Liat Kishon-Rabin

Tel Aviv University | TAU

The present study assessed LENA's suitability as a tool for monitoring future language interventions by evaluating its reliability, construct validity, and criterion validity in infants learning Hebrew and Arabic, across low and high levels of maternal education. Participants were 32 infants aged 3 to 11 months (16 in each language) and their mothe...

Purpose Processing narrow focus (NF), the stressed word in the sentence, includes both the perceptual ability to identify the stressed word in the sentence and the pragmatic–semantic ability to comprehend the nonexplicit linguistic message. NF and its underlying meaning can be conveyed only via the auditory modality. Therefore, NF can be considered...

Human listeners are assumed to apply different strategies to improve speech recognition in background noise. Young listeners with normal hearing (NH), e.g., have been shown to follow the voice of a particular speaker based on the fundamental (F0) and formant frequencies, which are both influenced by the gender, age, and size of the speaker. However...

Purpose This study aims to examine the development of auditory selective attention to speech in noise by examining the ability of infants to prefer child-directed speech (CDS) over time-reversed speech (TRS) presented in “on-channel” and “off-channel” noise. Method A total of 32 infants participated in the study. Sixteen typically developing infan...

Hypothesis: Hearing via soft tissue stimulation involves an osseous pathway. Background: A recent study that measured both hearing thresholds and skull vibrations found that vibratory stimulation of soft tissue led to hearing sensation that correlated with skull vibrations, supporting the hypothesis of an osseous pathway. It is possible, however...

Cochlear implants (CIs) are the state-of-the-art therapy for individuals with severe to profound hearing loss, providing them with good functional hearing. Nevertheless, speech understanding in background noise remains a significant challenge. The purposes of this study were to: (1) conduct a novel within-study comparison of speech-in-noise perform...

Background: Evidence from motor and visual studies suggests that the ability to generalize learning gains to untrained conditions decreases as the training progresses. This decrease in generalization was suggested to reflect a shift from higher to lower levels of neuronal representations of the task following prolonged training. In the auditory mo...

Different rules for changing step sizes (e.g., logarithmic, linear) are alternately used in adaptive threshold-seeking procedures, with no clear justification. We hypothesized that the linear rule may yield more accurate thresholds for poor performers because the step sizes are predetermined and fixed across listeners and thus can be small, in cont...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to delineate differences between children with specific language impairment (SLI), typical age–matched (TAM) children, and typical younger (TY) children in learning and mastering an undisclosed artificial morphological rule (AMR) through exposure and usage. Method Twenty-six participants (eight 10-year-old chi...

Background: The ability to discriminate between talkers assists listeners in understanding speech in a multitalker environment. This ability has been shown to be influenced by sensory processing of vocal acoustic cues, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequencies that reflect the listener's vocal tract length (VTL), and by cognitive...

Background: Speech perception in noise remains a significant challenge for cochlear implant (CI) users in everyday life. It has been argued that training to use the information provided by the CI is as important as technological advances. So far, however, only few studies have trained speech perception in noise, most (if not all) included postling...

The few studies that compared auditory skill learning between children and adults found variable results, with only some children reaching adult-like thresholds following training. The present study aimed to assess auditory skill learning in children as compared with adults during single- and multisession training. It was of interest to ascertain w...

Hearing can be elicited in response to bone as well as soft-tissue stimulation. However, the underlying mechanism of soft-tissue stimulation is under debate. It has been hypothesized that if skull vibrations were the underlying mechanism of hearing in response to soft-tissue stimulation, then skull vibrations would be associated with hearing thresh...

Arabic stress is predictable, varies across words, and does not have a contrastive role, whereas, Hebrew stress although nonpredictable, carries contrastive value. Stress processing was assessed in speakers of the two languages at three processing levels: discrimination, short-term memory, and metalinguistic awareness. In Experiment 1, Arabic speak...

