Bob Mcmurray

Verified

Bob verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Bob verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• Ph.D., Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
• Professor at University of Iowa

Although skilled readers make use of information about words adjacent to the fixated word, developing readers are limited in their uptake of parafoveal information, leading to the expectation that they may be entirely insensitive to the presence of adjacent stimuli. However, lack of benefit from nearby items does not imply that those items cannot n...

Although skilled readers make use of information about words adjacent to the fixated word, developing readers are limited in their uptake of parafoveal information, leading to the expectation that they may be entirely insensitive to the presence of adjacent stimuli. However, lack of benefit from nearby items does not imply that those items cannot n...

Listeners face a critical challenge in speech perception: acoustic cues to a given speech sound often unfold asynchronously. Traditional work suggests listeners solve this problem by processing each cue immediately and continuously to update higher-level interpretations. However, recent findings suggest that certain speech sounds (e.g., voiceless s...

Speech categorization is a gateway for downstream language processes. Recent evidence from work with the Visual Analog Scaling (VAS) task (Kapnoula et al., 2017) underscores the importance of categorization consistency (trial-by-trial variability around the mean function) over slope (long-term category structure) as a critical predictor of real-wor...

Speech perception is fundamental to language and reading abilities. While these skills are correlated, most studies examining the role of speech perception on outcomes do not test both concurrently. Moreover, traditional forced-choice tasks have limitations in accurately indexing these relationships. This study used a visual analog scaling task—a c...

Speech processing requires listeners to map temporally unfolding input to words. There has been consensus around the principles governing this process: lexical items are activated immediately and incrementally as speech arrives, perceptual and lexical representations rapidly decay to make room for new information, and lexical entries are temporally...

Purpose Auditory lifestyle, which refers to the variety, range, and types of auditory environments individuals encounter in their daily lives, can affect individuals' daily communication functions and moderate the outcomes of hearing interventions. This study aimed to determine the factors associated with adult cochlear implant (CI) users' auditory...

The efficacy of the Cochlear Implant (CI) in listeners with single-sided deafness (SSD) was evaluated by comparing single-ear speech perception in SSD listeners and bilateral cochlear implant listeners (BCI). Consonant-nucleus-consonant (CNC) speech perception scores for the CI-only ear in SSD listeners (N=55) were compared to single-ear performanc...

Speech sounds are based on categories, but listeners are also sensitive to within-category acoustic variation. This gradient system helps promote flexibility, deal with ambiguity, and maintain plasticity. While the exact sources of gradiency are not well understood, prior work suggests it may be a product of statistical learning: Listeners exposed...

Listeners generally map continuous acoustic information onto categories in a gradient manner with varying individual differences. Typically, such individual differences in speech categorization have been characterized by the mean slope of the response function, as quantified through the visual analog scaling (VAS) task. However, recent evidence sug...

The efficacy of the Cochlear Implant (CI) in listeners with single-sided deafness (SSD) was evaluated by comparing single-ear speech perception in SSD listeners and bilateral cochlear implant listeners (BCI). Consonant-nucleus-consonant (CNC) speech perception scores for the CI-only ear in SSD listeners (N=55; 36 female, 19 male) were compared to s...

We report two experiments demonstrating that visual word recognition is impeded by the presence of nearby stimuli, especially adjacent words. Reading research has converged on a consensus that skilled readers control their attention to make use of information from adjacent (primarily upcoming) words, increasing reading efficiency. Other lines of re...

Listeners must cope with highly variable input to successfully recognize speech. One way they do this is by adapting to the systematicities of individual talkers. Research on talker-specific adaptation has found that listeners either generalize talker-specific phoneme categories to new talkers or individuate them, creating talker-specific categorie...

Objective: The objective of this study was to characterize the dynamics of real-time lexical access, including lexical competition among phonologically similar words, and semantic activation in school-age children with hearing aids (HAs) and children with cochlear implants (CIs). We hypothesized that developing spoken language via degraded auditory...

