This dissertation investigated how four factors -- the degree of L2 experience, L1 sound structure, age difference in L1 language development and age of L2 exposure -- affect the perceptual cue weighting of duration and spectral differences for English tense-lax vowel contrasts. Four major hypotheses were tested: desensitization hypothesis (DH)…

Purpose: ?he lexical stress pattern (trochaic vs. iambic) may affect various aspects of word learning and word production in children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study aimed to investigate lexical stress effects in word learning by Greek-speaking children with CIs. Method: A word learning paradigm, consisting of a word production and a word…

Purpose: Assessment of strained voice quality is difficult due to the weak reliability of auditory-perceptual evaluation and lack of strong acoustic correlates. This study evaluated the contributions of relative fundamental frequency (RFF) and mid-to-high frequency noise to the perception of strain. Method: Stimuli were created using recordings of…

The present study examined the relationship between multisensory integration and the temporal binding window (TBW) for multisensory processing in adults with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The ASD group was less likely than the typically developing group to perceive an illusory flash induced by multisensory integration during a sound-induced…

Purpose: Semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) exercises with tubes or straws have been widely used for a variety of voice disorders. Yet, the effects of longer periods of SOVT exercises (lasting for weeks) on the aging voice are not well understood. This study investigated the effects of a 6-week straw phonation in water (SPW) exercise program.…

This study tested whether individual sensitivity to an auditory perceptual cue called amplitude rise time (ART) facilitates novel word learning. Forty adult native speakers of Polish performed a perceptual task testing their sensitivity to ART, learned associations between nonwords and pictures of common objects, and were subsequently tested on…

Having historically received less attention than other linguistic structures (Derwing & Munro, 2005), second language (L2) pronunciation instruction represents an emergent area of research in the field (Thomson & Derwing, 2015). While several methods have been shown to be effective for improving L2 segmental production, including explicit…

Diversified emotional responses are generally referred as the evidence of showing categorical perception of major and minor modes. Yet it is uncertain whether the categorical performance is independent to the emotion tagging. This study therefore adopted a direct measure with the proper controlled stimuli to reexamine the categorial nature of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate how the distinctive establishment of 2nd language (L2) vowel categories (e.g., how distinctively an L2 vowel is established from nearby L2 vowels and from the native language counterpart in the 1st formant [F1] × 2nd formant [F2] vowel space) affected L2 vowel perception. Method: Identification…

Purpose: This study examined the effect of depressive symptoms on production and perception of conversational and clear speech (CS) sentences. Method: Five talkers each with high-depressive (HD) and low-depressive (LD) symptoms read sentences in conversational and clear speaking style. Acoustic measures of speaking rate, mean fundamental frequency…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether speech perception would reflect small latency changes in subcortical speech representation. Method: Twelve native Japanese listeners participated in the experiment. Those listeners participated in speech identification task and auditory brainstem response (ABR) measurement using…

Standardized, large-scale assessment of educational outcomes has become a global phenomenon over the past three decades (Smith, 2016). A key challenge facing assessment designers is that standard formats may be inaccessible or may create barriers to student performance. Schwanke, Smith, and Edyburn's (Schwanke, T. D., 2001) A3 model describes how…

Some listeners exhibit higher sensitivity to subphonemic acoustic differences (i.e., higher speech gradiency). Here, we asked whether higher gradiency in a listener's first language (L1) facilitates foreign language learning and explored the possible sources of individual differences in L1 gradiency. To address these questions, we tested 164…

Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions…

Objective: The purpose of this study was to describe normative aspects of wideband acoustic immittance (WAI) measures obtained from healthy White neonates. Method: In this cross-sectional study, wideband absorbance (WBA), admittance magnitude, and admittance phase were measured under ambient pressure condition in 326 ears from 203 neonates (M age…