Cochlear implant (CI) users find it extremely difficult to discriminate between talkers, which may partially explain why they struggle to understand speech in a multi-talker environment. Recent studies, based on findings with postlingually deafened CI users, suggest that these difficulties may stem from their limited use of vocal-tract length (VTL)...

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of external feedback in auditory perceptual learning of school-age children as compared with that of adults. Method: Forty-eight children (7-9 years of age) and 64 adults (20-35 years of age) conducted a training session using an auditory frequency discrimination (difference limen for...

Objective: The study compared the performance of adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to that of age-matched peers with typical development (TD) and cognitive language-matched peers with TD on measures of identification and comprehension of "narrow focus." Participants: Forty-nine participants, 17 autistic, 17 TD peers matched for a...

Many studies have examined the contribution of different spectral bands to speech intelligibility, measuring recognition scores of filtered speech stimuli. For a given filter bandwidth, the influence of filter properties on such experiments has been studied mainly with respect to transition band slopes. The objective of the present study was to det...

Purpose: The stressed word in a sentence (narrow focus [NF]) conveys information about the intent of the speaker and is therefore important for processing spoken language and in social interactions. The ability of participants with severe-to-profound prelingual hearing loss to comprehend NF has rarely been investigated. The purpose of this study w...

Context: Damage to the auditory system by loud sounds can be avoided by hearing protection devices (HPDs) such as earmuffs, earplugs, or both for maximum attenuation. However, the attenuation can be limited by air conduction (AC) leakage around the earplugs and earmuffs by the occlusion effect (OE) and by skull vibrations initiating bone conductio...

The mechanism of human hearing under water is debated. Some suggest it is by air conduction (AC), others by bone conduction (BC), and others by a combination of AC and BC. A clinical bone vibrator applied to soft tissue sites on the head, neck, and thorax also elicits hearing by a mechanism called soft tissue conduction (STC) or nonosseous BC. The...

The pattern of generalization of learning gains to untrained conditions in adult human perceptual skill learning has been used as an effective behavioral probe for studying the functional organization of the learning system. Learning gains were previously reported to generalize symmetrically between the ears for tonal stimuli. However, given the op...

Objectives: To assess discrimination of lexical stress pattern in infants with cochlear implant (CI) compared with infants with normal hearing (NH). While criteria for cochlear implantation have expanded to infants as young as 6 months, little is known regarding infants' processing of suprasegmental-prosodic cues which are known to be important fo...

AimTo evaluate the impact of unilateral hearing loss (UHL) on early aural/oral communication skills of infants by comparing performance to infants with bilateral normal hearing (BNH).Method Thirty-four infants with UHL (median age 9.4mo, 25th–75th centile 7.34–12.15) and 331 control infants with BNH (median age 9mo, 6.0–13.38) were divided into two...

Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show...

The purpose of the present study was to assess how adolescents with autism who vary in the severity of autistic characteristics judge the emotional state of the speaker when lexical and prosodic information is congruent or incongruent. Eighty participants, 24 autistic and 56 typically developing (TD) subjects participated: (a) 11 autistic adolescen...

Objectives: This study investigated the use of the Infant-Toddler Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (IT-MAIS) as a measure of early auditory skill development in aided infants and toddlers with varying degrees of hearing loss. Specific goals were (1) to rate the change in IT-MAIS score as a function of change in hearing thresholds achieved thr...

Background: Physiological and behavioral sex-related differences have been previously reported in the human auditory system, although data are limited to adults and are equivocal. While physiological evidence showed some advantage for females, psychophysical data tended to show greater sensitivity for males in several auditory tasks. Possible expl...

Objectives/hypothesis: To compare speech perception performance with right versus left cochlear implants (CIs) in children with bilateral CIs implanted simultaneously. Study design: Prospective case series of patients undergoing simultaneous bilateral cochlear implantation. Methods: Speech perception performance was tested in 10, right-handed...

To measure the course of improvement in a gap-detection (GD) task following multi-session training in older compared to young adults. Thirty participants with normal hearing were divided into four groups: two groups of older and younger adults who received multi-session training over 10 days (9 adults/group, mean ages 64.7 and 24.1 years, respectiv...

