David B Pisoni

• Indiana University Bloomington

Purpose Many child-, hearing-, and device-related factors contribute to spoken language outcomes in children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Recently, the family environment has been implicated as another contributing factor in language development. However, most studies on the role of families in language outcomes of children who are DHH a...

Verbal working memory delays are found in many prelingually deaf children who receive cochlear implants (CIs). Because of the central importance of working memory for language, learning, and daily functioning, these delays present a significant challenge to cognitive development and quality of life. In order to address the consequences of working m...

Individual differences in verbal working memory underlie substantial variation routinely observed in the speech and language outcomes of deaf children with cochlear implants (CI). In this chapter, we describe the nature of verbal working memory and its component processes: encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. We then present evidence suggesting th...

Purpose Cochlear implants (CIs) have improved the quality of life for many children with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. Despite the reported CI benefits of improved speech recognition, speech intelligibility, and spoken language processing, large individual differences in speech and language outcomes are still consistently reported...

The Childhood Development after Cochlear Implantation (CDaCI) study was a pivotal study of language development in children receiving cochlear implants (CIs) in the early 2000s. The main findings were that children receiving CIs developed better receptive and expressive language skills than would be predicted if they had not undergone implantation,...

Objectives: Adults with hearing loss (HL) demonstrate greater benefits of adding visual cues to auditory cues (i.e., "visual enhancement" [VE]) during recognition of speech presented in a combined audiovisual (AV) fashion when compared with normal-hearing peers. For patients with moderate-to-profound sensorineural HL who receive cochlear implants...

Purpose Large individual differences and poor speech recognition outcomes are routinely observed in most patients who have received auditory brainstem implants (ABIs). A case report of an ABI recipient with exceptionally good speech recognition outcomes presents an opportunity to better understand the core information processing mechanisms that und...

The goal of the current work was to develop and validate web-based measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge. Two existing paper-and-pencil assessments, the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and the Word Familiarity Test (WordFAM), were modified for web-based administration. In Experiment 1, participants ( n = 100) completed the web-based VST. I...

Two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge, the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and the Word Familiarity Test (WordFAM), were recently validated for web-based administration. An analysis of the psychometric properties of these assessments revealed high internal consistency, suggesting that stable assessment could be achieved with fewer test...

Background: Verbal working memory delays are found in many deaf children with cochlear implants compared with normal-hearing peers, but the factors contributing to these delays are not well understood. This study investigated differences between cochlear implant users and normal-hearing peers in memory scanning speed during a challenging verbal wo...

In this Point of View, we review a number of recent discoveries from the emerging, interdisciplinary field of Network Science, which uses graph theoretic techniques to understand complex systems. In the network science approach, nodes represent entities in a system, and connections are placed between nodes that are related to each other to form a w...

Objective Military veterans have high rates of noise‐induced hearing loss (NIHL) which is associated with more significant spiral ganglion neuronal loss. This study explores the relationship between NIHL and cochlear implant (CI) outcomes in veterans. Study Design Retrospective case series of veterans who underwent CI between 2019 and 2021. Setti...

Purpose Verbal fluency tasks assess the ability to quickly and efficiently retrieve words from the mental lexicon by requiring subjects to rapidly generate words within a phonological or semantic category. This study investigated differences between cochlear implant users and normal-hearing peers in the clustering and time course of word retrieval...

Deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children who use auditory-oral communication display considerable variability in spoken language and executive functioning outcomes. Furthermore, language and executive functioning skills are strongly associated with each other in DHH children, which may be relevant for explaining this variability in outcomes. However,...

Purpose Individual differences and variability in outcomes following cochlear implantation (CI) in patients with hearing loss remain significant unresolved clinical problems. Case reports of specific individuals allow for detailed examination of the information processing mechanisms underlying variability in outcomes. Two adults who displayed excep...

Objectives: Existing cochlear implant (CI) outcomes research demonstrates a high degree of variability in device effectiveness among experienced CI users. Increasing evidence suggests that verbal learning and memory (VL&M) may have an influence on speech recognition with CIs. This study examined the relations in CI users between visual measures of...

