Speech and Hearing Science Commons^™

Phonetic Complexity Affects Children’S Mandarin Tone Production Accuracy In Disyllabic Words: A Perceptual Study, Puisan Wong, Winifred Strange

Publications and Research

This is the first study to examine the effect of phonetic contexts on children’s lexical tone production. Mandarin tones in disyllabic words produced by forty-four 2- to 6-year-old children and twelve mothers were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Native Mandarin speaking adults categorized the tones based on the pitch information in the filtered stimuli. All mothers’ tones were categorized with ceiling accuracy. Counter to the findings in most previous studies on children’s tone acquisition and the prevailing assumption in models of speech development that children acquire suprasegmental features much earlier than segmental features, this study found that children as …

Executive Control Mechanisms In Bilingualism: Beyond Speed Of Processing, Klara Marton, Mira Goral, Luca Campanelli, Jungmee Yoon, Loraine K. Obler

Publications and Research

The question of interest in this study was whether bilingual individuals show superior executive control compared to monolingual participants. Findings are mixed, with studies showing advantage, disadvantage, or no difference between bilingual and monolingual speakers. In this study, we used different experimental conditions to examine implicit learning, resistance to interference, monitoring, and switching, independently. In addition, we matched our monolingual and bilingual participants on baseline response time. Bilingual participants demonstrated faster implicit learning, greater resistance to interference, more efficient switching compared to monolingual participants. The groups did not differ in monitoring. In conclusion, depending on task complexity and on the …

Perception And Production Of /V/ And /W/ In Hindi Speakers, Vikas Grover

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the ability of Hindi speakers to identify, discriminate and produce two English phonemes /v/ and /w/ which are difficult for Hindi speakers to distinguish. In Hindi, /v/ and /w/ are used interchangeably. This pattern of use has transferred to Indian English, resulting in English /v/ and /w/ words showing variable pronunciations (e.g., “whale” or “vale” for the word “whale”). Hindi speakers were asked to identify, discriminate and produce tokens of /v/ and /w/. This study also examined whether experience with American English, related to the length of residence (LOR) in the US affects Hindi listeners’ perception and …

Language-Mixing In Discourse In Bilingual Individuals With Non-Fluent Aphasia, Avanthi Paplikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Language-mixing (LM) as defined by Chengappa (2009, p. 417) is an “intra-sentential phenomenon referred to as the mixing of various linguistic units (morphemes, words, modifiers, phrases, etc.), primarily from two participating grammatical systems”. LM is influenced by grammatical, environmental, and social constraints (e.g., Milroy & Wei, 1995; Bhat & Chengappa, 2005). Researchers have suggested that LM in patients with aphasia is a communicative strategy used to achieve successful exchanges between speakers; the effectiveness of this mixing, however, had yet to be demonstrated quantitatively.

In the current study we investigated whether LM is present in bilingual speakers with aphasia, and if …

When Less Can Be More: Dual Task Effects In Stuttering And Fluent Adults, Naomi Nechama Eichorn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study tested the counterintuitive hypothesis that engaging cognitive resources in a secondary task while speaking could benefit aspects of speech production. Effects of dual task conditions on speech fluency, rate, and error patterns were examined in stuttering and fluent speakers based on specific predictions derived from three related theoretical frameworks. Twenty fluent adults and 19 adults with confirmed diagnoses of stuttering participated in the study. All participants completed two baseline tasks: (1) a continuous speaking task in which spontaneous speech was produced in response to given prompts; and (2) a working memory (WM) task involving manipulations of WM …

Neurophysiological Indices Of The Effect Of Cognates On Vowel Perception In Late Spanish-English Bilinguals, Carol A. Tessel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The field of research in bilingualism and second language (L2) acquisition has yielded overwhelming evidence that acquiring a second language later in life will result in less accurate production and perception of consonants and vowels in the second language. These effects, in part, are a result of interference from the already formed phonetic categories shaped by early exposure to the L1 (Iverson, 2007). Phonetic categories from the L2 will, at least initially, be mapped onto phonetic categories from the L1 (Flege, 1995). Shared storage of similar lexical items from L1 and L2 may also take place resulting in differences in …

“What” And “Where” In Auditory Sensory Processing: A High-Density Electrical Mapping Study Of Distinct Neural Processes Underlying Sound Object Recognition And Sound Localization, Victoria M. Leavitt, Sophie Molholm, Manuel Gomez-Ramirez, John J. Foxe

