Purpose: Acoustic-prosodic entrainment, defined as the tendency for individuals to modify their speech behaviors to more closely align with the behaviors of their conversation partner, plays an important role in successful interaction. From a mechanistic perspective, acoustic-prosodic entrainment is, by its very nature, a rhythmic activity.…

Purpose: Previous studies have investigated the effects of the inability to produce hand gestures on speakers' prosodic features of speech; however, the potential effects of encouraging speakers to gesture have received less attention, especially in naturalistic settings. This study aims at investigating the effects of encouraging the production…

Purpose: To compare vowel acoustics and intelligibility in words produced with and without contrastive stress by speakers with spastic (mixed-spastic) dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (DYS[subscript CP]) and healthy controls (HCs). Method: Fifteen participants (9 men, 6 women; age M = 42 years) with DYS[subscript CP] and 15 HCs (9 men, 6…

Purpose: The question of what type of utterance--a sustained vowel or continuous speech--is best for voice quality analysis has been extensively studied but with equivocal results. This study examines whether previously reported differences derive from the articulatory and prosodic factors occurring in continuous speech versus sustained phonation.…

Purpose: This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of spontaneous speech by talkers aged 9-14 years and their ability to adapt these characteristics to maintain effective communication when intelligibility was artificially degraded for their interlocutor. Method: Recordings were made for 96 children (50 female participants, 46 male…

It is well known that mental state verbs are difficult to acquire, but little is known about the acquisition of mental state language encoded through intonation. Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) has at least three intonation contours available for marking polar questions (PQs): ¡H*L% marks an utterance as a PQ; H+L*L%, in addition to doing the former,…

Purpose: A speech analysis-resynthesis paradigm was used to investigate segmental and suprasegmental acoustic variables explaining intelligibility variation for 2 speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Sentences were read in conversational and clear styles. Acoustic characteristics from clear sentences were extracted and applied to…

Purpose: As children mature, changes in voice spectral characteristics co-vary with changes in speech, language, and behavior. In this study, spectral characteristics were manipulated to alter the perceived ages of talkers' voices while leaving critical acoustic-prosodic correlates intact, to determine whether perceived age differences were…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between prosodic speech cues and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) severity, hypothesizing a mutually interactive relationship between the speech characteristics of the psychologist and the child. The authors objectively quantified acoustic-prosodic cues of the psychologist and of the…

Prosody production atypicalities are a feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), but behavioral measures of performance have failed to provide detail on the properties of these deficits. We used acoustic measures of prosody to compare children with ASDs to age-matched groups with learning disabilities and typically developing peers. Overall,…

Talker variability in speech influences language processing from infancy through adulthood and is inextricably embedded in the very cues that identify speech sounds. Yet little is known about developmental changes in the processing of talker information. On one account, children have not yet learned to separate speech sound variability from…

Linguistic stress and sequential statistical cues to word boundaries interact during speech segmentation in infancy. However, little is known about how the different acoustic components of stress constrain statistical learning. The current studies were designed to investigate whether intensity and duration each function independently as cues to…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the contribution of acoustic hearing to the perception of suprasegmental features by adults who use a cochlear implant (CI) and a hearing aid (HA) in opposite ears. Method: 23 adults participated in this study. Perception of suprasegmental features--intonation, syllable stress, and word…

A common feature of public speech in Catalan is the placement of prominence on lexically unstressed syllables ("emphatic stress"). This paper presents an acoustic study of radio speech data. Instances of emphatic stress were perceptually identified. Within-word comparison between vowels with emphatic stress and vowels with primary lexical stress…

This study investigates the phonetic implementation of stress in American English compounds by measuring the interaction of stress cues with different intonation patterns. Participants in an experiment produced compounds and phrases such as "greenhouse" and "green house" in different prosodic positions and sentence types to elicit the contrast in…