It is well known that adult US-English-speaking learners of French experience difficulties acquiring high /y/-/u/ and mid /oe/-/[openo]/ front vs. back rounded vowel contrasts in French. This study examines the acquisition of these French vowel contrasts at two levels: phonetic categorization and lexical representations. An ABX categorization task…

Digital signal processing (DSP) has been an integral part of most electrical, electronic, and computer engineering curricula. The applications of DSP in multimedia (audio, image, video) storage, transmission, and analysis are also widely taught at both the undergraduate and post-graduate levels, as digital multimedia can be encountered in most…

In the present study, we analyze activities on the topic of sound, which are performed in the science education laboratory lessons in the third-year students of the Department of Early Childhood Education at the University of Ioannina. The analysis of the activities is based on one of the most modern learning theories of CHAT (Cultural Historical…

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

This dissertation investigates the linguistic and social constraints on the occurrence of creaky voice quality (creak) in Beijing Mandarin (BM), as well as the effect of linguistic and prosodic context on creak's social meanings for Mandarin listeners. It is a two-phase study, composed of 1) a production study of the distribution of creak in the…

Sonification--representing data in sound--is a potential method for supporting human operators who have to monitor dynamic processes. Previous research has investigated a limited number of sound dimensions and has not systematically investigated the impact of dimensional interactions on sonification effectiveness. In three experiments the authors…

This article presents the results of an acoustic analysis of vowels and plosives/affricates produced by 45 Mandarin-speaking children with hearing impairment. Vowel production is represented and categorized into three groups by vowel space size calculated with normalized F1 and F2 values of corner vowels. The correlation between speech…

Eyewitnesses instructed to close their eyes during retrieval recall more correct and fewer incorrect visual and auditory details. This study tested whether eye closure causes these effects through a reduction in environmental distraction. Sixty participants watched a staged event before verbally answering questions about it in the presence of…

How do the characteristics of sounds influence the allocation of visual-spatial attention? Natural sounds typically change in frequency. Here we demonstrate that the direction of frequency change guides visual-spatial attention more strongly than the average or ending frequency, and provide evidence suggesting that this cross-modal effect may be…

Research linking loud sounds to hearing loss in youngsters is now widespread, resulting in the issuance of warnings to protect children's hearing. However, studies attesting to the adverse effects of intrusive sounds and noise on children's overall mental and physical health and well-being have not received similar attention. This, despite the…

This paper describes a set of simple experiments with a very low cost using a notebook as a measuring instrument without external hardware. The major purpose is to provide demonstration experiments for schools with very low budgets. (Contains 6 figures.)

Purpose: This study sought to compare dichotic right-ear advantages (REAs) of young adults to older adult data (C. M. Roup, T. L. Wiley, & R. H. Wilson, 2006) after matching for overall levels of recognition performance. Specifically, speech-spectrum noise was introduced in order to reduce dichotic recognition performance of young adults to a…

The current experiments examined how native Parisian French and native Swiss French listeners use vowel duration in perceiving the /[openo]/-/o/ contrast. In both Parisian and Swiss French /o/ is longer than /[openo]/, but the difference is relatively large in Swiss French and quite small in Parisian French. In Experiment 1 we found a parallel…

The large pronunciation variability of words in conversational speech is one of the major causes of low accuracy in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Many pronunciation modeling approaches have been developed to address this problem. Some explicitly manipulate the pronunciation dictionary as well as the set of the units used to define the…

This study proposes an automatic method for the detection of pauses and identification of pause types in conversational speech for the purpose of measuring the effects of Friedreich's Ataxia (FRDA) on speech. Speech samples of [approximately] 3 minutes were recorded from 13 speakers with FRDA and 18 healthy controls. Pauses were measured from the…