We report two experiments demonstrating that visual word recognition is impeded by the presence of nearby stimuli, especially adjacent words. Reading research has converged on a consensus that skilled readers control their attention to make use of information from adjacent (primarily upcoming) words, increasing reading efficiency. Other lines of re...

Word recognition is supported by a competition process in which words that partially match the input are activated and vie for recognition. Recent work has shown that adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) do not fully resolve this competition, likely due to a deficiency in inhibition among words (lateral inhibition). It is not yet...

Listeners of all ages and hearing abilities must contend with the fact that speech is often heard in challenging conditions. Research has found that the process of spoken word recognition changes in these contexts, but what these changes represent and whether they have meaningful effects on outcomes was unknown. Here, we build on recent work by app...

Speech sounds are based on categories, but listeners are also sensitive to within-category acoustic variation. This gradient system helps promote flexibility, deal with ambiguity, and maintain plasticity. While the exact sources of gradiency are not well understood, prior work suggests it may be a product of statistical learning: Listeners exposed...

The cognitive neuroscience of language development has typically study how children acquire language knowledge (e.g. phonemes, words or grammatical rules of the language). However, children must also build a cognitive and neural system that can support efficient use of this information for real-time language processing. To address this gap, the pre...

The cognitive neuroscience of language development has typically study how children acquire language knowledge (e.g. phonemes, words or grammatical rules of the language). However, children must also build a cognitive and neural system that can support efficient use of this information for real-time language processing. To address this gap, the pre...

Speech perception is fundamental to language and reading abilities. While these skills are correlated, most studies examining the role of speech perception on outcomes do not test both concurrently. Moreover, traditional forced-choice tasks have limitations in accurately indexing these relationships. This study used a visual analog scaling task—a c...

Objectives Cochlear implant (CI) users with access to hearing in both ears (binaural configurations) tend to perform better in speech perception tasks than users with a single-hearing ear alone. This benefit derives from several sources, but one central contributor may be that binaural hearing allows listeners to integrate content across ears. A su...

We report two experiments demonstrating that visual word recognition is impeded by the presence of nearby stimuli, especially adjacent words. Reading research has converged on a consensus that skilled readers control their attention to make use of information from adjacent (primarily upcoming) words, increasing reading efficiency. Other lines of re...

Word recognition is generally thought to be supported by an automatic process of lexical competition, at least in normal hearing young adults. When listening becomes challenging, either due to properties of the environment (noise) or the individual (hearing loss), the dynamics of lexical competition change and word recognition can feel effortful an...

Speech processing requires listeners to map temporally unfolding input to words. There has been consensus around the principles governing this process: lexical items are activated immediately and incrementally as speech arrives, perceptual and lexical representations rapidly decay to make room for new information, and lexical entries are temporally...

A critical aspect of spoken language development is learning to categorize the sounds of the child’s language(s). This process was thought to develop early during infancy to set the stage for the later development of other, higher-level aspects of language (e.g., vocabulary, syntax). This development was thought to follow a form of perceptual narro...

The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception (ITCP) was designed to test word-initial phoneme perception by uniformly sampling frequently used phonemes as well as balancing feature overlap of response competitors. However, the task has only been validated in normal hearing listeners. In this study, a large cohort of cochlear implant users completed the IT...

The latency of turn-taking responses in dialogue are quick and precisely coordinated across the interacting dyad. This is challenging because the processing time required to conceptualize, formulate, and generate a response can be longer that the typical response latency. Producing timely responses is likely a greater challenge for children, whose...

The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception is a single-word closed-set speech-in-noise test with well-balanced phonetic features. The current study aimed to establish a U.K. version of the test (ITCP-B) based on the Southern Standard British English. We conducted a validity test in two sessions with 46 participants. The ITCP-B demonstrated excellent tes...

In the literature, we encounter papers reporting manipulating pitch contours in speech tokens for a specific problem to be addressed in experiments (e.g., learning pitch patterns superimposed onto a pseudo-syllable), usually in the field of Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition. This type of research often tests listeners’ perceptual and pr...

