Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. For noise-vocoded sentences, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' reporting improved from near 0% to 70% correct over 30 sentences (Experiment 1). Learning was…

Purpose: Speech perception in participants with auditory neuropathy (AN) was systematically studied to answer the following 2 questions: Does noise present a particular problem for people with AN: Can clear speech and cochlear implants alleviate this problem? Method: The researchers evaluated the advantage in intelligibility of clear speech over…

This paper reports an investigation of gender-indicating acoustic properties of the vocalizations of 73 six- and seven-year-old speakers. Tape recorded samples of these children's isolated vowel and sentence productions were presented in four listening sessions. One hundred and sixteen young adult (age 17-24) female listeners made gender judgments…

This article reviews experiments completed over the past decade at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and the State University of New York at Geneseo concerning speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC) and synthesizes the empirical evidence concerning the acoustical and perceptual characteristics of speech in SC.…

Examined the processing of potential auditory and visual cues that differentiate statements from echoic questions. Found that both auditory and visual cues reliably conveyed statement and question intonation, were successfully synthesized, and generalized to other utterances. (Author/VWL)

Comparison of the lexical characteristics of 88 auditory misperceptions showed no difference in word-frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency between the actual and the perceived utterances. Another comparison showed that slip of the ear tokens had denser neighborhoods and higher neighborhood frequency than words in general.…

Effects of variation from stimulus to stimulus in emotional tone of voice on speech perception were examined through a series of perceptual experiments. Stimuli were recorded from human speakers who produced utterances in tones of voice designed to convey affective information. Stimuli varying in talker voice and emotional the where then presented…

This commentary on EC 232 373 and EC 232 374 suggests that a theory that depends on categorizing events as either stuttering or nonstuttering must fail. It evaluates the merit of the voluntary/involuntary distinction in loss of speech production control, defends research on the nature of stuttering, and proposes additional research and theory.…

Extended findings of a study that found that increasing the salience of perceptually important regions of nonsense word and sentence materials aids speech perception in noise by investigating the robustness of these enhancement techniques in improving consonant intelligibility for a range of different speakers and for groups of listeners with…

Musically tone-deaf individuals have psychophysical deficits in detecting pitch changes, yet their discrimination of intonation contours in speech appears to be normal. One hypothesis for this dissociation is that intonation contours use coarse pitch contrasts which exceed the pitch-change detection thresholds of tone-deaf individuals (Peretz &…

Purpose: To examine age-related differences in auditory speech recognition and visual text recognition performance for parallel sets of stimulus materials in the auditory and visual modalities. In addition, the effects of variation in rate of presentation of stimuli in each modality were investigated in each age group. Method: A mixed-model design…

Background: Much remains unknown about grammatical morpheme (GM) acquisition by children with moderate hearing impairment (HI) acquiring spoken English. Aims: To investigate how moderate HI impacts on the use of GMs in speech and to provide an explanation for the pattern of findings. Methods & Procedures: Elicited and spontaneous speech data were…

Describes two experiments which examined the relation between neonatal cry features and obstetric histories. Experiment 1 showed differences in pitch and durational features between the cries of high- and low-complication newborns. Experiment 2 showed differences in the cry ratings of the two groups on dimensions such as aversive, sick, urgent,…

Models of stuttering and delayed auditory feedback propose that, in these conditions, the rhythmic structure of fluent speech prespecifing the intervals between vowels of stressed syllables is lacking and that auditory perception of vowels of stressed syllables is predicted incorrectly. A model regarding onset of stuttering in children is also…

The commentary to EC 232 373 and EC 232 374 discusses whether stuttering is really what the listener perceives, the stutterer senses, or the dictionary states. It concludes that stuttering can probably be defined in appropriate contexts as any or all of these three things. (JDD)