We report findings concerning the understanding of prosody in Asperger Syndrome (AS), a topic which has attracted little attention and led to contradictory results. Ability to understand grammatical prosody was tested in three novel experiments. Experiment 1 assessed the interpretation of word stress, Experiment 2 focused on grammatical pauses,…

The perception of non-native speech sounds is heavily influenced by the acoustic cues that are relevant for differentiating members of a listener's native (L1) phonological contrasts. Many studies of both (naive) non-native and (not naive) second language (L2) speech perception implicitly assume continuity in a listener's habits of…

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on attrition in L1 speech (de Leeuw, Mennen & Scobbie, in press; de Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen, 2010; Dmitrieva, Jongman & Sereno, 2010; Mennen, 2004). Adding to this line of inquiry, the present study investigates the speech of a 62-year-old bilingual monozygotic twin who emigrated to an L2-speaking…

The theoretical framework of this study is based on the prevalent debate of whether prosodic processing is influenced by higher level linguistic-specific circuits or reflects lower level encoding of physical properties. Using the dichotic listening technique, the study investigates the hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent by native…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is an acquired neurologic disorder in which an individual suddenly and unintentionally speaks with an accent which is perceived as being different from his/her usual accent. This study presents an acoustic-phonetic description of two Quebec French-speaking cases. The first speaker presents a perceived accent shift to…

This column presents an outline for the secondary general classroom. The project, called a "soundwalk," requires students to use music, sounds, and technology to create immersive, cinematic audio tours of their school and community. The author argues that the soundwalk is a perfect opportunity for students within secondary general music courses to…

Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 10) to test pre-attentive speech discrimination in two language contexts. ERPs were recorded while participants silently read magazines in English or Spanish. Two speech contrast conditions were recorded in each language context. In the "phonemic in English"…

We do not know how vocal learning came to be, but it is such a salient trait in human evolution that many have tried to imagine it. In primates this is difficult because we are the only species known to possess this skill. Songbirds provide a richer and independent set of data. I use comparative data and ask broad questions: How does vocal…

Prosodic features in spontaneous speech help disambiguate implied meaning not explicit in linguistic surface structure, but little research has examined how these signals manifest themselves in real conversations. Spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between familiar speakers in conversational dyads were acoustically analyzed…

Purpose: To investigate the impact on percentage of syllables stuttered of various durations of delayed auditory feedback (DAF), levels of frequency-altered feedback (FAF), and masking auditory feedback (MAF) during conversational speech. Method: Eleven adults who stuttered produced 10-min conversational speech samples during a control condition…

In an fMRI experiment, we tested experienced singers with singing tasks to investigate neural correlates of voluntary and involuntary vocal pitch regulation. We shifted the pitch of auditory feedback (plus or minus 25 or 200 cents), and singers either: (1) ignored the shift and maintained their vocal pitch or (2) changed their vocal pitch to…

Millions of patients are debilitated by hearing loss, mainly caused by degeneration of sensory hair cells in the cochlea. The underlying reasons for hair cell loss are highly diverse, ranging from genetic disposition, drug side effects, traumatic noise exposure, to the effects of aging. Whereas modern hearing aids offer some relief of the symptoms…

Rolf De Heer's 1997 Australian feature film "Dance Me to My Song" was devised with the late Heather Rose, a person with Cerebral Palsy. The film also features a central performance by Heather (as the character of Julia) and is clearly about "her world". The ethic of engagement exemplified by this film resonates with what Gerard Goggin has termed…

A simple method is described to combine a modern function generator and a digital oscilloscope to configure a setup that can directly measure the amplitude frequency response of a system. This is achieved by synchronously triggering both instruments, with the function generator operated in the "Linear-Sweep" frequency mode, while the oscilloscope…

Differences in insect morphology and movement during singing provide a fascinating opportunity for students to investigate insects while learning about the characteristics of sound. In the activities described here, students use a free online computer software program to explore the songs of the major singing insects and experiment with making…