The tendency to hear a tone sequence as 2 or more streams (segregated) builds up, but a sudden change in properties can reset the percept to 1 stream (integrated). This effect has not hitherto been explored using an objective measure of streaming. Stimuli comprised a 2.0-s fixed-frequency inducer followed by a 0.6-s test sequence of alternating…

Purpose: According to the frames then content (f/c) hypothesis (P. F. MacNeilage & B. L. Davis, 1990), the internal structure of syllables with consonant plus vowel structure (CV) during canonical babbling is determined primarily by production system properties related to rhythmic mandibular oscillations ("motor frames"). The purpose of this study…

Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which modulated the assignment of actor and undergoer roles to the arguments),…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between school readiness skills as measured by the Missouri KIDS and academic potential in reading and math as measured by the scores on the CTP4 in grades 2-4 in a private, independent school. This study identified which school readiness skills most accurately predict the need for…

Purpose: This study aimed to compare 2 quantitative acoustic measures of nasality in children with cleft lip and palate (CLP) and healthy controls using formalized perceptual assessment as a guide. Method: Fifty participants (23 children with CLP and 27 age- and gender-matched healthy controls) aged between 4 and 12 years produced a variety of…

Based on my own research education courses for doctoral students, I examine the ways in which music provides powerful and rich models for perception, conceptualisation and engagement for both listeners and performers, to cultivate the processes and products of qualitative research in the social science in general, and in music education in…

In the context of a project developing software for pronunciation practice and feedback for Mandarin-speaking learners of English, a key issue is how to decide which features of pronunciation to focus on in giving feedback. We used naive and experienced native speaker ratings of comprehensibility and nativeness to establish the key features…

Three picture-word interference (PWI) experiments assessed the extent to which embedded subset words are activated during the identification of spoken superset words (e.g., "bone" in "trombone"). Participants named aloud pictures (e.g., "brain") while spoken distractors were presented. In the critical condition,…

Background: Deficient rapid auditory processing (RAP) has been associated with early language impairment and dyslexia. Using an auditory masking paradigm, children with language disabilities perform selectively worse than controls at detecting a tone in a backward masking (BM) condition (tone followed by white noise) compared to a forward masking…

A key objective when fitting hearing aids to children is to maximize the audibility of high frequency speech cues which are critical in the understanding of spoken English. Recent advances in digital signal processing have enabled the development of hearing aids which offer linear frequency transposition as a new way of accessing these important…

Visual speech perception has become a topic of considerable interest to speech researchers. Previous research has demonstrated that perceivers neurally encode and use speech information from the visual modality, and this information has been found to facilitate spoken word recognition in tasks such as lexical decision (Kim, Davis, & Krins,…

Children with primary or "specific" language impairment (PLI) demonstrate subtle deficits in non-linguistic cognitive processing skills that may play a causal or contributing role in PLI. The purpose of this study was to investigate the possibility that short-term treatment of non-linguistic cognitive processing skills improves language abilities…

The inherent confound between the organization of articulation and the acoustic-phonetic structure of the speech signal makes it exceptionally difficult to evaluate the competing claims of motor and acoustic-phonetic accounts of how listeners recognize coarticulated speech. Here we use Granger causation analysis of high spatiotemporal resolution…

Research in the field of speech production pathology is dominated by describing deficits in output. However, perceptual problems might underlie, precede, or interact with production disorders. The present study hypothesizes that the level of the production disorders is linked to level of perception disorders, thus lower-order production problems…

The current study lays the groundwork for a model of Mandarin tones based on both native speakers' and non-native speakers' perception and production. It demonstrates that there is variability in non-native speakers' tone productions and that there are differences in the perceptual boundaries in native speakers and non-native speakers. There…