Objectives: This study examined the performance of a group of adult cochlear implant (CI) candidates (CIC) on visual tasks of verbal learning and memory. Preoperative verbal learning and memory abilities of the CIC group were compared with a group of older normal-hearing (ONH) control participants. Relations between preoperative verbal learning an...

Cochlear implants (CIs) represent a significant engineering and medical milestone in the treatment of hearing loss for both adults and children. In this review, we provide a brief overview of CI technology, describe the benefits that CIs can provide to adults and children who receive them, and discuss the specific limitations and issues faced by CI...

Purpose The aim of this study was to evaluate whether families of children with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) are organized similarly to those of typically developing, typically hearing (TH) children and whether the dimensions of family dynamics and environment are related to spoken language development similarly in children with and without SN...

Purpose Verbal working memory (VWM) delays are commonly found in prelingually deaf youth with cochlear implants (CIs), albeit with considerable interindividual variability. However, little is known about the neurocognitive information-processing mechanisms underlying these delays and how these mechanisms relate to spoken language outcomes. The goal...

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the role of parental sensitivity in language and neurocognitive outcomes in children who are deaf and/or hard of hearing (DHH). Method Sixty-two parent–child dyads of children with normal hearing (NH) and 64 of children who are DHH (3–8 years) completed parent and child measures of inhibitory contro...

This chapter argues that a comprehensive approach to research on specificity effects in spoken‐word recognition. It focuses on findings demonstrating the roles that the talker, the speech signal, the listener, and the context play in indexical specificity effects in spoken‐word recognition. The chapter discusses theoretical frameworks and new resea...

Speech perception and comprehension are critical for human communication. This chapter aims to evaluate the claim that auditory‐visual (AV) integration is an ability or skill that is predictive of AV benefit and that can explain both age and individual differences in the auditory‐visual benefit. One clear prediction that emerges from considering au...

This chapter reviews research on children's speech perception that contributes to that alternative view. The reports described thus far adhered to the view of the phoneme as the principal unit of language processing for adults and infants alike. Children may be predisposed to acquire new vocabulary items at early ages that are as acoustically disti...

Speech is a complex auditory signal that contains multiple layers of linguistic and non‐linguistic structures. This chapter discusses empirical and theoretical work examining the extent to which linguistic and non‐linguistic properties are independently processed and represented. It considers research examining the impact of socially conditioned an...

This chapter focuses on the characteristics and effectiveness of clear speech (CS) aimed at enhancing intelligibility for adult interlocutors with perceptual difficulties arising from hearing loss, low proficiency, or environmental noise. It looks at the acoustic‐articulatory features of conversational‐to‐clear‐speech modifications and continues by...

This chapter focuses on research that has investigated whether speech perception, the initial encoding of linguistic input, may be a plausible candidate: several of the deficits accompanying poor reading achievement could conceivably stem from deficits in the underlying quality of phoneme percepts. Research conducted to investigate whether speech‐p...

Personal identity can be discerned from fleeting instances of speech, and, remains recognizable after temporal displacements of years. The science of voice, including the nature of the voice as social object, the auditory‐acoustic cues that are accountable for the recognition or discrimination of individual voice patterns, information carried in th...

A neural insult to any of a set of left‐hemispheree perisylvian regions can result in an acquired language disorder, or aphasia. This chapter describes a model of speech‐sound processing that spans a network of brain regions in the left and right hemispheres, from temporal to frontal areas. The complementary contributions of imaging research on typ...

Cochlear implants (CI) are neural prostheses that have had a substantial and long‐lasting effect on spoken‐language processing in deaf adults and children. This chapter addresses several neuromyths about how CIs work as an interface between the sound environment and spoken‐language processing in the brain. It presents evidence that individual diffe...

The dominant contemporary account of auditory perceptual organization has been auditory scene analysis. The diversity of acoustic constituents of speech is readily resolved as a coherent stream perceptually, though the means by which this occurs challenges the potential of the generic auditory account. Acoustic analysis of speech, and synthesis tha...

