Despite enormous improvements in AT devices and services in American classrooms, the number of students with special needs, and the complexity of needs that they and their families experience continues to be sky rocketed nationwide. In response to these urgent needs, more advanced and specialized assistive technologies have been developed that…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed…

This dissertation investigates the prosodic and intonational characteristics of Western Cham (three letter code for International Organization for Standardization's ISO 639-3 code: [iso=cja]), an Austronesian language in the Chamic sub-group. I examine acoustic variables of prominence at word and postlexical levels: syllable duration, pitch…

Because people today are accustomed to listening to electronic instruments, school music ensembles need to rise to the challenge of reflecting present-day culture by doing a "contemporary makeover". This is all-important if ensembles are to command student respect and attract new members. With a creative mindset and openness to innovation, one can…

Research has demonstrated that second language (L2) vocabulary learning improves when target words are presented in acoustically varied compared with acoustically consistent formats. The present study investigated the extent to which this benefit of acoustic variability is a consequence of difficult encoding demands (cognitive effort hypothesis)…

Categorical perception (CP) is a mechanism whereby non-identical stimuli that have the same underlying meaning become invariantly represented in the brain. Through behavioral identification and discrimination tasks, CP has been demonstrated to occur broadly across the auditory modality, including in perception of speech (e.g. phonemes) and music…

Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in…

An experiment to verify the Doppler effect of sound waves is described. An ultrasonic source is mounted at the end of a simple pendulum. As the pendulum swings, the rapid change of frequency can be recorded by a stationary receiver using a simple frequency-to-voltage converter. The experimental results are in close agreement with the Doppler…

Accurately aligning to a crosswalk is an important component of safe street crossing for pedestrians who are blind. Six alignment cues were evaluated in a simulated crosswalk environment in which the angle of the crosswalk was not always in line with the slope of the ramp. The effectiveness of each cue is reported and implications are discussed.…

This paper continues the collection of experiments that describe the use of cell phones as experimental tools in physics classroom education. We describe a computer-aided determination of the free-fall acceleration "g" using the acoustical Doppler effect. The Doppler shift is a function of the speed of the source. Since a free-falling objects…

Previous work on children's acquisition of complex sequences points to a tendency for affricates to be acquired before clusters, but there is no clear evidence of a difference in order of acquisition between clusters with /s/ that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), such as /s/ followed by stop in onset position, and other clusters…

Using functional MRI, we investigated whether auditory processing of both speech and meaningful non-linguistic environmental sounds in superior and middle temporal cortex relies on a complex and spatially distributed neural system. We found that evidence for spatially distributed processing of speech and environmental sounds in a substantial…

A period of exposure to trains of simultaneous but spatially offset auditory and visual stimuli can induce a temporary shift in the perception of sound location. This phenomenon, known as the "ventriloquist aftereffect", reflects a realignment of auditory and visual spatial representations such that they approach perceptual alignment despite their…

Auditory processing problems in persons with dyslexia are still subject to debate, and one central issue concerns the specific nature of the deficit. In particular, it is questioned whether the deficit is specific to speech and/or specific to temporal processing. To resolve this issue, a categorical perception identification task was administered…