Purpose: The efficacy of the Cochlear Implant (CI) in listeners with single-sided deafness (SSD) was evaluated by comparing single-ear speech perception in SSD listeners and bilateral cochlear implant listeners (BCI).Methods: Consonant-nucleus-consonant (CNC) speech perception scores for the CI-only ear in SSD listeners (N=55) were compared to sing...

Every day, listeners encounter a wide range of acoustic signals. Successfully solving this variability problem allows them to interpret these signals accurately. While this mechanism tends to be less effortful for adults, children need to learn stable categories in the face of such variability. It is unknown to what extent general maturation or div...

In the last 30 years, the Visual World Paradigm has rapidly become a dominant experimental paradigm for understanding real-time language processing. Part of this derives from the rich visualizations of the millisecond-by-millisecond timecourse of language processing that it offers. While the field has converged on strong statistical approaches for...

Children must develop quick and precise eye movements for processing visual information across various domains, including reading, visual search, scene perception, joint attention, and motor control. Prior research suggests that eye movement precision continues to develop through adolescence (Helo et al., 2014; Kim et al., 2022; Reichle et al., 201...

Listeners of all ages and hearing abilities must contend with the fact that speech is often heard in challenging conditions. Research has found that the process of spoken word recognition changes in these contexts, but what these changes represent and whether they have meaningful effects on outcomes was unknown. Here, we build on recent work by app...

Listeners of all ages and hearing abilities must contend with the fact that speech is often heard in challenging conditions. Research has found that the process of spoken word recognition changes in these contexts, but what these changes represent and whether they have meaningful effects on outcomes was unknown. Here, we build on recent work by app...

The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception (ITCP) was designed to test word-initial phoneme perception by uniformly sampling frequently used phonemes as well as balancing feature overlap of response competitors. However, the task has only been validated in normal hearing listeners. In this study, a large cohort of cochlear implant users completed the IT...

The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception (ITCP) is a single-word closed-set speech-in-noise test with well-balanced phonetic features that provides a reliable testing option for real-world listening. Objectives: The current study aimed to establish a UK version of the test (B-ITCP) based on the British received pronunciation. Design: We conducted a va...

Listeners generally map continuous acoustic information onto categories in a gradient manner with varying individual differences. Typically, such individual differences in speech categorization have been characterized by the mean slope of the response function, as quantified through the visual analog scaling (VAS) task. However, recent evidence sug...

The quantity, quality, and complexity of language input are important for children’s language development. This study examined how the detailed timing of this input relates to children’s vocabulary at 3 years of age in 64 mother–child dyads (male = 28; female = 36; White = 69%, Black = 31%). Acoustical analysis of turn taking in mother–child dialog...

Word recognition is a gateway to language, linking sound to meaning. Prior work has characterized its cognitive mechanisms as a form of competition between similar-sounding words. However, it has not identified dimensions along which this competition varies across people. We sought to identify these dimensions in a population of cochlear implant us...

Studies on speech categorization have shown that trial-by-trial response variability is a crucial factor in characterizing speech categorization profiles over the mean slope of response functions. However, the relationship between this categorization consistency and general language function remains unknown. In Experiment 1, English-speaking adults...

Morphological processing is the use of morphological structure during word reading. This study investigated whether middle school students applied morphological structure automatically when reading words. In addition, this study asked whether students with word reading difficulties (WRD) applied morphological structure in a way that differed from p...

In typical adults, recognizing both spoken and written words is thought to be served by a process of competition between candidates in the lexicon. In recent years, work has used eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm to characterize this competition process over development. It has shown that both spoken and written word recognition continue to...

Morphological processing is the use of morphological structure during word reading. This study investigated whether middle school students applied morphological structure automatically when reading words. In addition, this study asked whether students with word reading difficulties (WRD) applied morphological structure in a way that differed from p...

Both Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Reading Disorder (RD or dyslexia) have been proposed to derive in part from low-level speech perception deficits which may affect downstream language/reading processes. However, DLD and RD are comorbid, raising questions of whether the deficits in one group are driven by the other. Moreover, methodolog...