This chapter offers a critique of the idea that the objects of speech perception are motor, and that perception succeeds because of a resort to motor functions. A phonemic typology was sought in the spectrographic patterns of acoustic energy observed in phonemically contrastive utterances. The motor theory belongs to a class of accounts understood,...

This chapter provides an overview of formulaic language (FL), reviewing function, mental representation, and evidence for its unique status in a model of language, followed by a review of the perceptual characteristics of FL. In speech perception, retention by listeners of auditory‐acoustic characteristics in spoken sentences suggests that acoustic...

People have different acoustic voice signatures because of the unique physiology of the jaw, tongue, lips, and throat. The largest acoustic difference between talkers is the difference between men and women and children. Much of the research done on talker normalization has focused on understanding how listeners must map the acoustic properties of...

Research on the perception of dialect variation has expanded dramatically since the early years of the twenty‐first century. Early work on perceptual classification of regional dialects involved primarily forced‐choice dialect categorization tasks with native adult listeners of the target language. Listeners’ perceptual representations of dialect v...

Slips of the ear in casual conversation provide an insight into the use of knowledge in speech perception and language understanding. Speech errors, slips of the tongue, or slips of the ear occur during ordinary conversation under ordinary circumstances. Problems in collecting slips of the tongue have been somewhat ameliorated by recording technolo...

Individuals who are speaking in a second language tend to use the language in ways that differ from native speakers. As listeners build representations of nonnative‐accented speech, the need for explicit processing should decrease and fewer attentional resources should be necessary for listeners to access the lexical items intended by the nonnative...

This chapter reviews some of what is known about the acoustic cues to the perception of segmental phonemes of human language. The acoustic cues to the stop manner of articulation were first established mainly by using spectrograms as the basis for creating synthetic speech stimuli. Descriptions of the bases of voicing opposition are often somewhat...

This chapter provides a brief overview of how the brain's auditory system represents speech. Animal experiments have been invaluable in elucidating basic physiological mechanisms of sound encoding, auditory learning, and pattern classification in the mammalian brain. The human auditory nerve contains about 30,000 such nerve fibers, each capable of...

Languages where stress placement in words can vary are said to have “lexical stress.” In lexical‐stress languages, the stress pattern of every polysyllabic word is lexically determined, that is, is part of the phonological representation of how speakers ought to produce the word. This chapter considers issues of vocabulary structure that could infl...

One of the goals of speech research has been to characterize the defining properties of speech and to specify the processes and mechanisms used in speech perception and word recognition. This chapter utilizes e behavioral, psychoacoustic, and neural evidence to argue that features are basic representational units in speech perception and in lexical...

Speech is a highly specialized, biologically significant acoustic signal. This chapter is concerned with cognitive audiology, an emerging interdisciplinary field that represents the intersection and collaborations of clinicians, speech and hearing scientists, and cognitive psychologists working on common problems that cross over the traditional bou...

Phonotactics describes the phonological segments and sequences of phonological segments that are legal as well as illegal in a given language. Once the word‐learning process has been effectively triggered by a novel word with low phonotactic probability, neighborhood density acts on the fragile and nascent representation of the word form to be lear...

Like singing, speech is governed by a control system that requires sensory information about the effects of its actions, and the major source of this sensory feedback is the auditory system. This chapter addresses a number of issues related to the perceptual control of speech production. The study of postlingually deafened individuals represents th...

The phenomenological power of the McGurk effect has motivated research into the apparent automaticity with which the senses integrate/merge. Speech provided the first example of a stimulus that could modulate an area in the human brain that was thought to be solely responsible for another sense. Since 2005, evidence has continued to grow that suppo...

Purpose Youth with cochlear implants (CIs) are at risk for delays in verbal short-term memory (STM)/working memory (WM), which adversely affect language, neurocognitive, and behavioral outcomes. Assessment of verbal STM/WM is critical for identifying and addressing these delays, but standard assessment procedures require face-to-face (FTF) administ...

