Purpose: Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) exhibit differences in displacement and velocity of the articulators as compared with older adults. The purpose of the current study was to examine effects of 3 loudness cues on articulatory movement patterns in individuals with PD. Method: Nine individuals diagnosed with idiopathic PD and 9 age-…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine similarities and differences in nasalance scores observed with different computerized nasalance systems in the context of vowel-loaded sentences. Methodology: Subjects were 46 Caucasian adults with no perceived hyper-or hyponasality. Nasalance scores were obtained using the Nasometer 6200 (Kay…

Native language experience plays a critical role in shaping speech categorization, but the exact mechanisms by which it does so are not well understood. Investigating category learning of nonspeech sounds with which listeners have no prior experience allows their experience to be systematically controlled in a way that is impossible to achieve by…

Purpose: To investigate regional dialect variation in the vowel systems of typically developing 8- to 12-year-old children. Method: Thirteen vowels in isolated "h_d" words were produced by 94 children and 93 adults (males and females). All participants spoke American English and were born and raised in 1 of 3 distinct dialect regions in…

Purpose: Some variability in children's early productions of grammatical morphemes reflects phonological factors. For example, production of 3rd person singular "-s" is increased in utterance-final versus utterance-medial position and in simple versus cluster codas (e.g., "sees" vs. "hits"). Understanding the factors that govern such variability…

Purpose: To determine whether older blind participants recognize time-compressed speech better than older sighted participants. Method: Three groups of adults with normal hearing participated (n = 10/group): (a) older sighted, (b) older blind, and (c) younger sighted listeners. Low-predictability sentences that were uncompressed (0% time…

Fluent speech does not contain obvious breaks to word boundaries, yet there are a number of cues that listeners can use to help them segment the speech stream. Most of these cues have been investigated in isolation from one another. In previous work, Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997) suggested that listeners use a Possible Word…

Second language (L2) learners of tone languages do not perceive and produce the different tones of the target language with equal ease. The most common explanation for these asymmetries is that acoustically salient tones are the easiest to learn. An alternative explanation is that tones are easiest to learn when they are highly frequent in the…

Smart Glasses such as Google Glass are mobile computers combining classical Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) with several sensors. Therefore, contact-free, sensor-based experiments can be linked with relating, near-eye presented multiple representations. We will present a first approach on how Smart Glasses can be used as an experimental tool for…

Humans make use of more than just the audio signal to perceive speech. Behavioral and neurological research has shown that a person's knowledge of how speech is produced influences what is perceived. With methods for collecting articulatory data becoming more ubiquitous, methods for extracting useful information are needed to make this data…

This paper proposes a novel educational support system for technical experiments involving the production of practical electronic circuits for sound processing. To support circuit design and production, each student uses a computer during the experiments, and can learn circuit design, virtual circuit making, and real circuit making. In the…

This study used fMRI to measure brain activity during adult processing of cries of infants with autistic disorder (AD) compared to cries of typically developing (TD) infants. Using whole brain analysis, we found that cries of infants with AD compared to those of TD infants elicited enhanced activity in brain regions associated with verbal and…

In order to explore the influence of context on the phonetic design of talk-in-interaction, we investigated the pitch characteristics of short turns (insertions) that are produced by one speaker between turns from another speaker. We investigated the hypothesis that the speaker of the insertion designs her turn as a pitch match to the prior turn…

Children's early productions are highly variable. Findings from children's early productions of grammatical morphemes indicate that some of the variability is systematically related to segmental and phonological factors. Here, we extend these findings by assessing 2-year-olds' production of non-morphemic codas using both listener decisions and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to determine the relationship between relative fundamental frequency (RFF) and listener perception of vocal effort in individuals with varying degrees of vocal hyperfunction. Method: Thirty women diagnosed with voice disorders commonly associated with vocal hyperfunction and 10 healthy women provided…