Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic-phonemic normalization) were investigated through the…

Listeners can access information about a speaker such as age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background upon hearing their speech. However, it is still not clear if listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual (matched-guise) test is used to measure whether listeners' accentedness…

Purpose: This study presents the results of acoustic and kinematic analyses of word-initial semivowels (/[voiced alveolar approximant], l, w/) produced by second-language (L2) speakers of English whose native language is Korean. In addition, the relationship of acoustic and kinematic measures to the ratings of foreign accent was examined by…

Previous studies have yielded contradictory results on the relationship between perception and production in second language (L2) phonological processing. We re-examine the relationship between the two modalities both within and across processing levels, addressing several issues regarding methodology and statistical analyses. We focus on the…

Purpose: Psychoacoustic data indicate that infants and children are less likely than adults to focus on a spectral region containing an anticipated signal and are more susceptible to remote masking of a signal. These detection tasks suggest that infants and children, unlike adults, do not listen selectively. However, less is known about children's…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to assess speech understanding in quiet and in diffuse noise for adult cochlear implant (CI) recipients utilizing bimodal hearing or bilateral CIs. Our primary hypothesis was that bilateral CI recipients would demonstrate less effect of source azimuth in the bilateral CI condition due to symmetric…

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of lexical characteristics on the intelligibility of speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Intelligibility was compared for listening in a quiet versus a noisy environment. Method: A total of 192 young listeners participated in the study, with 96 listeners listening in quiet and 96 listening in noise…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display differences in multisensory function as quantified by several different measures. This study estimated the stability of variables derived from commonly used measures of multisensory function in school-aged children with ASD. Participants completed: a simultaneity judgment task for audiovisual…

Purpose: The extant literature suggests that individual differences in speech perception can be linked to broad receptive language phenotype. For example, a recent study found that individuals with a smaller receptive vocabulary showed diminished lexically guided perceptual learning compared to individuals with a larger receptive vocabulary. Here,…

Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and Japanese) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Mandarin tones (Tones 1 vs. 2 [T1-T2], Tones 1 vs. 3 [T1-T3], Tones 1 vs. 4 [T1-T4], Tones 2 vs. 3 [T2-T3], Tones 2 vs. 4 [T2-T4], Tones 3 vs. 4 [T3-T4]) on account of their L1. Method:…

This study employed a multisite design to investigate the differential impact of deductive and guided inductive instruction for second language (L2) grammar development in ecologically valid classroom contexts. Students (n = 138) from eight intact third-year L2 Spanish classes in three public high schools in the United States received deductive…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of auditory perceptual phonetic training on the identification and production of English vowels by Cypriot Greek children and adults. Another two groups of Cypriot Greek child and adult speakers served as controls. The trained groups participated in the pretest, training, and posttest phase,…

The practice of second language (L2) speech perception has traditionally relied on equal-interval perceptual scales and novice listeners' (NLs) impressionistic judgments of constructs such as accentedness and comprehensibility (Munro & Derwing, 2011). However, issues have surfaced with respect to how well NLs can use these scales, whether they…

Intonation plays an integral role in comprehending spoken language. Listeners can rapidly integrate intonational information to predictively map a given pitch accent onto the speaker's likely referential intentions. We use mouse tracking to investigate two questions: (a) how listeners draw predictive inferences based on information from…

Purpose: Conversation training therapy (CTT) is the 1st voice therapy approach to eliminate the traditional therapeutic hierarchy and use patient-driven conversation as the sole therapeutic stimulus. The purpose of this investigation was to determine the efficacy of CTT compared to standard-of-care voice therapy approaches for the treatment of…