Understanding speech in an accent or dialect different than one's own can be challenging. McLaughlin and Van Engen (2020) were the first to quantify this increase in listening effort using Task Evoked Pupillary Response (TEPR), a common measure of cognitive arousal. They found that monolingual, English speaking adults' pupils dilated more quickly…

Purpose: This study investigated whether perceptual ratings of speech parameters were predictive of transcription intelligibility in quiet and in noise for speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Ten speakers with PD and five healthy controls read 56 sentences. One group of 60 listeners orthographically transcribed the sentences in quiet,…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine how the speech disorder profiles in Down syndrome (DS) relate to reduced intelligibility, atypical overall quality, and impairments in the subsystems of speech production (phonation, articulation, resonance, and prosody). Method: Auditory-perceptual ratings of intelligibility, overall quality, and…

Our motivation was to examine how toddler (2;6) and adult speakers of American English prosodically realize information status categories. The aims were three-fold: (1) to analyze how adults phonologically make information status distinctions; (2) to examine how these same categories are signaled in toddlers' spontaneous speech; and (3) to analyze…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

The present dissertation analyzed speech production and perception in early heritage Spanish-English bilingual children. Specifically, I investigated how perception and production of lexical stress develops in bilingual children. Current models of second language (L2) speech perception do not include heritage bilinguals or suprasegmental aspects…

This study examined the relationship between targeted pronunciation instruction in French as a second language (L2) and listener-based ratings of accent, comprehensibility, and fluency. The ratings by 20 French listeners evaluating the speech of 30 adult L2 French learners enrolled in a 15-week listening and speaking course targeting segments,…

The present study reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of Spanish vowels by three different groups of speakers: 1) native Spanish speakers; 2) native English intermediate learners of Spanish; and 3) native English advanced learners of Spanish. In particular, we examined the production of the five Spanish…

This dissertation investigated the perception and production of dialectally variant prosodic properties in Korean. The current study was focused on the tonal system of North Kyungsang and South Cholla Korean to understand how lexical pitch accent, which is a property of the North Kyungsang variety, is realized by native and non-native speakers of…

A comparison of the contour alignment of nuclear and initial prenuclear accents was carried out for the Irish dialects of Gaoth Dobhair in Ulster (GD-U) and Cois Fharraige in Connaught (CF-C). This was done across conditions where the number of unstressed syllables following the nuclear and preceding the initial prenuclear accents was varied from…

This paper investigates the acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress ("hot dog" vs. "hot dog") in English. This has previously been shown to be acquired quite late, in contrast to recent research showing that infants both perceive and prefer rhythmic patterns in their own language. Subjects (40 children in four groups the averages ages of which…

This textbook has been designed for courses in practical phonetics for beginning students. The point of view is that general phonetics is a primary skill of great importance to language students who want to acquire a fluent and accurate spoken mastery of a language in adulthood, as well as to linguists who need it as a basic tool of their…