Purpose: "Dynamic pitch," which is defined as the variation in fundamental frequency in speech, is one of the acoustic cues that affect speech recognition in noise. Built on the evidence that a symmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch led to poorer speech recognition, the present study examined the effect of an asymmetrical manipulation…

Purpose: Categorical perception (CP) manifests in various aspects of human cognition. While there is mounting evidence for CP in facial emotions, CP in vocal emotions remains understudied. The current study attempted to test whether individuals with a tonal language background perceive vocal emotions categorically and to examine how factors such…

Music educators typically use a variety of strategies to teach their subject matter, one core practice of which is modeling. Vocal modeling is a type of aural demonstration, with uses ranging from pitch matching and song instruction to vocal tone building and musicianship development. In early studies, researchers primarily studied the effects of…

There is growing theoretical and empirical consensus for a role of awareness of suprasegmental phonology, also known as prosody, or the rhythmic elements of speech, in reading comprehension. Here we explore a potential mechanism by which this relation functions: awareness of how punctuation reflects prosody, for instance appreciating that a period…

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual…