The ability to statistically segment a continuous auditory stream is one of the most important preparations for initiating language learning. Such ability is available to human infants at 8 months of age, as shown by a behavioral measurement. However, behavioral study alone cannot determine how early this ability is available. A recent study using…

What follows is an alternative to the standard tuning fork and quarter-wave tube speed of sound experiment. Rather than adjusting the water level in a glass or plastic tube to vary the length of an air column, a set of resonance tubes of different lengths is used. The experiment still demonstrates the principles of standing waves in air columns…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated the effects of age on the use of fundamental frequency differences([delta]F[subscript 0]) in the perception of competing synthesized vowels in simulations of electroacoustic and cochlear-implant hearing. Method: Twelve younger listeners with normal hearing and 13 older listeners with (near) normal…

Purpose: To investigate the effect of visual cues on listening effort as well as whether predictive variables such as working memory capacity (WMC) and lipreading ability affect the magnitude of listening effort. Method: Twenty participants with normal hearing were tested using a paired-associates recall task in 2 conditions (quiet and noise) and…

This article arises from the authors' belief that there is a need to develop motivating ways for students across Australia to meaningfully encounter Australian indigenous music, the breadth and richness of which is beginning to be conveyed via a diverse range of mainstream media texts. Engaging with theoretical insights from the ethnomusicology of…

How do infants use their knowledge of native language sound patterns when learning words? There is ample evidence of infants' precocious acquisition of native language sound structure during the first year of life, but much less evidence concerning how they apply this knowledge to the task of associating sounds with meanings in word learning. To…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the contribution of acoustic hearing to the perception of suprasegmental features by adults who use a cochlear implant (CI) and a hearing aid (HA) in opposite ears. Method: 23 adults participated in this study. Perception of suprasegmental features--intonation, syllable stress, and word…

Create your own speakers for an MP3 player while exploring the science of sound. Review of science notebooks, students' intriguing cabinet designs, and listening to students talk with a musician about the physics of an instrument show that complex concepts are being absorbed and extended with each new iteration. Science that matters to students…

Perception is a product of the interaction between bottom-up sensory processing and top-down higher order cognitive activity. For example, when the initial phoneme of a word is obliterated and replaced with noise, listeners hear it as intact provided there is semantic context. We modified this phonemic restoration paradigm by masking (not…

In foreign accent syndrome (FAS), changes in articulation and prosody cause listeners to perceive the speaker as "foreign-sounding." Fewer than 100 cases of FAS have been described in the literature; commonly associated with brain damage, only a handful of these have been analyzed with respect to acoustic measures. Acoustic and…

It is well established that a task-irrelevant sound (deviant sound) departing from an otherwise repetitive sequence of sounds (standard sounds) elicits an involuntary capture of attention and orienting response toward the deviant stimulus, resulting in the lengthening of response times in an ongoing task. Some have argued that this type of…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated how acoustic distortion affected younger and older adults' use of context in a lexical decision task. Method: The authors measured lexical decision reaction times (RTs) when intact target words followed acoustically distorted sentence contexts. Contexts were semantically congruent, neutral, or…

Most sociolinguistic studies rely on apparent time, cross-sectional methods to analyze language change. On the basis of apparent time data, sociolinguists have hypothesized that cultural processes of lifespan change create predictable cycles of linguistic behavior in which adolescents lead in the use of vernacular variants and advance sound change…

The purpose of this study was to examine how executive function skills in verbal and nonverbal auditory tasks are related to early reading skills in beginning readers. Kindergarteners (N = 41, aged 5 years) completed verbal (phonemes) and nonverbal (environmental sounds) Continuous Performance tasks yielding measures of executive function (misses,…

Research has shown that lexical tones, a suprasegmental feature, are processed by native speakers as linguistic elements just like other segmental information. Among the four tones of Mandarin Chinese, in particular, Tone 2 and Tone 3 are very similar in their pitch contour shapes and thus can be difficult to distinguish in native and nonnative…