Publications and Research

Functionally distinct dorsal and ventral auditory pathways for sound localization (WHERE) and sound object recognition (WHAT) have been described in non-human primates. A handful of studies have explored differential processing within these streams in humans, with highly inconsistent findings. Stimuli employed have included simple tones, noise bursts, and speech sounds, with simulated left–right spatial manipulations, and in some cases participants were not required to actively discriminate the stimuli. Our contention is that these paradigms were not well suited to dissociating processing within the two streams. Our aim here was to determine how early in processing we …

Discrimination Of Tone Contrasts In Mandarin Disyllables By Naïve American English Listeners, Shari Salzhauer Berkowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examined the perception of Mandarin disyllabic tones by inexperienced American English speakers. Participants heard two naturally-produced Mandarin disyllables, and indicated if the two were the same or different. A small native Mandarin-speaking control group participated as well. All 21 possible Mandarin contrasts where the initial syllable varied but the final syllable stayed the same were tested. Acoustic analysis was performed on the stimuli under study. Mandarin subjects scored at ceiling on all contrasts. American English subjects performed poorly on contrasts where the difference in mean F0 was small, or where the difference in the offset F0 of …

Markers Of Dyslexia In Adult Spanish-Speakers Who Report Severe Difficulty Learning English, Elizabeth Ijalba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The relationship between native-language reading ability and second-language (L2) learning was explored in a cohort of 60 adult Spanish-speakers learning English as a second language. The research questions centered on whether underlying nativelanguage deficits associated with dyslexia would be present in a subset of English Language Learners who reported severe difficulty learning English. Our participants were divided into two education groups (below and above12th grade). These two groups were classified into three groups based on self- and teacher- ratings of ease or difficulty in English learning ability: for the high-education group, Poor English Language Learners (PELL, N=7); Good English Language …

Development Of Lexical Tone Production In Disyllabic Words By 2- To 6-Year-Old Mandarin-Speaking Children, Puisan Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated children's development in the production of Mandarin lexical tones in familiar disyllabic words and tested the hypothesis that disyllabic tone contours with more complex fundamental frequency contours are more difficult for children to produce. Participants were forty-four 2- to 6-year-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and 12 mothers. Their disyllabic tone productions were elicited by picture naming and low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information while retaining the fundamental frequency contours. Three Mandarin-speaking judges listened to the filtered stimuli, and categorized the children's and adult's disyllabic tones. Acoustic analysis was performed on selected accurate child and adult productions and on …

Speech Perception And Lexical Effects In Specific Language Impairment: The Effects Of Vowel Duration And Word Knowledge On Perception Of Final Alveolar Stop Voicing, Frances L.V. Scheffler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The perception of temporal speech cues, lexical knowledge, and their interactions were examined in children (6;0-9;6) with specific language impairment (SLI). An identification task was used to test four 12-step speech continua: word-word (FEET—FEED), nonword-nonword (ZEST—ZEED), word-nonword (CHEAT—CHEED) and nonword-word (REAT—READ). The stimuli were naturally recorded and digitally edited. The vowel steady state, which varied in duration from 110 to 350 milliseconds in 20-millisecond steps, was the acoustic cue to the voicing characteristic of the final consonant in each stimulus. The analyses revealed that both the TLD and SLI groups used vowel duration as a perceptual cue. For the word-word …

The Contribution Of Interaural Intensity Differences To The Horizontal Auditory Localization Of Narrow Bands Of Noise, Matthew H. Bakke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brief bursts of third-octave bands of noise (center frequencies at 0.5, 1.0, 2.0 and 4.0 kHz) and band pass noises with different degrees of low-frequency content (0.5 to 4.0 kHz, 1.0 to 4.0 kHz and 2.0 to 4.0 kHz) were recorded binaurally from 17 different horizontal locations (90 degrees on the left to 90 degrees on the right in 11.25 degree steps) one meter from the ears of an anthropomorphic mannequin (KEMAR) in an anechoic room and a reverberant room. The recorded sounds were processed by attenuating or removing interaural intensity differences and presented to five normally hearing subjects through …

