The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of wearing earplugs on classical musicians' pitch perception across three experimental conditions: no earplugs, foam earplugs, and Etymotic earplugs. Participants were graduate and undergraduate music majors attending a large school of music in the southeastern United States (N = 72).…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

Our motivation was to examine how toddler (2;6) and adult speakers of American English prosodically realize information status categories. The aims were three-fold: (1) to analyze how adults phonologically make information status distinctions; (2) to examine how these same categories are signaled in toddlers' spontaneous speech; and (3) to analyze…

Background: Several studies have revealed that prosody contributes to reading acquisition. However, the relation between awareness of prosodic patterns and different facets of language ability (e.g., vocabulary knowledge) in school-age children remains unclear. This study measured awareness of prosodic patterns using non-speech and speech stimuli.…

Purpose: Previous studies have shown enhanced pitch and impaired time perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether such deviated patterns of auditory processing depending on acoustic dimensions would transfer to the higher level linguistic pitch and time processing. In this study, we compared…

Face masks affect the transmission of speech and obscure facial cues. Here, we examine how this reduction in acoustic and facial information affects a listener's understanding of speech prosody. English sentence pairs that differed in their intonational (statement/question) and emotional (happy/sad) prosody were created. These pairs were recorded…

Purpose: Congenital amusia is an inborn neurogenetic disorder of fine-grained pitch processing. This study attempted to pinpoint the impairment mechanism of speech processing in tonal language speakers with amusia. We designed a series of perception tasks aiming at selectively probing low-level pitch processing and relatively high-level…

Vowel nasalization usually occurs through a two-step process whereby a vowel is nasalized via coarticulation with a nearby nasal segment; when the language later drops the nasal segment, a nasal vowel remains. Spontaneous vowel nasalization is a rare, peculiar form of nasalization that emerges in contexts that lack an historical etymological nasal…

Purpose: Reduced intensity is a hallmark of speech production in Parkinson's disease (PD). Previous work has examined the perception of intensity in PD to explain these speech deficits. This study reports loudness ratings of pure tones by individuals with PD and controls, all with normal thresholds for older adults. Method: Twenty individuals with…

Purpose: Auditory perceptual judgments are commonly used to diagnose dysarthria and assess treatment progress. The purpose of the study was to examine the acoustic underpinnings of perceptual speech abnormalities in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Auditory perceptual judgments were obtained from sentences produced by 13 speakers…

Purpose: A fundamental feature of human speech is variation, including the manner of phonation, as exemplified in the case of whispered speech. In this study, we employed whispered speech to examine an unresolved issue about congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical pitch processing, which also affects speech pitch processing…

Purpose: We recently demonstrated that individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) respond differentially to specific altered auditory feedback parameters during speech production. Participants with PD respond more robustly to pitch and less robustly to formant manipulations compared to control participants. In this study, we investigated whether…

Purpose: Music training has been proposed as a possible tool for auditory training in older adults, as it may improve both auditory and cognitive skills. However, the evidence to support such benefits is mixed. The goal of this study was to determine the differential effects of lifelong musical training and working memory on speech recognition in…

This dissertation documents and analyzes phonetic and phonological features of Gua, an under-documented, understudied and nearly-endangered Guang language, spoken in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The language has two dialects, Anum and Boso. The data for this dissertation is from the Boso dialect spoken in the Boso community. The dissertation…