Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate infants' listening preference for emotional prosodies in spoken words and identify their acoustic correlates. Method: Forty-six 3- to-12-month-old infants (M[subscript age] = 7.6 months) completed a central fixation (or look-to-listen) paradigm in which four emotional prosodies (happy, sad, angry,…

Background: Previous research has found that high-frequency energy of speech signals decreased while wearing face masks. However, no study has examined the specific spectral characteristics of fricative consonants and vowels and the perception of clarity of speech in mask wearing. Aims: To investigate acoustic-phonetic characteristics of fricative…

We describe here a low-cost experiment for introductory physics students where they compare the physical properties of aluminum and steel by means of cantilever oscillations. This, in turn, allows the students to improve their physical intuition about these materials. Further, the students can apply their physics and mathematics knowledge and…

Purpose: Envelope following responses (EFRs) could be useful for objectively evaluating audibility of speech in children who are unable to participate in routine clinical tests. However, relative to adults, the characteristics of EFRs elicited by frequency-specific speech and their utility in predicting audibility in children are unknown. Method:…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to use acoustic and kinematic speech measures to characterize type of motor speech impairment--apraxia of speech (AOS) versus dysarthria--in individuals with four-repeat tauopathy (4RT)-associated syndromes, including nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), primary progressive AOS (PPAOS),…

We propose an experiment in which the sound of a drumroll is recorded and analysed according to a simple mechanical model in which the inelastic restitution coefficient of the collision between the stick and drum surface, as well as the ongoing kinematics of the drumstick, are considered. The agreement shows that this model is well suited for…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate acoustic change over time as biomarkers to differentiate among spastic-flaccid dysarthria associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), spastic dysarthria associated with primary lateral sclerosis (PLS), flaccid dysarthria associated with spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy (SBMA), and to explore how…

Purpose: The human voice changes with the progression of neurological disease and the onset of diseases that affect articulators, often decreasing the effectiveness of communication. These changes can be objectively measured using signal processing techniques that extract acoustic features. When measuring acoustic features, there are often several…

The udu is a traditional Nigerian percussion instrument that can be thought of as a Helmholtz resonator with two apertures. We use a simple two-particle mechanical analogue to study the behaviour of such a resonator and find that the model describes quite well the main features of udu acoustics.

By 12 months of age, infants exhibit behavioral sensitivity to sound symbolism (e.g. sound-shape correspondences) when they hear universally sound symbolic pseudowords (e.g. "bouba," "kiki"). Here, we investigated whether infant's sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences is affected when they hear language-specific sound…

Sound waves are one of the important topics studied in physics. However, students' graph representation is still low, leading to their low concept understanding of physics learning. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the learning process to improve students' graph representation by providing a valid and reliable graph representation test…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the short- and longer-term effects (3-month follow-up) of a 1-month intensive straw phonation (SP) therapy on the voice quality and voice-related quality of life of female speech-language pathology (SLP) students with mild dysphonia. Method: Thirty-two female SLP students (mean age: 18.5 years,…

Purpose: We examined the effect of bite block insertion (BBI) on lingual movements and formant frequencies in corner vowel and diphthong production in a sentence context. Method: Twenty young adults produced the corner vowels (/u/, /[open back unrounded vowel]/, [ae]/, /i/) and the diphthong /[open back unrounded vowel][near-close near-front…

Our world is shaped profoundly by science and technology, which are strongly interrelated. The importance of integrating technology in science teaching is acknowledged by many international science-teaching standards in recent decades. The present study aims at examining how undergraduate students utilize what they have learnt about the physics of…

How do infants learn the sounds of their native language when there are many simultaneous sounds competing for their attention? Adults and children detect when speech sounds change in complex scenes better than when other sounds change. We examined whether infants have similar biases to detect when human speech changes better than nonspeech sounds…