Here we report, for the first time, a relationship between sensitivity to amplitude envelope rise time in infants and their later vocabulary development. Recent research in auditory neuroscience has revealed that amplitude envelope rise time plays a mechanistic role in speech encoding. Accordingly, individual differences in infant discrimination…

Purpose: Given the role of auditory perception in voice production, studies have investigated whether impairments in auditory perception may underlie the noted disruptions in speech in Parkinson's disease (PD). Studies of loudness perception in PD show impairments in the perception of self-generated speech, but not external tones. Studies of pitch…

Purpose: Former studies suggested that music perception can help produce certain accentual features in the first and second language (L2), such as intonational contours. What was missing in many of these studies was the identification of the exact relationship between specific music perception skills and the production of different accentual…

Purpose: This study aimed to identify predictors of response to treatment for residual speech sound disorder (RSSD) affecting English rhotics. Progress was tracked during an initial phase of traditional motor-based treatment and a longer phase of treatment incorporating ultrasound biofeedback. Based on previous literature, we focused on baseline…

A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

The present study examined second language (L2) development in the perceptual identification of a dialectal sound of the target language, through an investigation of the role of individual learner experiences in L2 phonological development. A total of 213 English-speaking learners of Spanish across five levels of study and with varying dialect…

Purpose: Background noise can interfere with our ability to understand speech. Working memory capacity (WMC) has been shown to contribute to the perception of speech in modulated noise maskers. WMC has been assessed with a variety of auditory and visual tests, often pertaining to different components of working memory. This study assessed the…

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non-signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between…

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty…

Previous research has suggested that training on a musical instrument is associated with improvements in working memory and musical pitch perception ability. Good working memory and musical pitch perception ability, in turn, have been linked to certain aspects of language production. The current study examines whether working memory and/or pitch…

This dissertation investigates the effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Phonological neighbors are defined as words that are different in one and only one phoneme by addition, deletion and substitution. Phonological neighborhood density refers to the number of neighbors a certain word has. …

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…

Here we explore relations between auditory perception of amplitude envelope structure, prosodic sensitivity, and phonological awareness in a sample of 56 typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia. We examine whether rise time sensitivity is linked to prosodic sensitivity, and whether prosodic sensitivity is linked to…

This study compared the phonological awareness ability of 11 children (ages 6-8) with persistent phonological impairment to that of 11 phonologically normal children. Phonologically normal children scored higher on three of the four phonological awareness measures, with no differences on word recognition. Speech intelligibility was a significant…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal predictive relationships among variables that may contribute to poor phonological awareness skills in preschool-age children with speech-sound disorders. Method: Forty-seven children with speech-sound disorders were assessed during the spring of their prekindergarten year and again…