Purpose: Age-related declines in auditory temporal processing and cognition make older listeners vulnerable to interference from competing speech. This vulnerability may be increased in older listeners with sensorineural hearing loss due to additional effects of spectral distortion and accelerated cognitive decline. The goal of this study was to…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

This study examined the relationship between four common types of language play and their correlations with the verbal and social abilities of 3- to 5-year-old children. While observation has shown that children this age produce a range of play, research has not yet examined whether play is a measurable skill connected to preschoolers' language…

Word order is a core mechanism for conveying syntactic structure, yet interrogatives usually disrupt canonical word orders. For example, in English, polar interrogatives typically invert the subject and auxiliary verb and insert an utterance-initial "do" if no auxiliary is present. These word order patterns result from differences in the…

It has been well documented how language-specific cues may be used for word segmentation. Here, we investigate what role a language-independent phonological universal, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), may also play. Participants were presented with an unsegmented speech stream with non-English word onsets that juxtaposed adherence to the…

The effect of context on the identification of common environmental sounds (e.g., dogs barking or cars honking) was tested by embedding them in familiar auditory background scenes (street ambience, restaurants). Initial results with subjects trained on both the scenes and the sounds to be identified showed a significant advantage of about five…

Among the many ways in which sounds alternate in the world's languages, changes in the order of sounds (metathesis) are relatively rare. Mutsun, a Southern Costanoan language of California which was documented extensively before the death of its last speaker in 1930, displays three patterns of synchronic consonant-vowel (CV) metathesis. Two of…

Advances in technology, changes in demographics, and the increasingly global nature of the economy indicate that many jobs lost during the recent global recession will not be returning. Regardless of their major field of study, college students would benefit greatly from becoming more entrepreneurial in their thinking, yet opportunities for…

How do infants use their knowledge of native language sound patterns when learning words? There is ample evidence of infants' precocious acquisition of native language sound structure during the first year of life, but much less evidence concerning how they apply this knowledge to the task of associating sounds with meanings in word learning. To…

In their own words, 50 students in two Los Angeles area schools reveal their feelings about litter, graffiti, and the appearance of their schools. The analysis includes a discussion of the research in environmental psychology as it pertains to overcrowding, noise and pollution, design and appearance, and their effects on productivity. Excerpts of…

Literature on auditory distraction has generally focused on the effects of particular kinds of sounds on attention to target stimuli. In support of extensive previous findings that have demonstrated the special role of language as an auditory distractor, we found that a concurrent speech stream impaired recall of a short lecture, especially for…

California has conducted on-site sound surveys of 36 different schools to determine the degree of noise, and thus disturbance, within the learning environment. This report provides the methodology and results of the survey, including descriptive charts and graphs illustrating typical desirable and undesirable sound levels. Results are presented…

Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an "ironic tone of voice". Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in…

The first evaluative study is a survey of user -- student and teacher -- response to the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) schools and to elements of the SCSD building system. Results of the 3,000 person survey are presented both as comparative findings for the 11 SCSD schools involved and as response profiles for each of the schools.…

The attrition of both new and experienced teachers is a great challenge for schools and school administrators throughout the United States, particularly in large urban districts. Because of the importance of this issue, there is a large empirical literature that investigates why teachers quit and how they might be better induced to stay. Here we…