Purpose: One of the central questions in speech production research is to what degree certain structures have an inherent difficulty and to what degree repeated encounter and practice make them easier to process. The goal of this article was to determine the extent to which frequency and sonority distance of consonant clusters predict production…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the speech prosody of postlingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users compared with control speakers without hearing or speech impairment. Method: Speech recordings of 74 CI users (37 males and 37 females) and 72 age-balanced control speakers (36 males and 36 females) are considered. All…

Student noise can affect teachers' stress experience and work performance. Two experimental studies were conducted to examine these effects in more detail. Based on Lazarus' transactional stress model and the maximal adaptability theory, we assumed an increase in stress experience due to noise and stimulating effects of noise up to a point of…

Children's development and education take place in educational buildings with highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers, many surrounding distracting sounds, and general background noises. Auditory selective attention, therefore, is a valuable tool to orient oneself, to focus on specific sound sources, and to…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to analyze the association of total leisure noise exposure and hearing threshold shifts over 5 years among adolescents enrolled in the Ohrkan cohort study. Method: The Ohrkan cohort of 2,148 students aged 13-19 years was recruited from 2009 to 2011 and followed up 5 years later. Complete baseline and follow-up…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the susceptibility to energetic and informational masking in patients with single-sided deafness (SSD) with one normal-hearing (NH) ear and a cochlear implant (CI) in the contralateral ear, understand the effect on speech recognition when spatially separating noise and speech maskers, and investigate the…

Purpose: This article describes the developmental trajectories of four communication-related parameters (i.e., intelligibility, articulation rate, fluency, and communicative efficiency) in a cross-sectional study of typically developing children between 3 and 9 years. The four target parameters were related to auditory-perceptual parameters of…

Studies have demonstrated that listeners can retain detailed voice-specific acoustic information about spoken words in memory. A central question is when such information influences lexical processing. According to episodic models of the mental lexicon, voice-specific details influence word recognition immediately during online speech perception.…

School noise is a serious, inevitable problem that teachers experience as stress or strain. Coping styles have a huge impact on teachers' mental health and therefore might influence this daily stress experience. Based on the stress-strain model and the transactional stress model, we examined in an online study how 99 teachers with different coping…

Purpose: Using naturalistic synthesized speech, we determined the relative importance of acoustic cues in voice gender and age perception in cochlear implant (CI) users. Method: We investigated 28 CI users' abilities to utilize fundamental frequency (F0) and timbre in perceiving voice gender (Experiment 1) and vocal age (Experiment 2).…

Second language (L2) learners often speak with a strong accent, which can make them difficult to understand. However, familiarity with an accent enhances intelligibility. We propose that L2 learners are even more familiar with their own accented speech patterns and may thus understand self-produced L2 words better than others' accented…

Sequences of auditory objects such as one-syllable words or brief sounds disrupt serial recall of visually presented targets even when the auditory objects are completely irrelevant for the task at hand. The "token set size effect" is a label for the claim that disruption increases only when moving from a 1-token distractor sequence…

Purpose: This study aims to give an integrative answer on which speech stereotypes exist toward German gay and straight men, whether and how acoustic correlates of actual and perceived sexual orientation are connected, and how this relates to masculinity/femininity. Hence, it tests speech stereotype accuracy in the context of sexual orientation.…

Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents' immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or…

Working memory (WM) enables a rapid access to a limited number of items that are no longer physically present. WM studies usually involve the encoding and retention of multiple items, while probing a single item only. Hence, little is known about how well multiple items can be reported from WM. Here we asked participants to successively report…