Efficient neural encoding of sound plays a critical role in speech and language, and when impaired, may have reverberating effects on communication skills. This study investigated disruptions to neural processing of temporal and spectral properties of speech in individuals with ASD and their parents and found evidence of inefficient temporal…

Questionnaire design texts commonly recommend emphasizing important words, including capitalization or underlining, to promote their processing by the respondent. In self-administered surveys, respondents can see the emphasis, but in an interviewer-administered survey, emphasis has to be communicated to respondents through audible signals. We…

Fetal hearing experiences shape the linguistic and musical preferences of neonates. From the very first moment after birth, newborns prefer their native language, recognize their mother's voice, and show a greater responsiveness to lullabies presented during pregnancy. Yet, the neural underpinnings of this experience inducing plasticity have…

Automatic recognition of instrument types from an audio signal is a challenging and a promising research topic. It is challenging as there has been work performed in this domain and because of its applications in the music industry. Different broad categories of instruments like strings, woodwinds, etc., have already been identified. Very few…

Purpose Phonological awareness (PA) requires the complex integration of language, speech, and auditory processing abilities. Enhanced pitch and rhythm discrimination have been shown to improve PA and speech-in-noise (SiN) discrimination. The screening of pitch and rhythm discrimination, if nonlinguistic correlates of these abilities, could…

Purpose: The Pitch Patterns Test (PPT) and the Duration Patterns Test (DPT) are clinical auditory processing tests that evaluate temporal patterning skills based on pitch (PPT) or duration (DPT) aspects of sound. Although temporal patterning tests are categorized under the temporal processing domain, successful performance on the PPT also relies…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of timbral instructions on pitch and timbre production. High school (n = 28) and collegiate (n = 28) trumpeters played sustained tones at two octave levels (written C4 and C5) following three types of timbral instructions (dark-timbre, bright-timbre, or neutral instructions). Presentation orders…

Purpose: Evidence increasingly indicates that people with developmental stuttering have auditory perception deficits. Our previous research has indicated similar but slower performance in categorical perception of the speech sounds under the quiet condition in children who stutter and adults who stutter (AWS) compared with their typically fluent…

While research on sound and education has opened up important pathways, it dominantly approaches sound as meaningful. This paper charts another tendency, exploring sound as educational precisely because it resists our attempts at understanding. The force that guides this trajectory is that of timbre, or the nuance of sounds. I begin with…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine how aging and modifications of critical acoustic parameters may affect the perception of whispered speech as a degraded signal. Method: Forty Mandarin-speaking adults were included in the study. Part 1 of the study compared the perception of Mandarin lexical tones, vowels, and syllables in older and younger…

Previous research on infant-directed speech (IDS) and its role in infants' language development has largely focused on mothers, with fathers being investigated scarcely. Here we examine the acoustics of IDS as compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in Norwegian mothers and fathers to 8-month-old infants, and whether these relate to direct…

Purpose: This study details the intended and unintended consequences of pitch shifting with the commercially available Eventide Eclipse. Method: Ten vocally healthy participants (M = 22.0 years; 6 cisgender females, 4 cisgender males) produced a sustained /?/, creating an input signal. This input signal was processed in near real time by the…

Purpose: In this study, we investigated how the direction and timing of a perturbation in voice pitch auditory feedback during phrasal production modulated the magnitude and latency of the pitch-shift reflex as well as the scaling of acoustic production of anticipatory intonation targets for phrasal prominence and boundary. Method: Brief pitch…

Cross-linguistic studies have reported that prosodic pattern awareness (e.g., lexical stress and lexical tone) is more important to reading acquisition than phonological awareness. However, few longitudinal studies have been conducted to explore the relations between these variables. This study examined preschoolers' pitch discrimination, prosodic…