The extent to which exposure to new phonemic contrasts (i.e. contrasts that are present in the L2 but not in the L1) will lead to the creation of a new phonemic category in L2 speakers, as well as the phonological nature of these categories, remains an open question insofar as there is no consensus on whether acquiring a new contrast would result…

Decoding training is an approach to teaching listening skills to help learners develop the ability to recognize individual words from speech. Although it has been historically underemphasized, recent empirical studies have pointed to its potential value in listening education. However, instructors and students generally face certain challenges…

This dissertation investigated how four factors -- the degree of L2 experience, L1 sound structure, age difference in L1 language development and age of L2 exposure -- affect the perceptual cue weighting of duration and spectral differences for English tense-lax vowel contrasts. Four major hypotheses were tested: desensitization hypothesis (DH)…

Purpose: ?he lexical stress pattern (trochaic vs. iambic) may affect various aspects of word learning and word production in children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study aimed to investigate lexical stress effects in word learning by Greek-speaking children with CIs. Method: A word learning paradigm, consisting of a word production and a word…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine the long-term associations of musical training with speech perception in adverse conditions and cognition in a longitudinal cohort study of middle-age to older adults. Method: This study is based on Epidemiology of Hearing Loss Study participants. We asked participants at baseline (1993-1995) about…

Purpose: Perceptual training is a listener-targeted means for improving intelligibility of dysarthric speech. Recent work has shown that training with one talker generalizes to a novel talker of the same sex and that the magnitude of benefit is maximized when the talkers are perceptually similar. The current study expands previous findings by…

Purpose: We examined how consonant perception is affected by a preceding speech carrier simulated in the same or a different room, for different classes of consonants. Carrier room, carrier length, and carrier length/target room uncertainty were manipulated. A phonetic feature analysis tested which phonetic categories are influenced by the…

The auditory scaffolding hypothesis states that early experience with sound underpins the development of domain-general sequence processing abilities, supported by studies observing impaired sequence processing in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. To test this hypothesis, we administered a sequence processing task to 77 DHH children who use…

Stuttering is a developmental speech disorder characterized by interruptions of fluency. A large body of research suggests that stuttering occurs due to a reduced ability to generate timing signals in order to sequence speech sounds. One piece of supporting evidence for this is that when speaking along with an external timing source like a…

Some listeners exhibit higher sensitivity to subphonemic acoustic differences (i.e., higher speech gradiency). Here, we asked whether higher gradiency in a listener's first language (L1) facilitates foreign language learning and explored the possible sources of individual differences in L1 gradiency. To address these questions, we tested 164…

Purpose: Assessment of strained voice quality is difficult due to the weak reliability of auditory-perceptual evaluation and lack of strong acoustic correlates. This study evaluated the contributions of relative fundamental frequency (RFF) and mid-to-high frequency noise to the perception of strain. Method: Stimuli were created using recordings of…

The present study examined the relationship between multisensory integration and the temporal binding window (TBW) for multisensory processing in adults with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The ASD group was less likely than the typically developing group to perceive an illusory flash induced by multisensory integration during a sound-induced…

Purpose: Semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) exercises with tubes or straws have been widely used for a variety of voice disorders. Yet, the effects of longer periods of SOVT exercises (lasting for weeks) on the aging voice are not well understood. This study investigated the effects of a 6-week straw phonation in water (SPW) exercise program.…

This study tested whether individual sensitivity to an auditory perceptual cue called amplitude rise time (ART) facilitates novel word learning. Forty adult native speakers of Polish performed a perceptual task testing their sensitivity to ART, learned associations between nonwords and pictures of common objects, and were subsequently tested on…

Having historically received less attention than other linguistic structures (Derwing & Munro, 2005), second language (L2) pronunciation instruction represents an emergent area of research in the field (Thomson & Derwing, 2015). While several methods have been shown to be effective for improving L2 segmental production, including explicit…