When children first hear the term "sound wave" perhaps they might associate it with the way a hand waves or perhaps the squiggly line image on a television monitor when sound recordings are being made. Research suggests that children tend to think sound somehow travels as a discrete package, a fast-moving invisible thing, and not something that…

Purpose: The present study investigated the intelligibility of digitized and synthesized speech output in background noise for children 3-5 years old. The purpose of the study was to determine whether there was a difference in the intelligibility (ability to repeat) of 3 types of speech output (digitized, DECTalk synthesized, and MacinTalk…

Background: High-functioning individuals with autism (HFA) or Asperger's syndrome (AS) commonly report difficulties understanding speech in situations where there is background speech or noise. The objective of this study was threefold: (1) to verify the validity of these reports; (2) to quantify the difficulties experienced; and (3) to propose…

The aim of this study was to shed some light on the organization of naive knowledge, and on the process of conceptual change in everyday physics, more specifically regarding the concepts of sound and heat. Eighty-three 8-year-old children were interviewed individually in order to see if they attributed the properties of objects (such as…

The ability of speakers to exaggerate speech sounds ("hyperarticulation") has led to the theory that the targets themselves must be hyperarticulated. Johnson, Flemming, and Wright (1993) found that perceptual "best exemplar" choices for vowels were more extreme than listeners' own productions. Our first experiment, using their…

Articulatory discoordination is often said to be an important feature of the speech production disorder in dysarthria, but little experimental work has been done to identify and specify the coordination difficulties. The present study evaluated the coordination of labial and lingual gestures for /u/ production in persons with Parkinson's disease…

Studies of prosodic control in severe dysarthria (DYS) have focused on differences between impaired and nonimpaired speech in terms of the range and variation of fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration. Whether individuals with severe DYS can adequately signal prosodic contrasts and "which" acoustic cues they use to do so has received…

Several authors have suggested that devices delivering altered auditory feedback (AAF) may be a viable treatment for adults and children who stutter. This paper reviews published, peer reviewed journal papers from the past 10 years that investigate the effect of AAF during different speaking conditions, tasks and situations. A review of that…

A simple instance of coupling behavior to the environment is oscillating the hands in pace with metronome beats. This environmental coupling can be weaker (1 beat per cycle) or stronger (2 beats per cycle). The authors examined whether strength of environmental coupling enhanced the stability of in-phase bimanual coordination. Detuning by…

In this paper, a new automatic contour tracking system, EdgeTrak, for the ultrasound image sequences of human tongue is presented. The images are produced by a head and transducer support system (HATS). The noise and unrelated high-contrast edges in ultrasound images make it very difficult to automatically detect the correct tongue surfaces. In…

Purpose: To determine if listeners with normal hearing and listeners with sensorineural hearing loss give different perceptual weightings to cues for stop consonant place of articulation in noise versus reverberation listening conditions. Method: Nine listeners with normal hearing (23-28 years of age) and 10 listeners with sensorineural hearing…

A musical note produced through the vibration of a single string is psychoacoustically simpler/purer than that produced via multiple-strings vibration. Does the psychoacoustics of instrument sound have any effect on learning outcomes in music instruction? This study investigated the effect of two psychoacoustically distinct instrument sounds on…

The aim of the study was to analyse the speech of the children with cochlear implants, and compare it with the speech of hearing controls. We focused on three categories of Croatian sounds: vowels (F1 and F2 frequencies), fricatives (noise frequencies of /s/ and /[esh]/ ), and affricates (total duration and the pattern of stop-fricative components…

A nonlinear aspect of the acousto-optic interaction that is analogous to multi-photon absorption is discussed. An experiment is described in which the second-order acousto-optically scattered intensity is measured and found to scale with the square of the acoustic intensity. This experiment using a commercially available acousto-optic modulator is…

Educators and administrators are looking for new ways to boost student performance and eliminate barriers to learning. When working to improve the classroom environment, facility managers typically target the physical structure, temperature controls, humidity levels and ventilation. Many heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) consultants…