Recent studies in the field of intonational phonology have shown that information-seeking questions can be distinguished from confirmation-seeking questions by prosodic means in a variety of languages (Armstrong, 2010, for Puerto Rican Spanish; Grice & Savino, 1997, for Bari Italian; Kugler, 2003, for Leipzig German; Mata & Santos, 2010, for…

Purpose: Evidence suggests that extensive experience with lexical tones or musical training provides an advantage in perceiving nonnative lexical tones. This investigation concerns whether such an advantage is evident in learning nonnative lexical tones based on the distributional structure of the input. Method: Using an established protocol,…

UPSTART is a federally funded i3 validation project that uses a computer-based program to develop the school readiness skills of preschool children in rural Utah. Researchers used a randomized control trial design to evaluate the impact of the program in advancing children's early literacy skills. Preschoolers in the experimental group were…

Language learners' language experience is predicted to display a significant effect on their accurate perception of foreign language sounds (Flege, 1995). At the superasegmental level, there is still a debate regarding whether tone language speakers are better able to perceive foreign lexical tones than non-tone language speakers (i.e Lee et al.,…

Many types of L2 phonological perception are often difficult to acquire without instruction. These difficulties with perception may also be related to intelligibility in production. Instruction on perception contrasts is more likely to be successful with the use of phonetically variable input made available through computer-assisted pronunciation…

Purpose: The objective of the study was to investigate the influence of noise (energetic) and speech (energetic plus informational) maskers on the head shadow (HS), squelch (SQ), and binaural summation (SU) effect in bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant (CI) users. Method: Speech recognition was measured in the presence of either a competing…

Purpose: This study investigated the development of spatial release from masking in children using closed-set Mandarin disyllabic words and monosyllabic words carrying lexical tones as test stimuli and speech spectrum-weighted noise as a masker. Method: Twenty-six children ages 4-9 years and 12 adults, all with normal hearing, participated in…

The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate a rapid assessment procedure to identify effective instructional strategies to teach auditory-visual conditional discriminations to children diagnosed with autism. We replicated and extended previous rapid skills assessments (Lerman, Vorndran, Addison, & Kuhn, 2004) by evaluating the effects…

The question of a sensitive period in language acquisition has been subject to extensive research and debate for more than half a century. While it has been well established that the ability to learn new languages declines in early years, the extent to which this outcome depends on biological maturation in contrast to previously acquired knowledge…

Students in South East Asia often struggle with English /l/ and /r/. This study therefore set out to examine how Taiwanese pupils' perception of these sounds is influenced by cross-language effects. Most Taiwanese students have Mandarin as L1 and Taiwanese as L2 or vice versa, and English as L3. A same-different discrimination experiment was…

The distinct music genre known as baby music is based on the premise that infants benefit from music "re-orchestrated for their little ears" ("Baby Einstein Takealong Tunes". (2012). Retrieved December 11, 2012, from http://www.babyeinstein.com/en/products/product_explorer/theme/music/62350/Takealong_Tunes.html). We completed a…

Sensitivity to frequency ratios is essential for the perceptual processing of complex sounds and the appreciation of music. This study assessed the effect of ratio simplicity on ratio discrimination for pure tones presented either simultaneously or sequentially. Each stimulus consisted of four 100-ms pure tones, equally spaced in terms of…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

In this column, we have previously presented various examples of how physical relationships can be examined by analyzing acoustic signals using smartphones or tablet PCs. In this example, we will be exploring the acoustic phenomenon of small beats, which is produced by the overlapping of two tones with a low difference in frequency ?f. The…

Whilst enhanced perception has been widely reported in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs), relatively little is known about the developmental trajectory and impact of atypical auditory processing on speech perception in intellectually high-functioning adults with ASD. This paper presents data on perception of complex tones and…