This dissertation had two purposes: (1) to create and document the development of a new music achievement test entitled the Musical Discrimination and Styles Task (MDAST), and (2) to describe the strength of the evidence supporting the validity and reliability of this new developmentally appropriate music aptitude and achievement instrument. I…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate cortical tracking of speech (CTS) in adults who stutter (AWS) compared to typically fluent adults (TFAs) to test the involvement of the speech-motor network in tracking rhythmic speech information. Method: Participants' electroencephalogram was recorded while they simply listened to sentences…

Following a preliminary study that examined the potential effectiveness of a computer-assisted consecutive interpreting (CACI) mode, this paper presents a further trial of the CACI workflow. The workflow involves respeaking using speech recognition (SR) in phase I and production assisted by the SR text and its machine translation (MT) output in…

Auditory selective attention forms an important foundation of children's learning by enabling the prioritisation and encoding of relevant stimuli. It may also influence reading development, which relies on metalinguistic skills including the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. Reports of attentional impairments and speech…

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…

Since speech is a continuous stream with no systematic boundaries between words, how do pre-verbal infants manage to discover words? A proposed solution is that they might use the transitional probability between adjacent syllables, which drops at word boundaries. Here, we tested the limits of this mechanism by increasing the size of the word-unit…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children with and without speech sound disorders (SSDs), analyzing the data both by group and continuously. Method: Sixty-one Australian English--speaking children aged 48-69 months participated in this…

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: Sleep-based memory consolidation has been shown to facilitate perceptual learning of atypical speech input including nonnative speech sounds, accented speech, and synthetic speech. The current research examined the role of sleep-based memory consolidation on perceptual learning for noise-vocoded speech, including maintenance of learning…

Purpose: This study investigates whether crosslinguistic effects on auditory word recognition are modulated by the quality of the auditory signal (clear and noisy). Method: In an online experiment, a group of Spanish--English bilingual listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task, in their second language, English. Words and pseudowords…

Previous research has hypothesized that human sequential processing may be dependent upon hearing experience (the "auditory scaffolding hypothesis"), predicting that sequential rule learning abilities should be hindered by congenital deafness. To test this hypothesis, we compared deaf signer and hearing individuals' ability to acquire…

Purpose: Vowels and consonants play different roles in language acquisition and speech recognition, yet standard clinical tests do not assess vowel and consonant perception separately. As a result, opportunities for targeted intervention may be lost. This study evaluated closed-set word recognition tests designed to rely predominantly on either…

Purpose: Envelope following responses (EFRs) could be useful for objectively evaluating audibility of speech in children who are unable to participate in routine clinical tests. However, relative to adults, the characteristics of EFRs elicited by frequency-specific speech and their utility in predicting audibility in children are unknown. Method:…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to use acoustic and kinematic speech measures to characterize type of motor speech impairment--apraxia of speech (AOS) versus dysarthria--in individuals with four-repeat tauopathy (4RT)-associated syndromes, including nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), primary progressive AOS (PPAOS),…

Purpose: The human voice changes with the progression of neurological disease and the onset of diseases that affect articulators, often decreasing the effectiveness of communication. These changes can be objectively measured using signal processing techniques that extract acoustic features. When measuring acoustic features, there are often several…