Understanding speech in adverse conditions is affected by experience--a familiar voice is substantially more intelligible than an unfamiliar voice when competing speech is present, even if the content of the speech (the words) are controlled. This familiar-voice benefit is observed consistently, but its underpinnings are unclear: Do familiar…

Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…

Background: Acquired progressive dysarthria is traditionally assessed, rated, and researched using measures of speech perception and intelligibility. The focus is commonly on the individual with dysarthria and how speech deviates from a normative range. A complementary approach is to consider the features and consequences of dysarthric speech as…