Background and aims: Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but…

F0 contours convey multiple types of information, including lexical and post-lexical meanings, as well as affective and socio-indexical indicators. This dissertation investigates the interaction between lexical tone and sentence-level intonation in Thai, focusing on how sentence position influences the acoustic realization and perceptual…

Pitch discrimination, or the ability to differentiate stimuli using auditory frequency, may be an important correlate of language acquisition. Research consistently finds that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have differences in auditory discrimination abilities. However, studies linking these abilities to delays or impairments in…

This dissertation examines how listeners' knowledge of interspeaker variability guides their generalization of perceptual learning in multi-talker listening. A series of perceptual learning experiments are conducted to evaluate whether listeners generalize what they have learned about a previous talker's production of sibilants and stop VOT to…

One feature of Spanish that presents some difficulties to second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) is English concerns lexical stress. This study explores one aspect of the obstacle these learners face, weak phonological processing routines concerning stress inherited from their native language. Participants were L1 English L2…

Research has shown that novel words can be learned through the mechanism of statistical or cross-situational word learning (CSWL). So far, CSWL studies using adult populations have focused on the presentation of spoken words. However, words can also be learned through their written form. This study compared auditory and orthographic presentations…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine how aging and modifications of critical acoustic parameters may affect the perception of whispered speech as a degraded signal. Method: Forty Mandarin-speaking adults were included in the study. Part 1 of the study compared the perception of Mandarin lexical tones, vowels, and syllables in older and younger…

Children with autism often show atypical brain lateralization for speech and language processing, however, it is unclear what linguistic component contributes to this phenomenon. Here we measured event-related potential (ERP) responses in 21 school-age autistic children and 25 age-matched neurotypical (NT) peers during listening to word-level…

Our study proposes the use of a free classification task for investigating the dimensions used by listeners in their perception of nonnative sounds and for predicting the perceptual discriminability of nonnative contrasts. In a free classification task, participants freely group auditory stimuli based on their perceived similarity. The results can…

This dissertation examines whether and how psycholinguistic priming, and social knowledge are integrated in the identification of sociolinguistic variants. Using the English variable (ING), the alternation between -ing and -in' (e.g. thinking vs. thinkin') as a testing ground, this dissertation probes whether and how individuals utilize…

Previous research has shown a relationship between robust neural encoding of speech by the auditory brainstem and children's phonological abilities. Two areas of brainstem encoding this work has included are the ABR dimensions of consistency, or how similar responses are to a repeated stimulus, and differentiation, or the degree to which responses…

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on…

Most words spoken to infants are produced in larger units, such as clauses, phrases, and sentences. As such, language learners must recognize words amidst the words that surround them. However, the phonetic forms of words change based on surrounding context. Here, we investigate the effects of a common source of phonetic change--phonological…

This study examined how discriminability and prototypicality of nonnative phones modulate the amplitude of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential. We hypothesized that if a frequently occurring (standard) stimulus is not prototypical to a listener, a weaker predictive memory trace will be formed and a smaller MMN will be…

This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic…