Purpose: Assessment of strained voice quality is difficult due to the weak reliability of auditory-perceptual evaluation and lack of strong acoustic correlates. This study evaluated the contributions of relative fundamental frequency (RFF) and mid-to-high frequency noise to the perception of strain. Method: Stimuli were created using recordings of…

Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions…

Purpose: The speech motor system uses feedforward and feedback control mechanisms that are both reliant on prediction errors. Here, we developed a state-space model to estimate the error sensitivity of the control systems. We examined (a) whether the model accounts for the error sensitivity of the control systems and (b) whether the two systems…

Purpose: Sarcasm is a specialized speech act in daily vocal communication usually characterized by unique prosodic features, but the role of voice quality in expressing sarcasm has not been explored much. The goal of this study is to explore the voice quality features of Mandarin sarcastic speech in comparison to sincere speech. Method: Fifteen…

Sentence position and word length have been claimed to contribute to the perceptual salience of words. The perceptual salience of words in turn is said to predict L2 developmental sequences. Data for such claims come from sentence repetition tasks that required perceptual re-encoding of input and that did not control for focal accent. We used a…