Objectives: To investigate differences in speech, language, and neurocognitive functioning in normal hearing (NH) children and deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) using anomalous sentences. Anomalous sentences block the use of downstream predictive coding during speech recognition, allowing for investigation of rapid phonological coding and...

Purpose This preliminary research examined (a) the perception of two common sources of indexical variability in speech—regional dialects and foreign accents, and (b) the relation between indexical processing and sentence recognition among prelingually deaf, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method Forty-three pre...

Purpose Using a new measure of family-level executive functioning (EF; the Family Characteristics Scale [FCS]), we investigated associations between family-level EF, spoken language, and neurocognitive skills in children with hearing loss (HL), compared to children with normal hearing. Method Parents of children with HL (n = 61) or children with n...

Hypothesis: This study tested the hypotheses that 1) experienced adult cochlear implants (CI) users demonstrate poorer reading efficiency relative to normal-hearing controls, 2) reading efficiency reflects basic, underlying neurocognitive skills, and 3) reading efficiency relates to speech recognition outcomes in CI users. Background: Weak phono...

Objective: This study investigated differences in functional hearing quality between youth with cochlear implants (CIs) and normal hearing (NH) peers, as well as associations between functional hearing quality and audiological measures, speech perception, language and executive functioning (EF). Design: Youth with CIs and NH peers completed meas...

Experimental measures of working memory that minimize rehearsal and maximize attentional control best predict higher-order cognitive abilities. These tasks fundamentally differ from clinically administered span tasks, which do not control strategy use. Participants engaged in concurrent articulation (to limit rehearsal) or concurrent tapping (to li...

Purpose Auditory deprivation has downstream effects on the development of language and executive functioning (EF) in prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs), but little is known about the very early development of EF during preschool ages in children with CIs. This study investigated the longitudinal development of EF and spoken lan...

Purpose Parenting stress has been studied as a potential predictor of developmental outcomes in children with normal hearing and children who are deaf and hard of hearing. However, it is unclear how parenting stress might underlie at-risk spoken language and neurocognitive outcomes in this clinical pediatric population. We investigated parenting st...

Hypotheses: Significant variability in speech recognition outcomes is consistently observed in adults who receive cochlear implants (CIs), some of which may be attributable to cognitive functions. Two hypotheses were tested: 1) preoperative cognitive skills assessed visually would predict postoperative speech recognition at 6 months after CI; and...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to describe and explain individual differences in complex/higher order language processing in long-term cochlear implant (CI) users relative to normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method Measures of complex/higher order language processing indexed by the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition (CELF...

Objectives: To examine differences in family environment and associations between family environment and key speech, language, and cognitive outcomes in samples of children with normal hearing and deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children who use hearing aids and cochlear implants. Design: Thirty families of children with normal hearing (n = 10),...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Listening effort is needed to understand speech that is degraded by hearing loss and/or a noisy environment, and this in turn reduces cognitive spare capacity (CSC), the amount of cognitive resources available for allocation to concurrent tasks. Sentence context is known to boost speech perception accuracy, but how does co...

Background: Postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) users routinely display large individual differences in the ability to recognize and understand speech, especially in adverse listening conditions. Although individual differences have been linked to several sensory ("bottom-up") and cognitive ("top-down") factors, little is currently...

This experiment examined the neural correlates of second language (L2) speech perception in noise in advanced Spanish students. Participants completed a speech perception task in quiet and noise in their first language (L1 = English) and L2 during fMRI. Behavioral tests of L2 Spanish sentence recognition confirmed that advanced learners of Spanish...

Purpose The current study adopts a systematic approach to the examination of working memory components in pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users by separately assessing contributions of encoding, storage, and retrieval. Method Forty-nine long-term CI users and 56 typically hearing controls completed forward and backward span tasks with 3 stimulus s...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the information-processing strategies of early-implanted, prelingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users with the California Verbal Learning Test–Second Edition (CVLT-II; Delis, Kramer, Kaplan, & Ober, 2000), a well-established normed measure of verbal learning and memory used in neuropsychologica...

