This study compared the relationship between acoustic parameters and listeners' perceptions of intonation contours produced by 12 children (ages 7-14) either with severe-to-profound hearing impairments (HI) or normal-hearing (NH). The HI children's productions were generally similar to the NH children in that they used fundamental frequency,…

Results from a new analysis of synchronous acoustic and fleshpoint-kinematic data, recorded from 53 normal young-adult speakers of American English, are reported. The kinematic data represent speech-related actions of the tongue blade and dorsum, both lips, and the mandible, during the test words, "special" and "problem," and were drawn from an…

Describes a method to teach acoustics to students with minimal mathematical backgrounds. Discusses the uses of charts in teaching topics of sound intensity level and the decibel scale. Avoids the difficulties of working with logarithm functions. (JRH)

Studies palatization gestures in the production of /t/ and /d/ in standard Belgium French through the use of electropalatography. The articulatory results are compared with an acoustic study of the affricated realization of these consonants when followed by /i/, /y/, /j/, and /h/ in Quebec French. (Author/VWL)

Provides acoustic evidence that in the last 50 years New Zealand English (NZE) has undergone a substantial vowel shift. Two sets of data are studied: the Otago corpus, recorded in 1995, and the Mobile Unit Corpus, recorded in 1948. (Author/VWL)

Explains that quality refers to those attributes of sound and silence that give music its expressive character. Explores quality in four areas of music (dynamics, articulation, texture, and tone color) by tracing the research behind each of these areas. Provides different ideas for teaching quality in secondary general music classes. (CMK)

Studies evaluating temporal auditory processing among individuals with reading and other language deficits have yielded inconsistent findings due to methodological problems (Studdert-Kennedy & Mody, 1995) and sample differences. In the current study, seven auditory masking thresholds were measured in fifty-two 7- to 10-year-old children (26…

The development of speech from infancy to adulthood results from the interaction of neurocognitive factors, by which phonological representations and motor control abilities are gradually acquired, and physical factors, involving the complex changes in the morphology of the articulatory system. In this article, an articulatory-to-acoustic model,…

We present the first experimental evidence of a phenomenon in speech communication we call "analog acoustic expression." Speech is generally thought of as conveying information in two distinct ways: discrete linguistic-symbolic units such as words and sentences represent linguistic meaning, and continuous prosodic forms convey information about…

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f-s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual…

The present study compared patterns of anticipatory coarticulation for utterances produced in habitual, loud, and slow conditions by 17 individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS), 12 individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD), and 15 healthy controls. Coarticulation was inferred from vowel F2 frequencies and consonant first-moment coefficients.…

One of the difficulties faced by cochlear implant (CI) recipients is perception of low-intensity speech cues. A. E. Vandali (2001) has developed the transient emphasis spectral maxima (TESM) strategy to amplify short-duration, low-level sounds. The aim of the present study was to determine whether speech scores would be significantly higher with…

The career and promotion of Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio as a case study of how Hollywood's shift to sound film affected Latino and Latina actors is examined. It reveals the way in which the starring opportunities for Latinos dwindled when accent and language increasingly marked them as nonwhite in the 1930s in the talkie films.

Prosodic abnormality is common in the dysarthria associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI), and adjustments of speaking rate and emphatic stress are often used as steps in treating the speech disorder in patients with TBI-induced dysarthria. However, studies to date do not present a clear and detailed picture of how speaking rate and emphatic…

In a cross-modal matching task, participants were asked to match visual and auditory displays of speech based on the identity of the speaker. The present investigation used this task with acoustically transformed speech to examine the properties of sound that can convey cross-modal information. Word recognition performance was also measured under…