Purpose: This study examined the use of different acoustic cues in auditory perception of consonant and vowel contrasts by profoundly deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) in comparison to age-matched children and young adults with normal hearing. Method: A speech sound categorization task in an XAB format was administered to 15 children ages…

Purpose: To estimate real-environment iPod listening levels for listeners in 4 environments to gain insight into whether average listeners receive dosages exceeding occupational noise exposure guidelines as a result of their listening habits. Method: The earbud outputs of iPods were connected directly into the inputs of a digital recorder to make…

This paper presents the results of an acoustic analysis of English diphthongs produced by three L1 speakers of Hindi and four L1 speakers of Punjabi. Formant trajectories of rising and falling diphthongs (i.e., vowels where there is a clear rising or falling trajectory through the F1/F2 vowel space) were analysed in a corpus of citation-form…

The influence of listener's expertise and sound identification on the categorization of environmental sounds is reported in three studies. In Study 1, the causal uncertainty of 96 sounds was measured by counting the different causes described by 29 participants. In Study 2, 15 experts and 15 nonexperts classified a selection of 60 sounds and…

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of minimal hearing loss (HL) on children's ability to perform simultaneous tasks in quiet and in noise. Method: Ten children with minimal HL and 11 children with normal hearing (NH) participated. Both groups ranged in age from 8 to 12 years. The children categorized common words…

This study was designed to address the result using sound enhancement technology in classrooms as a method of enhancing the auditory experience for students seated in the rear sections of classrooms. Previous research demonstrated the efficacy of using sound distribution systems (SDS) in real time to enhance speech perception (Anderson &…

The two objectives of this single-subject study were to assess how an FM system use impacts parent-child interaction in a noisy listening environment, and how a parent/caregiver training affect the interaction between parent/caregiver and child. Two 5-year-old children with hearing loss and their parent/caregiver participated. Experiment 1 was…

This study documents patterns of change in speech production in a multilingual with aphasia following a cerebrovascular accident (CVA). EC, a right-handed Hebrew-English-French trilingual man, had a left fronto-temporo-parietal CVA, after which he reported that his (native) Hebrew accent became stronger in his (second language) English. Recordings…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population. Method: The BEL sentences were presented…

With the range of conflicting ideas about issues such as climate change and global warming, it has never been more important to let our students outside--beyond the classroom door--to evaluate the validity of such claims by observing nature, collecting data, and providing evidence. The good news is that it has never been easier for students to…

In a recent article Huggins outlines a very simple method of measuring the speed of sound in metal pipes by striking one end with a hammer and recording the transit time as the resultant pulse echoes back and forth. We immediately adapted this for use in an introductory laboratory where we are familiarizing students with the measurement of…

Purpose: To consider interactions of vocal tract change with growth and perceived output patterns across development, the influence of nonuniform vocal tract growth on the ability to reach acoustic-perceptual targets for English vowels was studied. Method: Thirty-seven American English speakers participated in a perceptual categorization…

The voice is a marker of a person's identity which allows individual recognition even if the person is not in sight. Listening to a voice also affords inferences about the speaker's emotional state. Both these types of personal information are encoded in characteristic acoustic feature patterns analyzed within the auditory cortex. In the present…

Purpose: The purpose of this experiment was to assess the ability of an acoustic model composed of both time-based and spectral-based measures to track change following voice disorder treatment and to serve as a possible treatment outcomes measure. Method: A weighted, four-factor acoustic algorithm consisting of shimmer, pitch sigma, the ratio of…

Psychometric intelligence correlates with reaction time in elementary cognitive tasks, as well as with performance in time discrimination and judgment tasks. It has remained unclear, however, to what extent these correlations are due to top-down mechanisms, such as attention, and bottom-up mechanisms, i.e. basic neural properties that influence…