Objectives: The objective of the present study was to determine whether long-term cochlear implant (CI) users would show greater variability in rapid phonological coding skills and greater reliance on slow-effortful compensatory executive functioning (EF) skills than normal-hearing (NH) peers on perceptually challenging high-variability sentence r...

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to investigate psychosocial outcomes in a sample of prelingually deaf, early-implanted children, adolescents, and young adults who are long-term cochlear implant (CI) users and to examine the extent to which language and executive functioning predict psychosocial outcomes. Design: Psychosocial outcom...

This volume presents the latest research on language, literacy and numeracy, cognition, and social and emotional development of deaf learners. It is written by internationally recognized researchers and practitioners. In their contributions they discuss the backgrounds and contexts of their research, take interdisciplinary perspectives in merging t...

This volume presents the latest research on language, literacy and numeracy, cognition, and social and emotional development of deaf learners. It is written by internationally recognized researchers and practitioners. In their contributions they discuss the backgrounds and contexts of their research, take interdisciplinary perspectives in merging t...

Purpose Statistical learning—the ability to learn patterns in environmental input—is increasingly recognized as a foundational mechanism necessary for the successful acquisition of spoken language. Spoken language is a complex, serially presented signal that contains embedded statistical relations among linguistic units, such as phonemes, morphemes...

Objectives Increasing evidence suggests that hearing loss may be linked to cognitive decline, and that cochlear implantation may lead to improvements in cognition. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of severe‐to‐profound hearing loss and cochlear implantation in post‐lingually deafened adults, compared with age‐matched normal‐hearing...

Objective: Verbal working memory (WM) is more strongly correlated with spoken language skills in prelingually deaf, early-implanted cochlear implant (CI) users than in normal-hearing (NH) peers, suggesting that CI users access WM in order to support and compensate for their slower, more effortful spoken language processing. This pilot study tested...

ABSTRACT Objectives/Hypothesis: Cochlear implants (CIs) restore auditory sensation to patients with moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. However, the benefits to speech recognition vary considerably among patients. Advancing age contributes to this variability in post-lingual adult CI users. Similarly, older individuals with normal hear...

Objective: Deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) show poorer verbal working memory compared to normal-hearing (NH) peers, but little is known about their verbal learning and memory (VLM) processes involving multi-trial free recall. Design: Children with CIs were compared to NH peers using the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-...

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Listening effort is needed to understand speech that is degraded by hearing loss and/or a noisy environment. Effortful listening reduces cognitive spare capacity (CSC). Predictive contexts aid speech perception accuracy, but it is not known whether the use of context reduces or preserves CSC. Here, we compare the impact of...

The psychometric properties of the Learning, Executive, and Attention Functioning (LEAF) scale were investigated in an outpatient clinical pediatric sample. As a part of clinical testing, the LEAF scale, which broadly measures neuropsychological abilities related to executive functioning and learning, was administered to parents of 118 children and...

Objective Neurocognitive functions, specifically verbal working memory (WM), contribute to speech recognition in postlingual adults with cochlear implants (CIs) and normal-hearing (NH) listener shearing degraded speech. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) WM accuracy as assessed using three visual span measures — digits, objects, and symbols — would...

Cochlear implants (CIs) often work very well for many children and adults with profound sensorineural (SNHL) hearing loss. Unfortunately, while many CI patients display substantial benefits in recognizing speech and understanding spoken language following cochlear implantation, a large number of patients achieve poor outcomes. Understanding and exp...

Background: Formulaic expressions, including idioms and other fixed expressions, comprise a significant proportion of discourse. Although much has been written about this topic, controversy remains about their psychological status. An important claim about formulaic expressions, that they are known to native speakers, has seldom been directly demon...

Objectives: Despite the importance of verbal learning and memory in speech and language processing, this domain of cognitive functioning has been virtually ignored in clinical studies of hearing loss and cochlear implants in both adults and children. In this article, we report the results of two studies that used a newly developed visually based v...

