This study investigates whether native Hmong speakers' first language (L1) lexical tone experience facilitates or interferes with their perception of Mandarin tones and whether training is effective for perceptual learning of second (L2) tones. In Experiment 1, 3 groups of beginning level learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic background…

A fundamental challenge for human cognition is perceiving and acting in a world in which the statistics that characterize available sensory data are non-stationary. This thesis focuses on this problem specifically in the domain of sentence comprehension, where linguistic variability poses computational challenges to the processes underlying…

This article describes the organic chemistry of five compounds that are directly associated with the Christmas season. These substances and related materials are presented within the framework of the five senses: silver fulminate (sound), alpha-pinene (sight), sodium acetate (touch), tryptophan (taste), and gingerol (smell). Connections with the…

Previously published studies on the role of amplitude envelope in lexical tone perception focused on Mandarin only. Amplitude envelope was found to co-vary with fundamental frequency in Mandarin lexical tones, and amplitude envelope alone could cue tone perception in Mandarin which uses primarily tone contour for phonemic tonal contrasts. The…

Purpose: Deficits in auditory perception compromise a range of linguistic processes in persons with Parkinson's disease (PD), including speech perception and sensitivity to affective and linguistic prosody. An unanswered question is whether this deficit exists not only at the level of speech perception, but also at a more pervasive level of…

This study investigated global versus local pitch pattern perception in children with dyslexia aged between 8 and 11 years. Children listened to two consecutive 4-tone pitch sequences while performing a same/different task. On the different trials, sequences either preserved the contour (local condition) or they violated the contour (global…

Many attempts have been made to teach native Japanese listeners to perceptually differentiate English /r-l/ (e.g. "rock-lock"). Though improvement is evident, in no case is final performance native English-like. We focused our training on the third formant onset frequency, shown to be the most reliable indicator of /r-l/ category membership. We…

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech…

Purpose: In this research, the authors aimed to increase the analogy between Text Reception Threshold (TRT; Zekveld, George, Kramer, Goverts, & Houtgast, 2007) and Speech Reception Threshold (SRT; Plomp & Mimpen, 1979) and to examine the TRT's value in estimating cognitive abilities that are important for speech comprehension in noise. Method: The…

This study aimed to compare the perception of short vs. long vowel contrasts in Japanese and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) by four groups of listeners differing in their linguistic backgrounds: native Arabic (NA), native Japanese (NJ), non-native Japanese (NNJ) and Australian English (OZ) speakers. The NNJ and OZ groups shared the first language…

The peripheral manifestations of the inherited neuropathies are increasingly well characterized, but their effects upon cranial nerve function are not well understood. Hearing loss is recognized in a minority of children with this condition, but has not previously been systemically studied. A clear understanding of the prevalence and degree of…

The brain mechanisms of hearing include large regions of the anterior temporal, prefrontal, and inferior parietal cortex, and an extensive network of descending connections between the cortex and sub-cortical components of what is presently known as the auditory system. One important function of these additional ("top-down") mechanisms for hearing…

Method: Complete psychometric functions for phoneme and word recognition scores at 8 signal-to-noise ratios from -15 dB to 20 dB were generated for the first 10, 20, and 25, as well as all 50, three-word presentations of the Tri-Word or Computer Assisted Speech Recognition Assessment (CASRA) Test (Gelfand, 1998) based on the results of 12…

Much of the evidence provided in support of the argument that mathematical knowing is embodied/enacted is based on the analysis of gestures and bodily configurations, and, to a lesser extent, on certain vocal features (e.g., prosody). However, there are dimensions involved in the emergence of mathematical knowing and the production of mathematical…

American listeners' perception of Japanese contrasts of vowel length (e.g., kiro vs. kiiro), consonant length (e.g., kite vs. kitte) and syllable number/length (e.g., kjoo vs. kijoo) was examined. Stimuli consisted of sentence-length utterances produced by a native Japanese talker; five minimal pairs of each contrast type were included. Questions…