Use Of Verb Inflections In The Oral Expression Of Agrammatic Spanish-Speaking Aphasics, Jose Gregorio Centeno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Studies on agrammatic verb errors have basically addressed the production of verb forms as whole lexical units without looking at their inflectional affixes. There has been limited research assessing the possible role of the variables encapsulated in verbal inflections in verb access and retrieval. The purpose of this investigation was to, first, address the possible factors causing a hierarchy of sparing in Spanish verb inflections, and, second, extend the explanatory factors proposed by earlier cross-linguistic investigations on verb inflectional performance by agrammatic speakers. This investigation studied the production of verb inflections by agrammatic Spanish speakers in a sentence repetition task. …

Automatic And Controlled Information Processing In Alzheimer's Disease, Linda S. Carozza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research investigation explored the cognitive processing operations of 18 healthy elderly (HE) subjects and 12 Alzheimer's Disease (AD) subjects in the mild clinical stage of the disease in their performance on a semantic priming task involving semantic lexical activations of both automatic and controlled processing natures.

Relatively little conclusive evidence has been documented regarding the relative roles of attention and memory processing in the lexical-semantic impairment of Alzheimer's Disease. A lexical decision processing task was implemented to investigate the effects of normal aging and neuropathological damage of Alzheimer's Disease on subjects' semantic priming abilities. The research design was based …

Parsing Routines In Syntactic Processing: The Effect Of Expected Word Order On Sentence Comprehension, Ann Dibella Jablon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two experiments were conducted to test the SVO Expectancy Hypothesis. This hypothesis embodies three claims: (a) the syntactic parsing device has an initial expectation for the SVO (syntactically defined) structure, (b) the parser reads or tracks the syntactic information in the utterance to confirm or adjust its predictions, and (c) the parser has the ability to make on-line revisions based on the syntactic information contained within the utterance.

In the first experiments using tachistoscopic presentation, 75 sentences representing 15 different sentence types were read by subjects. Each type varied in structure and in the clarity of markers, used to indicate …

Parsing Routines In Syntactic Processing: The Effect Of Expected Word Order On Sentence Comprehension, Ann Dibella Jablon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two experiments were conducted to test the SVO Expectancy Hypothesis. This hypothesis embodies three claims: (a) the syntactic parsing device has an initial expectation for the SVO (syntactically defined) structure, (b) the parser reads or tracks the syntactic information in the utterance to confirm or adjust its predictions, and (c) the parser has the ability to make on-line revisions based on the syntactic information contained within the utterance.

In the first experiments using tachistoscopic presentation, 75 sentences representing 15 different sentence types were read by subjects. Each type varied in structure and in the clarity of markers, used to indicate …

A Sentence Test Of Speech Perception: Reliability, Set Equivalence, And Short Term Learning, Arthur Boothroyd, Laurie Hanin, Theresa Hnath

Publications and Research

The general goal of this project is to study the processes and outcomes of speech perception training in postlingually deafened adults fitted with cochlear implants. As part of this work we need to measure speech perception performance, using materials that place different relative emphases on the several components of the speech perception process. One of the materials that we have developed consists of 48 sets of topic-related sentences (see report #RCIl). These sets have been videorecorded by one female talker. One of the audio tracks contains the full acoustical signal. The other contains the output from an electroglottograph and consists …

The Effect Of Cochlear Dysfunction On Central Auditory Speech Test Performance, Barbara Ann Goldstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The major purpose of this study was to explore the effect of cochlear dysfunction on central auditory speech test performance. There has been limited research reported concerning the effects of peripheral hearing loss occurring in the absence of central auditory pathology on tests specifically designed to diagnose central auditory impairment. Similarly, there has been limited research reported concerning the effects of peripheral hearing loss in the presence of central auditory pathology on tests designed specifically for the evaluation and diagnosis of central auditory pathology. Despite the lack of such data, these tests are frequently performed on individuals with cochlear pathology, …

Predicting Consonant Confusions In Noise On The Basis Of Acoustical Analyses, Judy Robin Dubno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

The Velopharyngeal Mechanism: An Electromyographic Study, Fredericka Bell-Berti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Non-Metric Scaling Of Loudness, Alan M. Richards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Determination of loudness scales for 1000 Hz stimuli by conventional ratio scaling methods have yielded loudness functions which grow as approximately the 0.54 power of sound pressure. Thus, two-fold loudness differences are equivalent to approximately 10 dB across the auditory continuum. The unidimensional representation of loudness ss a power function of sound intensity implies that if A is twice as loud as B, which, in turn, is twice as loud C, the A will be four times as loud as C. In order to test this implication across the auditory continuum loudness ratio estimates were obtained from four 7x7 matrices …