Prosodic attributes of speech, such as intonation, influence our ability to recognize, comprehend, and produce affect, as well as semantic and pragmatic meaning, in vocal utterances. The present study examines associations between auditory perceptual abilities and the perception of prosody, both pragmatic and affective. This association has not bee...

Background: Soft tissue conduction (STC), a recently described mode of auditory stimulation elicited when the clinical bone vibrator is applied to skin sites over the head, neck, and thorax, complements air conduction (AC) and bone conduction (BC), elicited by the same vibrator. The study assessed skull bone vibrations induced during STC and BC st...

The ability of infants to develop recognition of a common stress pattern that is language specific has been tested mainly in trochaic languages with a strong-weak (SW) stress pattern. The goals of the present study were: (a) to test Hebrew-learning infants on their stress pattern preference in the Hebrew language, for which the weak-strong (WS) str...

Auditory sensation can be elicited not only by air conducted (AC) sound or bone conducted (BC) sound, but also by stimulation of soft tissue (STC) sites on the head and neck relatively distant from deeply underlying bone. Tone stimulation by paired combinations of AC with BC (mastoid) and/or with soft tissue conduction produce the same pitch sensat...

There is ample evidence showing that frequency discrimination can dramatically improve with practice. Nevertheless, the ability to generalize the learning gains to conditions that were not encountered during training is still controversial. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to evaluate the extent of generalization to the untrained ear...

The main purpose of the present study was to determine listening preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over static (white noise, WN) and dynamic (time-reversed speech, TRS) nonspeech stimuli in both normal-hearing (NH) infants and hearing-impaired infants with cochlear implants (CIs). A second purpose was to investigate the effect of auditory...

The goal of this study was to investigate the preference for the native language compared with an unfamiliar language in normally hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired infants with cochlear implants (CIs). Preference for the native language is an important step in the process of language acquisition because it helps infants to attend to the important s...

While it is well known that an auditory training of normal-hearing adults can result in significant learning gains, less in known about the influence of feedback on such gains. The objectives of the present study were: (1) to investigate the influence of feedback on the performance of a frequency discrimination task; (2) to compare the learning-dep...

To clarify the relationship between psychoacoustic capabilities and speech perception in adolescents with severe-to-profound hearing loss (SPHL). Twenty-four adolescents with SPHL and young adults with normal hearing were assessed with psychoacoustic and speech perception tests. The psychoacoustic tests included gap detection (GD), difference limen...

The high incidence of hearing impairment in the Arabic-speaking population in Israel, as well as the use of advanced aural rehabilitation devices, motivated the development of Arabic speech assessment tests for this population. The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first goal is to describe features that are unique to the Arabic language and th...

The high incidence of hearing impairment in the Arabic-speaking population in Israel, as well as the use of advanced aural rehabilitation devices, motivated the development of Arabic speech assessment tests for this population. The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first goal is to describe features that are unique to the Arabic language and th...

In the present study, we examined the influence of mean F0 and formant values on talker normalization. Initially, two speakers recorded an identical set of 10 isophonemic word lists in Hebrew, consisting of 10 words each. These recordings were then manipulated by means that affect F0 only, or both F0 and formant frequencies. Different degrees of ma...

The study examines prosodic characteristics of Hebrew speech directed to children between 0 ; 9-3 ; 0 years, based on longitudinal samples of 228,946 tokens (8,075 types). The distribution of prosodic patterns - the number of syllables and stress patterns - is analyzed across three lexical categories, distinguishing not only between open- and close...

Auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) and the simultaneously obtained behavioral measures (performance accuracy and reaction time) were used to study speech perception in postlingual adult cochlear implant (CI) recipients and in normal-hearing (NH) controls. AERPs were recorded while subjects were performing oddball discrimination tasks with in...

To compare behavioral speech perception performance of children with right versus left cochlear implants (CIs). A retrospective cohort study. Academic university medical center. Seventy-one prelingually deafened children that obtained a CI device at 48 months or younger. Cochlear implantation with Cochlear, Advanced Bionics, and Med-El devices. Pat...

