Purpose: One promising early marker for autism and other communicative and language disorders is early infant speech production. Here we used daylong recordings of high- and low-risk infant-mother dyads to examine whether acoustic-prosodic alignment as well as two automated measures of infant vocalization are related to developmental risk status…

This study investigates prosodic modulation in the spontaneous canonical babble of congenitally deaf infants with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants. Research has shown that the acoustic cues to prominence are less modulated in CI babble. However acoustic measurements of individual cues to prominence give incomplete…

It is generally assumed that prosodic cues that provide linguistic information, like discourse status, are driven primarily by the information structure of the conversation. This article investigates whether speakers have the capacity to adjust subtle acoustic-phonetic properties of the prosodic signal when they find themselves in contexts in…

Automated alignment of transcriptions to audio files expedites the process of preparing data for acoustic analysis. Unfortunately, the benefits of auto-alignment have generally been available only to researchers studying majority languages, for which large corpora exist and for which acoustic models have been created by large-scale research…

Rhetorical word stress has been identified as a feature of public, presentational, and didactic speech styles in Spanish through theoretical descriptions, intuitive accounts, and laboratory-based empirical research. Most scholars agree that non-primary stress is acoustically marked by pitch and primary stress is marked by segment lengthening. The…

Increasing evidence suggests that children with developmental dyslexia exhibit a deficit not only at the segmental level of phonological processing but also, by extension, at the suprasegmental level. However, it remains unclear whether such a suprasegmental phonological processing deficit is due to a difficulty in processing acoustic cues of…

We examine the ability of supervised text classification models to identify several discourse properties from teachers' speech with an eye for providing teachers with meaningful automated feedback about the quality of their classroom discourse. We collected audio recordings from 28 teachers from 10 schools in 164 authentic classroom sessions,…

Previous studies have shown that infant-directed speech (IDS) differs from adult-directed speech (ADS) on a variety of dimensions. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether acoustic differences between IDS and ADS in English are modulated by prosodic structure. We compared vowels across the two registers (IDS, ADS) in both stressed…

Though research has shown that rhythmic training is beneficial for phonological speech processing, little empirical work has been carried out to assess whether rhythmic training in the classroom can help to improve pronunciation in a second language. This study tests the potential benefits of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French…

This study explores the use of F0, intensity and duration in the production of two types of prominences in French: primary accent with duration as the main acoustic cue, and secondary accent with F0 and intensity as acoustic cues. These parameters were studied in 13 children using a cochlear implant (CI) and 17 children with a normal hearing (NH),…

One of the first challenges facing the young language learner is the task of segmenting words from a natural language speech stream, without prior knowledge of how these words sound. Studies with younger children find that children find it easier to segment words from fluent speech when the words are presented in infant-directed speech, i.e., the…

Many approaches to early word learning posit that children assume a one-to-one mapping of form and meaning. However, children's early vocabularies contain homophones, words that violate that assumption. Children might learn such words by exploiting prosodic differences between homophone meanings that are associated with lemma frequency (Gahl,…

Purpose: This study investigated how listeners process acoustic cues preserved during sentences interrupted by nonsimultaneous noise that was amplitude modulated by a competing talker. Method: Younger adults with normal hearing and older adults with normal or impaired hearing listened to sentences with consonants or vowels replaced with noise…

Purpose: The authors investigated how different variants of clear speech affect segmental and suprasegmental acoustic measures of speech in speakers with Parkinson's disease and a healthy control group. Method: A total of 14 participants with Parkinson's disease and 14 control participants served as speakers. Each speaker produced 18 different…

Purpose: Research has shown that observing hand gestures mimicking pitch movements or rhythmic patterns can improve the learning of second language (L2) suprasegmental features. However, less is known about the effects of hand gestures on the learning of novel phonemic contrasts. This study examines (a) whether hand gestures mimicking phonetic…