Purpose: Seeing the talker's face improves speech understanding in noise, possibly releasing resources for cognitive processing. We investigated whether it improves free recall of spoken two-digit numbers. Method: Twenty younger adults with normal hearing and 24 older adults with hearing loss listened to and subsequently recalled lists of 13…

The music industry is built on a system of expert evaluation focused on sound, but the foundations are challenged by recent research, which suggests that sight trumps sound. This presents a challenge to music educators, who train the next generation of expert performers and listeners. The aim of this study is to investigate students' perceptions…

Tonal languages differ in how they use phonetic correlates, e.g. average pitch height and pitch direction, for tonal contrasts. Thus, native speakers of a tonal language may need to adjust their attention to familiar or unfamiliar phonetic cues when perceiving non-native tones. On the other hand, speakers of a non-tonal language may need to…

Despite calls for engaging assessments targeting young language learners (YLLs) between 8 and 13 years old, what makes assessment tasks engaging and how such task characteristics affect measurement quality have not been well studied empirically. Furthermore, there has been a dearth of validity research about technology-enhanced speaking tests for…

Purpose: Perceptual learning paradigms involving written feedback appear to be a viable clinical tool to reduce the intelligibility burden of dysarthria. The underlying theoretical assumption is that pairing the degraded acoustics with the intended lexical targets facilitates a remapping of existing mental representations in the lexicon. This…

Acoustical engineers use their knowledge of sound to design quiet environments (e.g., classrooms and libraries) as well as to design environments that are supposed to be loud (e.g., concert halls and football stadiums). They also design sound barriers, such as the walls along busy roadways that decrease the traffic noise heard by people in…

Speech perception in dyslexia is characterized by a categorical perception (CP) deficit, demonstrated by weaker discrimination of acoustic differences between phonemic categories in conjunction with better discrimination of acoustic differences within phonemic categories. We performed a meta-analysis of studies that examined the reliability of the…

In order for statistical information to aid in complex developmental processes such as language acquisition, learning from higher-order statistics (e.g. across successive syllables in a speech stream to support segmentation) must be possible while perceptual abilities (e.g. speech categorization) are still developing. The current study examines…

Purpose: This investigation compared voice performance of student teachers across an academic semester in order to examine the effect of increasing demands on their voice. Method: A repeated measures design was applied to the data analysis: all participants were tested three separate times throughout the semester. The equipments used for…

Stephen Vitiello is a world-renowned contemporary sound artist whom the author has known as a colleague for several years. This article presents an interview about the overall body of Vitiello's work to date, and his thoughts on teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University. The interview explores the creative and noncreative tensions between…

Nowadays, the use of data-acquisition systems in undergraduate laboratories is routine. Many computer-assisted experiments became possible with the PASCO scientific data-acquisition system based on the 750 Interface and DataStudio software. A new data-acquisition system developed by PASCO includes the 850 Universal Interface and Capstone software.…

While the science of sound can be taught by explaining the concept of sound waves and vibrations, the authors of this article focused their efforts on creating a more engaging way to teach the science of sound--through engineering design. In this article they share the experience of teaching sound to third graders through an engineering challenge…

Purpose: The model-based quantitative analysis of high-speed videoendoscopy (HSV) data at a low frame rate of 2,000 frames per second was assessed for its clinical adequacy. Stepwise regression was employed to evaluate the HSV parameters using harmonic models and their relationships to the Voice Handicap Index (VHI). Also, the model-based HSV…

Purpose: Evidence from children's spontaneous speech suggests that utterance length and utterance position may help explain why children omit grammatical morphemes in some contexts but not others. This study investigated whether increased utterance length (hence, increased grammatical complexity) adversely affects children's third person singular…

Purpose: In this study, the authors compared coarticulation and lingual kinematics in preadolescents and adults in order to establish whether preadolescents had a greater degree of random variability in tongue posture and whether their patterns of lingual coarticulation differed from those of adults. Method: High-speed ultrasound tongue contour…