This paper describes an enjoyable, simple, and inexpensive way to perform Young's two-source experiment using sound waves. The wave source is a simple aluminum rod (a "singing rod").

Purpose: Research suggests that children with reading disabilities (RD) have difficulty processing temporal and spectral components of sounds. Comodulation masking release (CMR) measures a listener's ability to use temporal and spectral information in noise to identify a signal. The purpose of this study was to determine whether children with RD…

Purpose: This study examined children's word learning in limited and extended high-frequency bandwidth conditions. These conditions represent typical listening environments for children with hearing loss (HL) and children with normal hearing (NH), respectively. Method: Thirty-six children with NH and 14 children with moderate-to-severe HL served…

Purpose: This study was designed to determine the extent to which high-frequency amplification helped or hindered speech recognition as a function of hearing loss, gain-frequency response, and background noise. Method: Speech recognition was measured monaurally under headphones for nonsense syllables low-pass filtered in one-third-octave steps…

Nineteen PD patients who received deep brain stimulation (DBS), 10 non-surgical (control) PD patients, and 11 non-pathologic age- and gender-matched subjects performed sustained vowel phonations. The following acoustic measures were obtained on the sustained vowel phonations: correlation dimension (D[subscript 2]), percent jitter, percent shimmer,…

Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between acceptable noise levels (ANLs) and the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB; R. M. Cox & G. C. Alexander, 1995). This study further examined the APHAB's ability to predict hearing aid use. Method: ANL and APHAB data were collected for 191 listeners with impaired hearing,…

The aim of the research was to analyse the speech of children with cochlear implants over approximately a 46-month period, and compare it with the speech of hearing controls. It focused on three categories of sounds in Croatian: vowels (F1 and F2 of /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/ and /u/), fricatives /s/ and /[esh]/ (spectral differences expressed in terms of…

This article analysed the acoustic structure of voiced stop ++ vowel sequences in a group of persons who stutter (PWS). This phonetic unit was chosen because successful production is highly dependent on the differential tweaking of right-to-left anticipatory coarticulation as a function of stop place. Thus, essential elements of both speech motor…

Curriculum guidelines, including the emergent Australian curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2009-10), indicate expectations that teachers will support their students' interpretation and creation of multimodal texts. However, English curriculum guidelines are yet to advise on a detailed metalanguage to…

The ability to identify stop consonants from brief onset spectra was compared between a group of Chinese children with phonological dyslexia (the PD group, with a mean age of 10 years 4 months) and a group of chronological age-matched control children. The linguistic context, which included vowels and speakers, and durations of stop onset spectra…

Suprasegmentals have been emphasized in ESL/EFL pedagogy since the advent of communicative language teaching. However, it is still unclear how individual suprasegmental features affect listeners' judgments of non-native speakers' accented speech. The current study began to specify relative weights of individual temporal and prosodic features for…

This study examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.g.,…

Production studies have shown that speakers of languages with larger phoneme inventories expand their acoustic space relative to languages with smaller inventories [Bradlow, A. (1995). A comparative acoustic study of English and Spanish vowels. "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America," 97(3), 1916-1924; Jongman, A., Fourakis, M., & Sereno,…

It has been widely shown that infants and adults are capable of using only prosodic information to discriminate between languages. However, it remains unclear which aspects of prosody, either rhythm or intonation, listeners attend to for language discrimination. Previous researchers have suggested that rhythm, the duration and timing of speech…

This study investigated the effects of first language prosodic transfer on the perception and production of English lexical stress and the relation between stress perception and production by second language learners. To test the effect of Thai tonal distribution rules and stress patterns on native Thai speakers' perception and production of…