Purpose: The aim of this study was to use acoustic and kinematic speech measures to characterize type of motor speech impairment--apraxia of speech (AOS) versus dysarthria--in individuals with four-repeat tauopathy (4RT)-associated syndromes, including nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), primary progressive AOS (PPAOS),…

Purpose: The human voice changes with the progression of neurological disease and the onset of diseases that affect articulators, often decreasing the effectiveness of communication. These changes can be objectively measured using signal processing techniques that extract acoustic features. When measuring acoustic features, there are often several…

The process of perceiving music involves the transference of environmental physics in the air to anatomical and physiological interpretations of resonance in the body and psychological perceptions in the brain. These processes and musical interpretations are the basis of physical and cognitive science, neurophysiology, psychoacoustics, and…

Purpose: Processing real-world sounds requires acoustic and higher-order semantic information. We tested the theory that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced processing of acoustic features and impaired processing of semantic information. Methods: We used a change deafness task that required detection of speech and…

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…

Word identification accuracy is modulated by many factors including linguistic characteristics of words (frequent vs. infrequent), listening environment (noisy vs. quiet), and listener-related differences (older vs. younger). Nearly, all studies investigating these factors use high-familiarity words and noise signals that are either energetic…

How do infants learn the sounds of their native language when there are many simultaneous sounds competing for their attention? Adults and children detect when speech sounds change in complex scenes better than when other sounds change. We examined whether infants have similar biases to detect when human speech changes better than nonspeech sounds…

This report is a summary of two studies. In the first, we compared examples of Irish fiddle performances with Western classical violin performances. Acoustical analyses showed that both classical examples produced average spectral centroids higher in frequency, higher harmonic to noise ratios, more use of vibrato, more disjunct intervals, and less…

Purpose: An extra moment after a sentence is spoken may be important for listeners with hearing loss to mentally repair misperceptions during listening. The current audiologic test battery cannot distinguish between a listener who repaired a misperception versus a listener who heard the speech accurately with no need for repair. This study aims to…

Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine if and how the subcortical neural representation of pitch cues in listeners with normal hearing is affected by systematic manipulation of vocoder parameters. Method: This study assessed the effects of temporal envelope cutoff frequency (50 and 500 Hz), number of channels (1-32), and carrier…

Background: Studies investigating auditory perception of gender expression vary greatly in the specific terms applied to gender expression in rating scales. Purpose: This study examined the effects of different anchor terms on listeners' auditory perceptions of gender expression in phonated and whispered speech. Additionally, token and speaker…

In this study, we investigated primary school children's perspectives on their hearing and listening in classrooms with different acoustic quality levels. The sample included 213 children. The children completed a self-report questionnaire rating how well they could hear and listen in various situations in classrooms with two different acoustic…

Purpose: Developmental dyslexia is a specific learning disorder that affects 5-17% children, and persists into adulthood. Speech perception in noise (SPIN) ability in dyslexia has been largely examined in previous studies. However, the available literature remains controversial and it is unclear under which conditions the deficits occur. The…

Children with complex communication needs often have multiple disabilities including visual impairments that impact their ability to interact with aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. Just as the field benefited from a consideration of visual cognitive neuroscience in construction of visual displays, an exploration of…

Purpose: Individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit auditory processing issues, including poor speech recognition in background noise and dichotic processing (integration of different stimuli presented to the two ears). Auditory training could mitigate these auditory difficulties. However, few auditory training…