The purpose of this study was to investigate whether brain activity related to the presence of stuttering can be identified with rapid functional MRI (fMRI) sequences that involved overt and covert speech processing tasks. The long-term goal is to develop sensitive fMRI approaches with developmentally appropriate tasks to identify deviant speech…

During speech communication, visual information may interact with the auditory system at various processing stages. Most noteworthy, recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) data provided first evidence for early and preattentive phonetic/phonological encoding of the visual data stream--prior to its fusion with auditory phonological features [Hertrich,…

Recent research provides evidence that individuals shift in their perception of variants depending on social characteristics attributed to the speaker. This paper reports on a speech perception experiment designed to test the degree to which the age attributed to a speaker influences the perception of vowels undergoing a chain shift. As a result…

The authors show that a narrowband noise (NBN) is perceived as longer when presented immediately after a wideband noise (WBN), compared to when the WBN is absent. This effect depended on the WBN's frequency spectrum overlapping that of the NBN, and it increased as the duration of the WBN increased up to 300 ms. It decreased when a silent gap was…

Purpose: This article presents the development of the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-V) following a consensus conference on perceptual voice quality measurement sponsored by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Special Interest Division 3, Voice and Voice Disorders. The CAPE-V protocol and recording form were…

Recent evidence suggests that the musical rhythm of a particular culture may parallel the speech rhythm of that culture's language (Patel, A. D., & Daniele, J. R. (2003). "An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music." "Cognition, 87," B35-B45). The present experiments aimed to determine whether listeners actually perceive such rhythmic…

A high variability phonetic training technique was employed to train 26 Mandarin speakers to better perceive ten English vowels. In eight short training sessions, learners identified 200 English vowel tokens, produced in a post bilabial stop context by 20 native speakers. Learners' ability to identify English vowels significantly improved in the…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

Previous research has suggested that training on a musical instrument is associated with improvements in working memory and musical pitch perception ability. Good working memory and musical pitch perception ability, in turn, have been linked to certain aspects of language production. The current study examines whether working memory and/or pitch…

This study investigates how inaccurate phoneme processing affects recognition of partially onset-overlapping pairs like "DAFFOdil-DEFIcit" and of minimal pairs like "flash-flesh" in second-language listening. Two cross-modal priming experiments examined differences between native (L1) and second-language (L2) listeners at two…

Purpose: To determine (a) the effect of fundamental frequency (f0) on speech intelligibility, acceptability, and perceived gender in electrolaryngeal (EL) speakers, and (b) the effect of known gender on speech acceptability in EL speakers. Method: A 2-part study was conducted. In Part 1, 34 healthy adults provided speech recordings using…

This study investigates the relationship between English listening comprehension and English and Chinese phonological awareness (PA), and the cross-linguistic transfer of PA in 48 Grade 2 and 47 Grade 4 Chinese English-immersion students. The results of the study indicate a correlation between English PA and English listening comprehension.…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is an acquired neurogenic disorder characterized by altered speech that sounds foreign-accented. This study presents a British subject perceived to speak with an Italian (or Greek) accent after a brainstem (pontine) stroke. Native English listeners rated the strength of foreign accent and impairment they perceived in…

Previous research indicates that multiple levels of linguistic information play a role in the perception and discrimination of non-native phonemes. This study examines the interaction of phonetic, phonemic and phonological factors in the discrimination of non-native phonotactic contrasts. Listeners of Catalan, English, and Russian are presented…

Schizophrenia has been associated with deficits in functional brain lateralization. According to some authors, the reduction of asymmetry could even promote this psychosis. At the same time, schizophrenia is accompanied by a high prevalence of nicotine dependency compared to any other population. This association is very interesting, because…