Hypotheses: 1) When controlling for age in postlingual adult cochlear implant (CI) users, information-processing functions, as assessed using "process" measures of working memory capacity, inhibitory control, information-processing speed, and fluid reasoning, will predict traditional "product" outcome measures of speech recognition. 2) Demographic...

Taking as a premise that phonological working memory (PWM) influences later language development, in their keynote article, Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan aim to specify the relations between early language input and the development of PWM in terms of separable influences of timing, quantity, and quality of early language input. We concur...

Objectives: Listening effort (LE) induced by speech degradation reduces performance on concurrent cognitive tasks. However, a converse effect of extrinsic cognitive load on recognition of spoken words in sentences has not been shown. The aims of the current study were to (a) examine the impact of extrinsic cognitive load on spoken word recognition...

An important speech-language outcome for deaf people with cochlear implants is speech intelligibility—how well their speech is understood by others, which also affects social functioning. Beyond simply uttering recognizable words, other speech-language skills may affect communicative competence, including rate-matching or converging toward interloc...

Purpose We sought to determine whether speech perception and language skills measured early after cochlear implantation in children who are deaf, and early postimplant growth in speech perception and language skills, predict long-term speech perception, language, and neurocognitive outcomes. Method Thirty-six long-term users of cochlear implants,...

Objective: Current clinical outcome measures for adults receiving cochlear implants (CIs) consist of word and sentence recognition, primarily under quiet conditions. However, these measures may not adequately reflect patients' CI-specific quality of life (QOL). This study first examined traditional auditory-only speech recognition measures and oth...

Hypothesis: 1) Environmental sound awareness (ESA) and speech recognition skills in experienced, adult cochlear implant (CI) users will be highly correlated, and, 2) ESA skills of CI users will be significantly lower than those of age-matched adults with normal hearing. Background: Enhancement of ESA is often discussed with patients with sensori...

Perturbations to acoustic speech feedback have been typically localized to specific phonetic characteristics, for example, fundamental frequency (F0) or the first two formants (F1/F2), or affect all aspects of the speech signal equally, for example, via the addition of background noise. This paper examines the consequences of a more selective globa...

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is characterised by subjective and objective memory impairment in the absence of dementia. MCI is a strong predictor for the development of Alzheimer's disease, and may represent an early stage in the disease course in many cases. A standard task used in the diagnosis of MCI is verbal fluency, where participants prod...

For adult cochlear implant(CI) users, understanding speech in the real world, outside the clinic, can be challenging. A fundamental attribute of real-life speech is the immense amount of talker variability, present from multiple talkers with diverse linguistic and developmental histories. Talker variability, beyond background noise or competing tal...

Deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) are at risk for psychosocial adjustment problems, possibly due to delayed speech-language skills. This study investigated associations between a core component of spoken-language ability—speech intelligibility—and the psychosocial development of prelingually deaf CI users. Audio-transcription measures of s...

This study investigated contributions of speech rate and rate-matching (adaptation to interlocutor rates) to the intelligibility of early-implanted deaf people with cochlear implants (CIs), a population that varies widely in speech-language skills. In a sentence-repetition task, CI users’ speech was slower, more variable, and less intelligible than...

Objectives: Noise-vocoded speech is a valuable research tool for testing experimental hypotheses about the effects of spectral degradation on speech recognition in adults with normal hearing (NH). However, very little research has utilized noise-vocoded speech with children with NH. Earlier studies with children with NH focused primarily on the am...

Verbal working memory is significantly delayed in many prelingually deaf children who receive cochlear implants. Because of the importance of working memory for language, learning, and daily functioning, these delays present a significant challenge to cognitive development and quality of life. In order to address the consequences of working memory...

Individual differences in verbal working memory underlie the substantial variation routinely observed in speech and language outcomes of deaf children with cochlear implants. In this chapter we describe the nature of verbal working memory and its component processes: encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. We then present evidence suggesting that the...

Musicians have been shown to have enhanced speech perception in noise skills. It is unclear whether these improvements are limited to the auditory modality, as no research has examined musicians' visual perceptual abilities under degraded conditions. The current study examined associations between long-term musical experience and visual perception...