Speech perception is fundamental to language and reading abilities. While these skills are correlated, most studies examining the role of speech perception on outcomes do not test both concurrently. Moreover, traditional forced-choice tasks have limitations in accurately indexing these relationships. This study used a visual analog scaling task—a c...

In the literature, we encounter papers reporting manipulating pitch contours in speech tokens for a specific problem to be addressed in experiments (e.g., learning pitch patterns superimposed onto a pseudo-syllable), usually in the field of Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition. This type of research often tests listeners’ perceptual and pr...

Traditionally, there has been a strong emphasis on capturing linguistic diversity as noise. In speech perception, for instance, Categorical Perception (CP) is one example of such perspective. CP argues that listeners discard variation and only consider information that is necessary to identify the sound category itself. The theory led to the use of...

In psychophysics and psychometrics, an integral method to the discipline involves charting how a person’s response pattern changes according to a continuum of stimuli. For instance, in hearing science, Visual Analog Scaling tasks are experiments in which listeners hear sounds across a speech continuum and give a numeric rating between 0 and 100 con...

Prior research suggests that real-time phonological competition processes are stabilized in early childhood (Fernald et al., 2006). However, recent work suggests that development of these processes continues throughout adolescence (Huang & Snedeker, 2011; Rigler et al., 2015). This study aimed to investigate whether these developmental changes are...

Word recognition is generally thought to be supported by an automatic process of lexical competition, at least in young, normal hearing listeners. When listening becomes challenging, either due to the environment (noise) or the individual (hearing loss), the dynamics of lexical competition change, and word recognition can begin to feel effortful an...

Speech understanding requires listeners to map temporally unfolding speech to lexical items. For decades there has been consensus around the principles governing this process: lexical items are activated immediately as the input arrives, acoustic information flows to word recognition in a continuous cascade, perceptual and lexical representations r...

Spoken word recognition is a sophisticated cognitive process that maps incoming speech to meaning. For young, normal-hearing adults, word recognition is served by a competition process which plays out incrementally as speech unfolds. Candidates that match the input are activated and compete as mismatching candidates are suppressed. It remains uncle...

A key question in speech perception research is how listeners categorize highly varied signals into discrete units. The long-held assumption was that listeners discard variation and focus on the category itself (categorical perception, Liberman et al., 1957). However, listeners often encounter highly varied speech signals (e.g., processing unfamili...

Bi-/multilingual experiences vary widely due to differing degrees of input frequency, dominancy in languages, and societal preferences for the language(s) used. Heritage bilingualism has received notable attention over the last decade. Heritage bilinguals are those who often use or are exposed to one language at home (the heritage language) that di...

Up to 20% of children in the US come from multilingual households (Census, 2019). However, current language development models are still mostly based on monolingual input. Heritage speaker (HS) children pose a challenge for current understandings of monolingual language development because their first language (the heritage language, HL) becomes th...

Listeners must cope with highly variable input to successfully recognize speech. One way they do this is by adapting to the systematicities of individual talkers. Research on talker-specific adaptation has found that listeners generalize talker-specific phoneme categories to new talkers or individuate such categories, creating talker-specific categ...

In typical adults, recognizing both spoken and written words is thought to be served by a process of competition between candidates in the lexicon. In recent years, work has used eye?tracking in the visual world paradigm to characterize this competition process over development. It has shown that both spoken and written word recognition continue to...

Objectives Cochlear implant (CI) users exhibit large variability in understanding speech in noise. Past work in CI users found that spectral and temporal resolution correlates with speech-in-noise ability, but a large portion of variance remains unexplained. Recent work on normal-hearing listeners showed that the ability to group temporally and spe...

Purpose Talkers adapt their speech according to the demands of their listeners and the communicative context, enhancing the properties of the signal (pitch, intensity) and/or properties of the code (enhancement of phonemic contrasts). This study asked how mothers adapt their child-directed speech (CDS) in ways that might serve the immediate goals o...

