Speech and music emerge from a spectrum of nested motor and perceptual coordination patterns across timescales of brief movements to actions. Intuitively, this nested clustering in movements should be reflected in sound. We examined similarities and differences in multimodal, multiscale coordination of speech and music using two complementary…

A new device for teaching the physics of sound, specifically demonstrating the wavelengths of standing sound waves, is here described. I define a "Lincoln's Tube" as any hollow tube that uses lights (LEDs typically) to demonstrate the presence of sound standing waves. The name is chosen intentionally to recall a Ruben's Tube or a Kundt's…

Purpose: This article describes patterns of speech modifications produced by talkers as a function of the degree of hearing impairment of communication partners during naturalistic conversations in noise. An explanation of observed speech modifications is proposed in terms of a generalization of the concept of effort. This account complements…

This article presents an action research analysis of data collected from lessons conducted in my own class. The action research investigated how the dynamics of noise and silence can be enforced using dramatic approaches. Research in the area of drama integration in teaching and learning often aims to improve learner's knowledge acquisition.…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

Joni Yessenia Sanchez is a (fictional) freshman music education major with the special ability to control sound waves with her mind. We meet her in her second semester as she happens upon the plot of a couple of extra-terrestrial visitors who plan to take over the world, while Joni is also deciding not to major in music education anymore. We…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of timbral instructions on pitch and timbre production. High school (n = 28) and collegiate (n = 28) trumpeters played sustained tones at two octave levels (written C4 and C5) following three types of timbral instructions (dark-timbre, bright-timbre, or neutral instructions). Presentation orders…

Purpose: For bilaterally implanted patients, the automatic gain control (AGC) in both left and right cochlear implant (CI) processors is usually neither linked nor synchronized. At high AGC compression ratios, this lack of coordination between the two processors can distort interaural level differences, the only useful interaural difference cue…

Identifying speech requires that listeners make rapid use of fine-grained acoustic cues--a process that is facilitated by being able to see the talker's face. Face masks present a challenge to this process because they can both alter acoustic information and conceal the talker's mouth. Here, we investigated the degree to which different types of…

The clinical use of ultrasound has dramatically increased, necessitating early ultrasound education and the development of new tools in ultrasound training and assessment. The goal of this study was to devise a novel low-resource examination that tested the anatomical knowledge and technical skill of early undergraduate medical students in a gross…

Science and technology play an important role in modern medicine and experience shows that, although school students and their relatives are likely to have experienced some of the complex procedures available today, they are generally not aware of the science behind them. Demonstrations that link school science to medical procedures can therefore…

It has long been believed across languages that the "Agent-First" strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the susceptibility to energetic and informational masking in patients with single-sided deafness (SSD) with one normal-hearing (NH) ear and a cochlear implant (CI) in the contralateral ear, understand the effect on speech recognition when spatially separating noise and speech maskers, and investigate the…

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant-directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult-directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: "hyperarticulation," which makes the categories more "separable," and…

Purpose: Auditory sensory gating is a neural measure of inhibition and is typically measured with a click or tonal stimulus. This electrophysiological study examined if stimulus characteristics and the use of speech stimuli affected auditory sensory gating indices. Method: Auditory event-related potentials were elicited using natural speech,…