The ability to identify errors by sight and sound--commonly referred to as "error detection"--is a musical ability needed in a variety of music professions. Instructors of undergraduate aural-skills courses often agree that strong error-detection skills are an essential outcome of these courses; however, error-detection activities are…

During conversation, talkers may adapt their speech in a variety of ways. One form of speech adaptation is clear speech, in which a talker selectively hyperarticulates segments when faced with specific communication challenges. The present speech production experiment investigated how talkers adapt a common feature of American English dialects:…

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech…

This dissertation investigated the effects of technological mediation on second language (L2) learning, focusing, as a case study, on gains in listening perception of the subtle but important feature of pitch placement in Japanese. Pitch accent can be difficult to perceive for non-native speakers whose first language (L1) does not rely on pitch or…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…