This dissertation examines the associations between pragmatic meaning categories in English and specific realizations of prosodic prominence. It has been well-established that in Mainstream American English (MAE), prominence is often used to convey contrast. A more limited set of studies suggests that prosodic prominence may also be capable of…

Purpose: Armed with the theory of embodied cognition proposing tight interactions between perception, motor, and cognition, this study aimed to test the hypothesis that speech rate-altered Mandarin lexical tone perception in quiet and noisy environments could be affected by the bodily dynamic cross-modal information. Method: Fifty-three adult…

In speech perception tasks with ambiguous bottom-up information, lexical processes have been shown to influence listener responses, such as in phoneme categorization tasks (Ganong, 1980). Proponents of interactive theories of speech perception and spoken word recognition assert this influence is a top-down feedback mechanism that can affect…

There is no one-to-one mapping between speech acoustics and individual speech sounds; instead, the acoustic cues produced for individual speech sounds show wide variability both within and across talkers. Nonetheless, listeners perceive the speech of familiar and novel talkers with ease. It is theorized that listeners achieve this feat by…

The perception and encoding of voice cues in consonants have been well studied, whereas there has been relatively little research on aspiration. The current study examined the encoding and perception of aspiration and voicing in Hindi, American English, and Tamil listeners when relevant cues were and were not degraded by noise. This study is novel…

Auditory speech appears to be linked to visual articulatory gestures and orthography through different mechanisms. Yet, both types of visual information have a strong influence on speech processing. The present study directly compared their contributions to speech processing using a novel word learning paradigm. Native speakers of French, who were…

Background: Articulatory excursion and vocal intensity are reduced in many children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP), contributing to the children's intelligibility deficits and negatively affecting their social participation. However, the effects of speech-treatment strategies for improving intelligibility in this population are…

Recent studies suggest that infants' audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants' emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the contribution of a contralateral hearing aid to the perception of consonants, in terms of voicing, manner, and place-of-articulation cues in reverberation and noise by adult cochlear implantees aided by bimodal fittings. Method: Eight postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) listeners…

Purpose: Five experiments probed auditory-visual (AV) understanding of sentences by users of cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Sentence material was presented in auditory (A), visual (V), and AV test conditions to listeners with normal hearing and CI users. Results: (a) Most CI users report that most of the time, they have access to both A and V…

Combining information from the visual and auditory senses can greatly enhance intelligibility of natural speech. Integration of audiovisual speech signals is robust even when temporal offsets are present between the component signals. In the present study, we characterized the temporal integration window for speech and nonspeech stimuli with…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to investigate how listener training and the presence of intermediate acoustic cues influence transcription variability for conflicting cue speech stimuli. Method: Twenty listeners with training in transcribing disordered speech, and 26 untrained listeners, were asked to make forced-choice labeling…

This study investigates the role of perception and sensory motor learning on speech production in L2. Compared to natural language learning, acoustic input in formal adult instruction is deprived of multiple sensory motor cues and lacks the imitation component. Consequently, it is possible that inaccurate pronunciation results from training.…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate (a) the distortion in production of word-initial friction duration in fricative /[esh]/, and (b) the perceptual discrimination between typical (normal) and atypical (prolonged or lengthened) friction duration. In the first experiment 80 school aged children pronounced word /[esh]uma/, 40 of them…

This study is the first attempt at detecting formal and positional characteristics of single-word simple discourse markers in a spontaneous speech sample of Hungarian. In the first part of the research, theoretical claims made in the relevant literature were tested. The data did not confirm or only partially confirmed the claims that Hungarian…