Purpose: The primary aim was to assess whether children have difficulty distinguishing similar-sounding novel words. The secondary aim was to assess what task characteristics might hinder or facilitate perceptual discrimination. Method: Three within-subjects experiments tested ninety-nine 3- to 5-year-old children total. Experiment 1 presented two…

Purpose: Our goal is to understand how the different types of plural marking are understood and processed by children with cochlear implants (CIs): (a) how does salience affect the processing of plural marking, (b) how is this processing affected by the incomplete signal provided by the CIs, and (c) is it linked to individual factors such as…

Production of certain English phonemes relies heavily on effort from the abdominal region, and under-utilization of this region by second language English speakers can create difficulties pronouncing these sounds. In particular, production of long vowel/diphthong sounds requires sustained abdominal contraction to maintain the length of these…

Purpose: Real-time altered feedback has demonstrated a key role for auditory feedback in both online feedback control and in updating feedforward control for future utterances. The aim of this study was to examine adaptation in response to temporal perturbation using real-time perturbation of ongoing speech. Method: Twenty native English speakers…

Purpose: Many children with cerebral palsy (CP) are described as having altered vocal quality. The current study utilizes psychoacoustic measures, namely, low-amplitude (H1*-H2*) and high-amplitude (H1*-A2*) spectral tilt and cepstral peak prominence (CPP), to identify the vocal fold articulation characteristics in this population. Method: Eight…

Because vocabulary knowledge is considered the building block of language learning, any difficulties concerned with vocabulary can harm the overall vocabulary acquisition process. Literature suggests that native Arabic speakers struggle to notice vowels while reading English texts. This can result from the differences between L1 and L2 linguistic…

Although second language (L2) learners often have difficulty with learning the L2 pronunciation, the literature has reported a mix of more successful and less successful learners. Many factors could contribute to individual variation in L2 speech sound learning. This dissertation examines a few factors that are hypothesized to influence L2…

Before formal instruction, preschoolers represent words in print in various degrees of conventionality. Unlicensed letters are letters that have no connection to the word that the child is aiming to write; they are neither licensed by phoneme-grapheme rules nor by orthographical representations in the mental lexicon. In the current paper, we…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to explore the relationships among vocal effort, extrinsic laryngeal muscle activity, and vocal tract length (VTL) within healthy speakers. We hypothesized that increased vocal effort would result in increased suprahyoid muscle activation and decreased VTL, as previously observed in individuals with vocal…

Purpose: This study investigated vowel and sibilant productions in noise to determine whether responses to noise (a) are sensitive to the spectral characteristics of the noise signal and (b) are modulated by the contribution of vowel or sibilant contrasts to word discrimination. Method: Vowel and sibilant productions were elicited during serial…

Yamdena is an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia. Although many language materials are available, the language has received very little scientific attention. In this article, I present the Yamdena corpus, which includes glossed legacy materials and original fieldwork. I also give an up-to-date introduction to Yamdena grammar, sketching its…

Music plays many important roles in language revitalization, from attracting learners and fostering speech communities to supporting language learning. These effects, however, are largely independent from the skills which linguists bring to language revitalization. This study introduces one concrete way in which applied linguistics can directly…

Purpose: Auditory feedback perturbation with voice pitch manipulation has been widely used in previous studies. There are several hardware and software tools for such manipulations, but audio plug-ins developed for music, movies, and radio applications that operate in digital audio workstations may be extremely beneficial and are easy to use,…

A growing body of research finds that neurotypical autistic traits are predictive of speech perception and language comprehension patterns, but considerably less is known about the influence of these traits on speech production. In this brief report, we present an analysis of vowel productions from 74 American English speakers who participated in…

Purpose: This study examines the efficacy of perceptual training for improving typical listeners' identification of vowels produced by individuals with dysarthria. We examined whether training on a subset of vowels can generalize to (a) untrained vowels and (b) other speakers with similar overall intelligibility. Method: Sixty naive listeners…