speech (infant- or adult-directed) to guide their subsequent visual preferences for social partners. We found that 5-month-old infants encode an individuals' use of infant-directed speech and adult-directed speech, and use this information to guide their subsequent visual preferences for individuals even after the speech behavior has ended. Use of infant-directed speech may act as an effective cue for infants to select appropriate social partners, allowing infants to focus their attention on individuals who will provide optimal care and opportunity for learning. This selectivity may play a crucial role in establishing the foundations of social cognition.

Recent evidence suggests that the musical rhythm of a particular culture may parallel the speech rhythm of that culture's language (Patel, A. D., & Daniele, J. R. (2003). An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music. Cognition, 87, B35-B45). The present experiments aimed to determine whether listeners actually perceive such rhythmic differences in a purely musical context (i.e., in instrumental music without words). In Experiment 1a, listeners successfully classified instrumental renditions of French and English songs having highly contrastive rhythmic differences. Experiment 1b replicated this result with the same songs containing rhythmic information only. In Experiments 2a and 2b, listeners successfully classified original and rhythm-only stimuli when language-specific rhythmic differences were less contrastive but more representative of differences found in actual music and speech. These findings indicate that listeners can use rhythmic similarities and differences to classify songs originally composed in two languages having contrasting rhythmic prosody.

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure.

Sensitivity to auditory rhythmic structures in music and language is evident as early as infancy, but performance on beat perception tasks is often well below adult levels and improves gradually with age. While some research has suggested the ability to perceive musical beat develops early, even in infancy, it remains unclear whether adult-like perception of musical beat is present in children. The capacity to sustain an internal sense of the beat is critical for various rhythmic musical behaviors, yet very little is known about the development of this ability. In this study, 223 participants ranging in age from 4 to 23 years from the Las Vegas, Nevada, community completed a musical beat discrimination task, during which they first listened to a strongly metrical musical excerpt and then attempted to sustain their perception of the musical beat while listening to a repeated, beat-ambiguous rhythm for up to 14.4 s. They then indicated whether a drum probe matched or did not match the beat. Results suggested that the ability to identify the matching probe improved throughout middle childhood (8–9 years) and did not reach adult-like levels until adolescence (12–14 years). Furthermore, scores on the beat perception task were positively related to phonological processing, after accounting for age, short-term memory, and music and dance training. This study lends further support to the notion that children's capacity for beat perception is not fully developed until adolescence and suggests we should reconsider assumptions of musical beat mastery by infants and young children. Public Significance Statement: This study suggests that the ability to perceive and feel the beat in music develops during middle childhood and continues to improve through adolescence. These findings contrast with prior work claiming that this capacity is achieved by infancy or young childhood and suggest that important aspects of musical beat skills develop quite slowly and are not adult-like until adolescence. We also report that this ability is related to developing language skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]