From MP3 players to cell phones to computer games, we're surrounded by a constant stream of ones and zeros. Do we really need to know how this technology works? While nobody can understand everything, digital technology is increasingly making our lives a collection of "black boxes" that we can use but have no idea how they work. Pursuing…

To improve more effectively the learners' proficiency to control contrast of the stressed to the unstressed in English teaching, it is necessary to analyze how the acoustical characteristics of learners' speech are related to the perceptual evaluation by teachers. This paper analyzes A) learner characteristics of durations measured in speech units…

Our favorite demonstration for sound waves is to set up a compressional pulse on a horizontally stretched Slinky[TM]. One can easily watch the pulse move back and forth at a speed of the order of one meter per second. Watching this demonstration, it occurred to us that the same thing might happen in a steel pipe if you hit the end of the pipe with…

Over the course of the first year of life, infants develop from being generalized listeners, capable of discriminating both native and non-native speech contrasts, into specialized listeners whose discrimination patterns closely reflect the phonetic system of the native language(s). Recent work by Maye, Werker and Gerken (2002) has proposed a…

Five experiments monitored eye movements in phoneme and lexical identification tasks to examine the effect of within-category subphonetic variation on the perception of stop consonants. Experiment 1 demonstrated gradient effects along voice-onset time (VOT) continua made from natural speech, replicating results with synthetic speech (B. McMurray,…

Building a quality auditorium has never come at a cheap price. In today's economy, a $750,000 minimum price tag just for sound, lighting, stage rigging and seats can be exorbitant. However, schools that have built new auditoriums or upgraded existing ones in the past decade say the investment is worth every penny. This article discusses the…

The second formant (F2) is well-known to be important to intelligibility (e.g. [Delattre, P., Liberman, A., & Cooper, F. (1955). Acoustic loci and transitional cues for consonants. "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 27", 769-774]) and is affected by a variety of dysarthrias [Weismer, G., & Martin, R. (1992). Acoustic and perceptual…

The role of selective attention in infant phonetic perception was examined using a distraction masker paradigm. We compared perception of /bu/ versus /gu/ in 6- to 8-month-olds using a visual fixation procedure. Infants were habituated to multiple natural productions of 1 syllable type and then presented 4 test trials (old-new-old-new). Perception…

Cardiac cycle time has been shown to affect pre-attentive brainstem startle processes, such as the magnitude of acoustically evoked reflexive startle eye blinks. These effects were attributed to baro-afferent feedback mechanisms. However, it remains unclear whether cardiac cycle time plays a role in higher startle-related cognitive processes, as…

The general purpose of the present study was to test the effectiveness of various psycho-acoustic manipulations for the understanding of specific information (typographic attributes such as bold and italic) which was included in texts by individuals with and without blindness. Thirty blind and thirty sighted students participated and were asked to…

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often have difficulty recognizing emotion in others. This is likely due to difficulties in interpreting non-verbal cues of affect. Although deficits in interpreting facial cues of affect are being widely explored, interpretation of vocal cues of affect has received much less attention. Accurate…

The current investigation examined the development of voice onset time (VOT) in Standard-Greek (SG) and Cypriot-Greek (CG)-speaking children at age levels 2;0-2;5, 2;6-2;11, 3;0-3;5, and 3;6-4;0 years. SG presents with a two-way voicing contrast (voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops) whereas CG is a three-way contrast dialect containing…

What is second language fluency? What is a foreign accent? Is it possible for an adult second language learner to speak fluently with a heavy accent or vice versa? What factors contribute to the perception of fluency and a foreign accent? What acoustic attributes correlate with the perception of fluency and a foreign accent? To answer these…

Purpose: This study examined how repeated presentations of words in noise affected understanding of both trained and untrained words in noise (in isolation and in sentences). Method: Eight older listeners with hearing impairment completed a word-based auditory training protocol lasting approximately 12 weeks. Training materials were presented in a…

Purpose: This study characterized the development of speech sound production in prelingually deaf children with a minimum of 8 years of cochlear implant (CI) experience. Method: Twenty-seven pediatric CI recipients' spontaneous speech samples from annual evaluation sessions were phonemically transcribed. Accuracy for these speech samples was…