The purpose of the present study was to investigate (a) the distortion in production of word-initial friction duration in fricative /[esh]/, and (b) the perceptual discrimination between typical (normal) and atypical (prolonged or lengthened) friction duration. In the first experiment 80 school aged children pronounced word /[esh]uma/, 40 of them…

We report two sets of experiments showing that the large individual variability in language learning success in adults can be attributed to neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, cognitive, and perceptual factors. In the first set of experiments, native English-speaking adults learned to incorporate lexically meaningfully pitch patterns in words. We…

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This paper addresses effects of age and sex on certain acoustic properties of speech, given conflicting findings on such effects reported in prior research. The speech of 27 younger adults (15 women, 12 men; mean age 25.5 years) and 59 older adults (32 women, 27 men; mean age 75.2 years) was evaluated for identification of differences for sex and…

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often have difficulty recognizing emotion in others. This is likely due to difficulties in interpreting non-verbal cues of affect. Although deficits in interpreting facial cues of affect are being widely explored, interpretation of vocal cues of affect has received much less attention. Accurate…

It is well documented that aging adversely affects the ability to perceive time-varying acoustic cues. Here we review how physiological measures are being used to explore the effects of aging (and concomitant hearing loss) on the neural representation of temporal cues. Also addressed are the implications of current research findings on the…

This study investigated the acoustical and perceptual characteristics of vowels in speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Twelve normal hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking a set of sentences containing monosyllabic words designed for measurement of vowel…