Experiments with adult skilled readers have shown that visual word recognition is delayed by the presence of adjacent words. In a visual world paradigm with masked flanked visual words, flanker effects were most pronounced for high-frequency target words and were greatest for word flankers (compared to pseudowords or false fonts). Fluent reading...

Background: Parafoveal processing facilitates reading of connected text by partially preprocessing upcoming words during the preceding fixation, leading to shorter subsequent fixations on these words. Visual recognition of non-isolated foveal words is inhibited by the presence of adjacent words, suggesting that parafoveal processing comes with an i...

The quantity, quality and complexity of language input are important for children’s language development. This study examined how the detailed timing of this input predicts children’s vocabulary at 3 years of age in 67 mother-child dyads (male = 28; female = 39; White = 70%, Black = 30%). Acoustical analysis of mother-child dialogue found that more...

The human brain extracts meaning using an extensive neural system for semantic knowledge. Whether broadly distributed systems depend on or can compensate after losing a highly interconnected hub is controversial. We report intracranial recordings from two patients during a speech prediction task, obtained minutes before and after neurosurgical trea...

During word recognition, listeners must quickly map sounds to meaning, while suppressing similar sounding competitors. It remains an open question whether domain-general inhibitory control is recruited for resolving lexical competition. Cochlear implant (CI) users present a unique population for addressing this question because they are consistentl...

Spoken word recognition is a critical hub during language processing, linking hearing and perception to meaning and syntax. Words must be recognized quickly and efficiently as speech unfolds to be successfully integrated into conversation. This makes word recognition a computationally challenging process even for young, normal hearing adults. Older...

Word recognition is a gateway to language whose cognitive mechanisms are well understood in typical listeners. However, cognitive science has not identified the fundamental dimensions along which processing varies across people or contexts. This is necessary for developing universal theories that fully capture the range of language function; it can...

Classic psycholinguistics seeks universal language mechanisms for all people, emphasizing the “modal” listener: hearing, neurotypical, monolingual, and young adults. Applied psycholinguistics then characterizes differences in terms of their deviation from the modal. This mirrors naturalist philosophies of health which presume a normal function, wit...

Objectives: Understanding speech-in-noise (SiN) is a complex task that recruits multiple cortical subsystems. Individuals vary in their ability to understand SiN. This cannot be explained by simple peripheral hearing profiles, but recent work by our group (Kim et al. 2021, Neuroimage) highlighted central neural factors underlying the variance in S...

An examination of how binaural fusion occurs is necessary for fully understanding why certain configurations of CI users display benefits in speech perception outcomes relative to others. This project tests two models of binaural fusion, discovering some general trends and interesting variation among listeners.

Teacher judgments of students’ reading abilities in the elementary grades have been researched extensively, but less is known about how middle school teachers judge their students’ word reading, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. Such information could be useful when determining which students and reading components would be reasonable...

Objectives: The ability to adapt to subtle variations in acoustic input is a necessary skill for successful speech perception. Cochlear implant (CI) users tend to show speech perception benefits from the maintenance of their residual acoustic hearing. However, previous studies often compare CI users in different listening conditions within-subject...

Research on speech categorization and phoneme recognition has relied heavily on tasks in which participants listen to stimuli from a speech continuum and are asked to either classify each stimulus (identification) or discriminate between them (discrimination). Such tasks rest on assumptions about how perception maps onto discrete responses that hav...

Categorical perception (CP) is likely the single finding from speech perception with the biggest impact on cognitive science. However, within speech perception, it is widely known to be an artifact of task demands. CP is empirically defined as a relationship between phoneme identification and discrimination. As discrimination tasks do not appear to...

Turn‐taking in dialogue is an essential part of communication and early language experience. The prevalence of utterances and the timing of responses in dialogue were examined at 14 and 36 months of age in 104 mother–child dyads from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (EHSREP). Mothers varied in their level of depression risk (mea...