To investigate the effect of increasing acoustic-phonetic difficulty in children with cochlear implants (CI) by means of auditory event-related potentials (AERPs). AERPs were recorded from a group of ten 9- to 14-year-old prelingually deafened children who exhibited open-set speech recognition, using the Nucleus 22 CI for at least 5 years. AERPs we...

It has recently been documented that perceptual learning occurs in the absence of perceived differences between stimuli. This finding supports the notion that stimuli do not have to be highly discriminable in order to elicit learning effects. It is not clear, however, whether additional characteristics of perceptual learning, such as generalization...

Most often, noise is considered a major factor in the degradation of listening conditions. Recently, however, there is increasing evidence suggesting that the addition of low-intensity noise can improve signal detection in non-linear systems. While this phenomenon has been described in physical systems, very little has been documented regarding its...

The use of bilateral hearing aids is based on the assumption that the human auditory system functions best when both ears receive incoming acoustic information. There is evidence, however, that some elderly individuals perform better while using unilateral as opposed to bilateral amplification. The main objective of the present study was to compare...

Listeners use several acoustic cues with different relative weighting, for perceiving a phonetic contrast. The weighting depends on variables such as age and language. The purpose of this study was to examine the relative weighting of some acoustic cues to the perception of initial voicing of plosives in different age groups. Three groups of childr...

This study was designed to characterize the effect of background noise on the identification of syllables using behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Twenty normal-hearing adults (18-30 years) performed an identification task in a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm. Stimuli consisted of naturally produced syllables [da] and [ga] embedde...

Relatively little is known about the combined effects of adverse listening conditions on bilinguals' speech perception. This study examines the effect of (1) speech rate and (2) noise, separately and combined, on bilinguals' speech perception in L1 and L2. Participants were university students, native speakers of Arabic (L1), with Hebrew L2. Speech...

To compare performance after cochlear implantation in children with mutations in connexin (Cx) 26 (GJB2) or Cx30 (GJB6) and children with deafness of unknown etiology. Genetic analysis and speech perception evaluation was performed in the children with and without Cx mutations who had undergone cochlear implantation. Speech perception performance w...

Following a recent report by Moore (Auditory learning: implications for speech perception. Proceedings of ISCA Workshop on Plasticity in Speech Perception [PSP2005], London, UK, 2005), showing in a frequency discrimination task that perceptual learning can occur in the absence of perceived stimuli, we further investigated the effects of training wi...

The purpose of this study was to present speech perception achievements of implanted children using commercially available cochlear implant devices: Nucleus, Clarion or Med-El. A retrospective analysis. Speech perception data of 96 hearing-impaired children: 27 with Clarion, 49 with Nucleus and 20 with Med-El were collected. Speech tests included t...

To compare the vocalizations of hearing-impaired infants before and after cochlear implantation with those of a control group of hearing infants and to relate prelexical vocalizations by using the PRoduction Infant Scale Evaluation (PRISE) to early auditory skill attainments, using the Infant-Toddler Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (IT-MAIS)...

Large gains in performance, evolving hours after practice has terminated, were reported in a number of visual and some motor learning tasks, as well as recently in an auditory nonverbal discrimination task. It was proposed that these gains reflect a latent phase of experience-triggered memory consolidation in human skill learning. It is not clear,...

This study evaluated the cognitive profiles of children with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE), uniformly treated with valproic acid with well-controlled seizures. Twenty-four were neuropsychologically evaluated. They comprised: 14 females, 10 males: 12 with generalized tonic-clonic seizures (GTCS), mean age 14y 4mo, SD ly 7mo, range 12y to 16y...

Children with dyslexia have difficulties with phonological processing. It is assumed that deficits in auditory temporal processing underlie the phonological difficulties of dyslectic subjects (i.e. the processing of rapid acoustic changes that occur in speech). In this study we assessed behavioral and electrophysiological evoked brain responses of...

Category boundary (CB) of Hebrew voicing on voice-onset time (VOT) continuum was found to be different from non-speech stimuli on tone-onset time (TOT) continuum. This is in contrast to data in English, thus suggesting that CB for speech stimuli may be determined not only by general auditory sensitivities but by additional factors that may be speec...

The current preliminary report describes the utilization of low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) in a small group of highly performing children using the Nucleus 22 cochlear implant (CI) and in normal-hearing (NH) adults. LORETA current density estimations were performed on an averaged target P3 component that was elicited by non-spee...

The purpose of the present study was to compare the growth function of pre-first word vocalizations of infants with normal hearing (NH) to that of hearing-impaired (HI) infants pre- and post-cochlear implantation. Subjects included 163 infants between 0.5 and 20 months old with normal hearing and known normal development, and, 18 infants with cochl...

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate speech perception performance of postlingually and prelingually deafened adults who were implanted using the supra meatal approach (SMA) and to compare their abilities to those who underwent surgery using the conventional surgical approach known as mastoidectomy posterior tympanotomy approach (MPTA)....

The objective was to extend our knowledge of the effect of birth control pills on voice quality in women based on various acoustic measures. A longitudinal comparative study of 14 healthy young women over a 36- to 45-day period. Voices of seven women who used birth control pills and seven women who did not were recorded repeatedly approximately 20...

To investigate the effect of age at cochlear implantation on the auditory development of children younger than 3 years and to compare these children's auditory development with that of peers with normal hearing. Using a repeated-measures paradigm, auditory skill development was evaluated before and 3, 6, and 12 months after implantation. Data were...

While it is well documented that significant improvements in a frequency discrimination task occur following training of normal-hearing adult subjects, less is known about the symmetry between the ears. The objectives of the present study were (1) to compare the first obtained DLF thresholds between left and right ears, (2) to determine whether sin...

Difference limen for frequency (DLF) is traditionally tested using a frequency increment detection paradigm in which listeners are requested to distinguish between a reference tone and a series of comparison tones of higher frequency. Sporadic findings indicated that an increment paradigm is not necessarily comparable to a decrement paradigm, in wh...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the effect of loss of spectral detail on speech perception is influenced by the gender of the speaker. Spectral smearing was carried out by multiplying the speech signal by a series of low-passed white noise samples, causing tonal components in the signal to be replaced by noise. Smearing bandwidth...

Auditory processing of increasing acoustic and linguistic complexity was assessed in children with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE) by using auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) as well as reaction time and performance accuracy. Twenty-four children with IGE [12 with generalized tonic-clonic seizures (GTCSs), and 12 with absence seizures...

To evaluate the effect of low-dose monophasic oral contraceptives on female vocal quality. Acoustic voice parameters of six women who use oral contraceptives and six women who do not were evaluated repeatedly during the menstrual cycle. Frequency and amplitude variations were measured using a computerized voice analysis program. Repeated-measures a...

The relationship between auditory perception and vocal production has been typically investigated by evaluating the effect of either altered or degraded auditory feedback on speech production in either normal hearing or hearing-impaired individuals. Our goal in the present study was to examine this relationship in individuals with superior auditory...

While there is growing evidence that frequency discrimination improves with practice, there are, however, limited and inclusive reports regarding the generalization of learning to untrained conditions. The goals of the present study were therefore (1) to measure the effect of multi-session training on difference limen frequency (DLF) thresholds and...

Studies in English, Dutch, Danish and French show that of the possible acoustic cues that listeners use for the perception of place of articulation, the transition of the second formant (F2) appears to be a very important cue. Although the Hebrew language shares some similarities with the above languages, one cannot assume that it either has simila...

Very few studies investigated systematically the acoustic cues for the perception of voicing stops in Hebrew. Voicing is characterized by several parameters of which the voice onset time (VOT) was found to be the primary cue for its perception. There are, however, other known acoustic cues to voicing such as transition to the first formant (F1) and...