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: "Dynamic pitch," which is defined as the variation in fundamental frequency in speech, is one of the acoustic cues that affect speech recognition in noise. Built on the evidence that a symmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch led to poorer speech recognition, the present study examined the effect of an asymmetrical manipulation…

Purpose: The effect of onset asynchrony on dichotic vowel segregation and identification in normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners was examined. We hypothesized that fusion would decrease and identification performance would improve with increasing onset asynchrony. Additionally, we hypothesized that HI listeners would gain more…

Using a semi-spontaneous speech corpus, we present evidence from computational modelling of tonal productions from Mandarin-speaking children (4- to 11-years old) and adults, showing that children exceed the adult-level tonal distinction at the age of 7 to 8 years using F0 cues, but do not reach the high adult-level distinction using spectral cues…

Speech is a complex, redundant and variable signal happening in a noisy and ever changing world. How do listeners navigate these complex auditory scenes and continuously and effortlessly understand most of the speakers around them? Studies show that listeners can quickly adapt to new situations, accents and even to distorted speech. Although prior…

The use of face coverings can make communication more difficult by removing access to visual cues as well as affecting the physical transmission of speech sounds. This study aimed to assess the independent and combined contributions of visual and auditory cues to impaired communication when using face coverings. In an online task, 150 participants…

Purpose: Prosody perception is an essential component of speech communication and social interaction through which both linguistic and emotional information are conveyed. Considering the importance of the auditory system in processing prosody-related acoustic features, the aim of this review article is to review the effects of hearing impairment…

Autistic children (AC) show less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task, which correlates with their reduced mouth-looking time. The present study examined whether AC's less audiovisual speech integration in the McGurk task could be increased by increasing their mouth-looking time. We recruited 4- to 8-year-old AC and nonautistic…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to describe changes in speech intelligibility and interrater and intrarater reliability of naive listeners' ratings of words produced by young children diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) over a period of motor-based intervention (dynamic temporal and tactile cueing [DTTC]). Method: A total of 120…

Purpose: Maturation of the ability to recognize target speech in the presence of a two-talker speech masker extends into early adolescence. This study evaluated whether children benefit from differences in fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) contour depth between the target and masker speech, a cue that has been shown to improve recognition in…

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…

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…

Difficulty listening in noisy environments is a common complaint of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the mechanisms underlying such auditory processing challenges are unknown. This preliminary study investigated auditory attention deployment in adults with ASD. Participants were instructed to maintain or switch attention…

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…