For much of its history, categorical perception was treated as a foundational theory of speech perception, which suggested that quasi-discrete categorization was a goal of speech perception. This had a profound impact on bilingualism research which adopted similar tasks to use as measures of nativeness or native-like processing, implicitly assuming...

Visual word recognition is usually investigated using isolated words, while effects of adjacent words in sentence reading are assumed to be beneficial due to preview benefits. However, the presence of adjacent words may interfere with processing the foveated word. Is interference simply due to the presence of visual stimulation, or is it modulated...

Objective: The objective of this study was to characterize the dynamics of real-time lexical access, including lexical competition among phonologically similar words, and spreading semantic activation in school-age children with hearing aids (HAs) and children with cochlear implants (CIs). We hypothesized that developing spoken language via degrad...

As a spoken word unfolds over time, similar sounding words (cap and cat) compete until one word "wins". Lexical competition becomes more efficient from infancy through adolescence. We examined one potential mechanism underlying this development: lexical inhibition, by which activated candidates suppress competitors. In Experiment 1, younger (7-8 ye...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Cochlear Implant (CI) users must cope with the degraded spectral input received through their device. This reduced quality leads to changes in how words are recognized: lexical access is delayed, leading to differences in competition between lexical candidates. CI users also report increased effort and fatigue during langu...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Listeners can account for systematic variability between talkers, which is learned over exposure to multiple talkers. Previous research suggests that listeners can both generalize prior knowledge of phoneme categories from a familiar to a novel talker (Eisner & McQueen, 2005; Kraljic & Samuel, 2006, 2007) and individuate t...

No PDF available ABSTRACT For typical listeners in quiet, lexical access occurs immediately. Multiple candidates are activated at word onset and subsequently updated as the word unfolds. For cochlear Implant (CI) users, this process changes to cope with their degraded input: CI users delay lexical access until a substantial portion of a word is hea...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Spoken word recognition proceeds by immediately activating items in the mental lexicon which match the incoming speech signal. These items compete for recognition over time. In multilinguals, the array of possible lexical competitors includes items across all their languages. Eye-tracking work indicates that the strength o...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Speech perception is gradient—listeners track continuous acoustic differences within a category (McMurray et al., 2022; Kapnoula & McMurray, 2022). Listeners use this gradiency to adjust subphonetic details (McMurray & Jongman, 2011), recover from ambiguity (McMurray et al., 2009), and aid learning and adaptation (McMurray...

Prior research suggests that real-time word recognition processes are stabilized in early childhood (Fernald et al., 2006). However, recent work suggests that development of these processes continues throughout adolescence (Huang & Snedeker, 2011; Rigler et al., 2015). This study aimed to investigate whether these developmental changes are based so...

The Visual World Paradigm (VWP) is a powerful experimental paradigm for language research. Listeners respond to speech in a "visual world" containing potential referents of the speech. Fixations to these referents provides insight into the preliminary states of language processing as decisions unfold. The VWP has become the dominant paradigm in psy...

An early achievement in language is carving a variable acoustic space into categories. The canonical story is that infants accomplish this by the second year, when only unsupervised learning is plausible. I challenge this view, synthesising five lines of developmental, phonetic and computational work. First, unsupervised learning may be insufficien...

Spoken word recognition is a complex cognitive process that underpins efficient language processing. When recognizing words, listeners must quickly map the spoken input to stored lexical candidates as speech unfolds over time. Older adults experience two declines that could impact word recognition: hearing loss and cognitive decline. To recognize w...

Classical psycholinguistics seeks a universal set of language processing mechanisms for all people. This relies on the “modal” listener: hearing, neurotypical, monolingual, young adults. Applied psycholinguistics then characterizes differences in terms of their deviation from modal. This approach mirrors naturalist philosophies of health which pres...

The efficiency of spoken word recognition is essential for real-time communication. There is consensus that this efficiency relies on an implicit process of activating multiple word candidates that compete for recognition as the acoustic signal unfolds in real-time. However, few methods capture the neural basis of this dynamic competition on a msec...