Purpose: The spectral powers of the modulations of vocal fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) less than 3 Hz (low-frequency power, LFP) and between 3 and 8 Hz (middle-frequency power, MFP) had been established to indicate the audiovocal feedback status and vocal efficiency of a speaker, and a resonant voice may enhance the auditory-vocal…

Fetal hearing experiences shape the linguistic and musical preferences of neonates. From the very first moment after birth, newborns prefer their native language, recognize their mother's voice, and show a greater responsiveness to lullabies presented during pregnancy. Yet, the neural underpinnings of this experience inducing plasticity have…

Purpose: Previous studies have demonstrated that tone identification can be facilitated when auditory tones are integrated with visual information that depicts the pitch contours of the auditory tones (hereafter, visual effect). This study investigates this visual effect in combined visual-auditory integration with high- and low-variability speech…

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of dynamic pitch in target speech on older and younger listeners' speech recognition in temporally modulated noise. First, we examined whether the benefit from dynamic-pitch cues depends on the temporal modulation of noise. Second, we tested whether older listeners can benefit from dynamic-pitch cues for…

Purpose: Musical training is often linked to enhanced auditory discrimination, but the relative roles of pitch and time in music and speech are unclear. Moreover, it is unclear whether pitch and time processing are correlated across individuals and how they may be affected by attention. This study aimed to examine pitch and time processing in…

Purpose: Natural speech comes with variation in pitch, which serves as an important cue for speech recognition. The present study investigated older listeners' dynamic pitch perception with a focus on interindividual variability. In particular, we asked whether some of the older listeners' inability to perceive dynamic pitch stems from the higher…

Tone language experience benefits pitch processing in music and speech for typically developing individuals. No known studies have examined pitch processing in individuals with autism who speak a tone language. This study investigated discrimination and identification of melodic contour and speech intonation in a group of Mandarin-speaking…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of lexical tone contour on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences in quiet and in noise. Method: A text-to-speech synthesis engine was used to synthesize Mandarin sentences with each word carrying the original lexical tone, flat tone, or a tone randomly selected from the 4 Mandarin lexical tones. The…

Purpose: The rhythmic entrainment (coordination) of behavior during human interaction is a powerful phenomenon, considered essential for successful communication, supporting social and emotional connection, and facilitating sense-making and information exchange. Disruption in entrainment likely occurs in conversations involving those with speech…

It is well known that mental state verbs are difficult to acquire, but little is known about the acquisition of mental state language encoded through intonation. Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) has at least three intonation contours available for marking polar questions (PQs): ¡H*L% marks an utterance as a PQ; H+L*L%, in addition to doing the former,…

This study investigated the integration of word- and phrase-level prominences in speech produced by twenty-five school-aged children (6;2 to 7;3) and twenty-five adults. Participants produced disyllabic number words in a straight count condition and in two phrasal conditions, namely, a stress clash and non-clash phrasal context. Duration and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to determine whether children with dyslexia (hereafter referred to as "DYS children") are more affected than children with average reading ability (hereafter referred to as "AR children") by talker and intonation variability when perceiving speech in noise. Method: Thirty-four DYS and 25 AR children were…

Purpose: Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. In this study, the authors investigated the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture that align with each other. The authors hypothesized that (a) in contrastive focus conditions, the…

This study analyses the scaling and alignment of low and high intonational targets in the speech of 27 children--nine English-speaking, nine Catalan-speaking and nine Spanish-speaking--between the ages of two and six years. We compared the intonational patterns of words controlled for number of syllables and stress position in the child speech to…

Prosody can be expressed not only by modification to the timing, stress and intonation of auditory speech but also by modifying visual speech. Studies have shown that the production of visual cues to prosody is highly variable (both within and across speakers), however behavioural studies have shown that perceivers can effectively use such visual…