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European Portuguese (EP) is a language with unpredictable stress. Previous behavioral studies have shown that without vowel reduction EP adult speakers displayed a stress deafness effect akin to that observed in speakers of fixedstress languages, suggesting that vowel quality may be the primary cue for stress discrimination in EP. However, an event-related potentials (ERPs) study reported that EP adults were able to discriminate stress contrasts pre-attentively in the absence of vowel quality cues. These results seemed to indicate that EP adult speakers may attend to different cues in the attentive and pre-attentive stress perception. Moreover, both the behavioral and ERPs studies have revealed a processing advantage for iambic stress, which could not be predicted by the rhythmic properties of EP, the language-specific weighting of stress correlates, or the frequency distributions of trochaic and iambic stresses in EP. A recent eye-tracking study has found that EP-learning infants at 5-6 months already exhibited an iambic preference in the absence of vowel reduction, manifested by longer looking time at the iambic stress. The present study used a passive oddball paradigm to examine pre-attentive stress perception without vowel quality cues by 5-to-7-month-old EP-learning infants. Results from twentytwo participants showed that both the trochaic and iambic conditions yielded a positive discrimination response (p-MMR). In addition, the iambic condition elicited a prominent late discriminative negativity (LDN) as well as a P3a component. Our findings present the first evidence for reciprocal discrimination of stress patterns in EP-learning infants, showing that, as in adult speakers, stress processing might also differ at the pre-attentive and attentive stages in infants. Importantly, the stress perception ability in EP-learning infants seems to develop asymmetrically, with an advantage for the iambic stress pattern. The present study highlighted the role of language-specific factors that may affect developing stress perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In speech audiometry, the speech-recognition threshold (SRT) is usually established by adjusting the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) until 50% of the words or sentences are repeated correctly. However, these conditions are rarely encountered in everyday situations. Therefore, for a group of 15 young participants with normal hearing and a group of 12 older participants with hearing impairment, speech-recognition scores were determined at SRT and at four higher SNRs using several stationary and fluctuating maskers. Participants' verbal responses were recorded, and participants were asked to self-report their listening effort on a categorical scale (self-reported listening effort, SR-LE). The responses were analyzed using an Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) and compared to the results of a human examiner. An intraclass correlation coefficient of r =.993 for the agreement between their corresponding speech-recognition scores was observed. As expected, speech-recognition scores increased with increasing SNR and decreased with increasing SR-LE. However, differences between speech-recognition scores for fluctuating and stationary maskers were observed as a function of SNR, but not as a function of SR-LE. The verbal response time (VRT) and the response speech rate (RSR) of the listeners' responses were measured using an ASR. The participants with hearing impairment showed significantly lower RSRs and higher VRTs compared to the participants with normal hearing. These differences may be attributed to differences in age, hearing, or both. With increasing SR-LE, VRT increased and RSR decreased. The results show the possibility of deriving a behavioral measure, VRT, measured directly from participants' verbal responses during speech audiometry, as a proxy for SR-LE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Ten years after Miller and Lowit's (2014) groundbreaking book providing a cross-linguistic perspective on motor speech disorders, we ask where we are regarding dysarthria treatment across languages in two specific populations: adults with Parkinson's disease (PD) and children with cerebral palsy (CP). Method: In this commentary, we consider preliminary evidence for both languageindependent and language-specific approaches to treatment and propose a hybrid approach to speech treatment across languages, centered on the individual with dysarthria who speaks any given language. Conclusions: Treatment research on individuals with dysarthria secondary to PD and CP is advancing, but several areas remain to be explored. Next steps are suggested for addressing the paucity and complexity of cross-linguistic speech treatment research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the effect of Arabic lexical stress predictability in producing English lexical stress by Yemeni EFL undergraduates and native Hadhrami Arabic (HA) speakers. The study involved the participation of 69 Yemeni EFL undergraduates with two varying levels of English proficiency. Additionally, 10 American native speakers were included to evaluate the correct production of English stress patterns by the Yemeni EFL undergraduates. The authors adopt the Metrical Theory and the Stress Typology Model to underpin the grounds of this study. Data from the study were collected through a production experiment using individual recording sessions for each participant reading 84 English real and nonce words. The differences between stressed and unstressed syllables were measured using phonetic cues ratios, vowel duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency (F0), analysed through PRAAT software. The findings suggest that the production of English lexical stress by Yemeni EFL undergraduates is influenced by HA. However, the predictability of the Arabic stress pattern does not always trigger errors in producing English lexical stress by Yemeni EFL undergraduates. Findings indicate that Yemeni EFL undergraduates are more attentive to vowel weight, especially when the ultimate syllable incorporates a tense vowel. It stands in contrast to the conventional approach of syllable structure, which places a more pronounced emphasis on instructing English vowels among Arab ELF learners as a result of Arabic dialectal variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate how information status is encoded paradigmatically and syntagmatically via prosodic prominence in German. In addition, we consider individual variability in the production of prominence. To answer our research questions, we collected controlled yet ecologically valid speech by applying an innovative recording paradigm. Participants were asked to perform an interactive reading task in collaboration with an interlocutor remotely via video calls. Results indicate that information status is encoded paradigmatically via the F0 contour, while syntagmatic effects are subtle and depend on the acoustic parameter used. Individual speakers differ primarily in their strength of encoding and secondarily in the type of parameters employed. While the paradigmatic effects we observe are in line with previous findings, our syntagmatic findings support two contradictory ideas, a balancing effect and a radiating effect. Along with the findings at the individual level, this study thus allows for new insights regarding the redundant and relational nature of prosodic prominence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch processing. Its linguistic consequences have been examined separately for speech intonations and lexical tones. However, in a tonal language such as Chinese, the processing of intonations and lexical tones interacts with each other during online speech perception. Whether and how the musical pitch disorder might affect linguistic pitch processing during online speech perception remains unknown. Method: We investigated this question with intonation (question vs. statement) and lexical tone (rising Tone 2 vs. falling Tone 4) identification tasks using the same set of sentences, comparing behavioral and event-related potential measurements between Mandarin-speaking amusics and matched controls. We specifically focused on the amusics without behavioral lexical tone deficits (the majority, i.e., pure amusics). Results: Results showed that, despite relative to normal performance when tested in word lexical tone test, pure amusics demonstrated inferior recognition than controls during sentence tone and intonation identification. Compared to controls, pure amusics had larger N400 amplitudes in question stimuli during tone task and smaller P600 amplitudes in intonation task. Conclusion: These data indicate that musical pitch disorder affects both tone and intonation processing during sentence processing even for pure amusics, whose lexical tone processing was intact when tested with words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The current study investigated English prosodic focus marking by autistic and typically developing (TD) Cantonese trilingual children, and examined the potential differences in this regard compared to native English-speaking children. Method: Forty-eight participants were recruited with 16 speakers for each of the three groups (Cantonese-speaking autistic [CASD], Cantonese-speaking TD [CTD], and English-speaking TD [ETD] children), and prompt questions were designed to elicit desired focus type (i.e., broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). Mean duration, mean fundamental frequency (F0), F0 range, mean intensity, and F0 curves were used as the acoustic correlates for linear mixed-effects model fitting and functional data analyses in relation to groups and focus conditions (i.e., broad, narrow, and contrastive pre-, on-, and post-focus). Results: The CTD group had post-focus compression (PFC) patterns via reducing mean duration, narrowing F0 range, and lowering mean F0, F0 curve, and mean intensity for words under both narrow and contrastive post-focus conditions, while the CASD group only had shortened mean duration and lowered F0 curves. However, neither the CTD group nor CASD group showed much of onfocus expansion (OFE) patterns. The ETD group marked OFE by increasing mean duration, mean F0, mean intensity, and higher F0 curve for words under on-focus conditions. Conclusions: The CTD group utilized more acoustic cues than the CASD group when it comes to PFC. The ETD group differed from the CASD and CTD groups in the use of OFE. Furthermore, both the CASD and CTD groups showed positive first language transfer in the use of duration and intensity and, potentially, successful acquisition in the use of F0 for prosodic focus marking. Meanwhile, the differences in the use of OFE between the Cantonese-speaking and English-speaking groups, not PFC, might indicate that Cantonese-speaking children acquire PFC prior to OFE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian banjo frogs are a distinctive group of medium to large, terrestrial, and burrowing limnodynastid frogs known for their conspicuous, single-note advertisement calls which are often likened to the pluck of a banjo string. Preliminary analyses of mitochondrial DNA sequences had previously indicated that the present taxonomy of the group, based primarily on morphology and advertisement calls, may not best reflect the true evolutionary relationships among taxa. In this study, we use comprehensive geographic sampling and integrative analyses of mitochondrial DNA sequences, nuclear single-nucleotide polymorphisms, adult morphology, and advertisement call data to re-evaluate the systematics and taxonomy of the Northern Banjo Frog (Limnodynastes terraereginae) and allied taxa. Our study reveals the presence of three evolutionarily distinct, morphologically divergent, and narrowly allopatric lineages that replace each other in a north-south series from the tip of Cape York Peninsula to the Sydney Basin in the south. Our findings demonstrate that our understanding of the systematics and taxonomy of Australian frogs remains incomplete, even for large and apparently "well-known" species that live in densely populated areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Purpose: Lexical stress and phoneme processes converge during phonological encoding, but the nature of the convergence has been debated. Stress patterns and phonemes may be integrated automatically and rigidly, resulting in a unified representation. Alternatively, stress and phoneme may be processed interactively based on sublexical contexts. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the extent to which the lexical stress and phoneme processing interact in a novel nonword learning paradigm. Method: Twenty-seven adults with typical speech skills were trained to produce nonwords with specific phonemes, syllables, and stress patterns (Set 1) to an accuracy criterion. Then, participants repeated nonwords that varied from Set 1 in syllable position (Set 2), phoneme sequence (Set 3), included new phonemes (Set 4), or had new phonemes and stress patterns (Set 5). Nonword productions were perceptually analyzed, and phoneme and stress errors were counted. Results: Participants’ produced Set 1 nonwords with few phonemic or stress errors after training; a similar number of both types of errors were produced when comparing Sets 2 and 3. Greater phoneme and stress errors were produced on nonwords from Sets 4 and 5 compared to Sets 1–3. The highest number of phonemic errors occurred in Set 4 nonwords. There was no difference in the number of stress errors produced on nonwords in Sets 4 and 5. Conclusion: The results of this study suggested that lexical stress and phoneme processing co-occurred and interacted during nonword productions. Trained stress patterns were learned during training; however, no evidence for a unified representation was observed. Negative interference was observed in nonwords with new phonemes and trained stress patterns, suggesting online phoneme processing may have dominated and interfered with the retrieval of stored metrical frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the perception of Mandarin lexical tones and stops to examine the degree of overlap between music and language. Eighteen musicians and 21 nonmusicians participated in a typical categorical perception task. Results showed that musicians and nonmusicians had comparable degree of categorical perception of tones and stops. Compared to nonmusicians, musicians exhibited enhanced sensitivities to within-category lexical tone stimuli. However, this improved ability was not observed in the perception of stops. These findings imply that musical experience strengthens the acuity of subtle low-level acoustic variations between within-category lexical tone stimuli without interfering with the high-level phonological representations of lexical tones, and this facilitatory effect is selective and could not readily extend to stop consonants in native language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study was to examine the efficacy of lexical stress diacritics on the English comprehensibility and accentedness of Korean speakers. To this end, 30 native Korean participants read aloud 15 English sentences without diacritics in the pretest. Then, they were given explicit instructions on the production of higher pitch and extended duration as a marker of English stress with musical notation provided. In the posttest, the participants read aloud the same sentences as were in the pretest but which had diacritics indicating stress placement. In the delayed posttest, two days after the pretest and the posttest, the participants read 15 sentences without diacritics again to see if the effects of the treatment were retained. Randomized speech samples were rated by three native speakers of English in relation to comprehensibility and accentedness. Findings showed that significant improvements were observed after the treatment in both comprehensibility and accentedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formants, or resonance frequencies of the upper vocal tract, are an essential part of acoustic communication. Articulatory gestures-such as jaw, tongue, lip, and soft palate movements-shape formant structure in human vocalizations, but little is known about how nonhuman mammals use those gestures to modify formant frequencies. Here, we report a case study with an adult male harbor seal trained to produce an arbitrary vocalization composed of multiple repetitions of the sound wa. We analyzed jaw movements frame-by-frame and matched them to the tracked formant modulation in the corresponding vocalizations. We found that the jaw opening angle was strongly correlated with the first (F1) and, to a lesser degree, with the second formant (F2). F2 variation was better explained by the jaw angle opening when the seal was lying on his back rather than on the belly, which might derive from soft tissue displacement due to gravity. These results show that harbor seals share some common articulatory traits with humans, where the F1 depends more on the jaw position than F2. We propose further in vivo investigations of seals to further test the role of the tongue on formant modulation in mammalian sound production., (© 2024 The Author(s). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The New York Academy of Sciences.)

This study investigates how prosodic prominence mediates the perception of American English vowels, testing the effects of F0 and duration. In Experiment 1, the perception of four vowel continua varying in duration and formants (high: /i-ɪ/, /u-ʊ/, non-high: /ɛ-ae/, /ʌ-ɑ/), was examined under changes in F0-based prominence. Experiment 2 tested if cue usage varies as the distributional informativity of duration as a cue to prominence is manipulated. Both experiments show that duration is a consistent vowel-intrinsic cue. F0-based prominence affected perception of vowels via compensation for peripheralization of prominent vowels in the vowel space. Longer duration and F0-based prominence further enhanced the perception of formant cues. The distributional manipulation in Experiment 2 exerted a minimal impact. Findings suggest that vowel perception is mediated by prominence in a height-dependent manner which reflects patterns in the speech production literature. Further, duration simultaneously serves as an intrinsic cue and serves a prominence-related function in enhancing perception of formant cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Machine listening" is one common term for a fast-growing interdisciplinary field of science and engineering that "uses signal processing and machine learning to extract useful information from sound". This article contributes to the critical literature on machine listening by presenting some of its history as a field. From the 1940s to the 1990s, work on artificial intelligence and audio developed along two streams. There was work on speech recognition/understanding, and work in computer music. In the early 1990s, another stream began to emerge. At institutions such as MIT Media Lab and Stanford's CCRMA, researchers started turning towards "more fundamental problems of audition". Propelled by work being done by and alongside musicians, speech and music would increasingly be understood by computer scientists as particular sounds within a broader "auditory scene". Researchers began to develop machine listening systems for a more diverse range of sounds and classification tasks: often in the service of speech recognition, but also increasingly for their own sake. The soundscape itself was becoming an object of computational concern. Today, the ambition is "to cover all possible sounds". That is the aspiration with which we must now contend politically, and which this article sets out to historicise and understand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A phoneme is perceptually the smallest distinct sound unit distinguished among words in a particular language. Every language has its own set of phonemes, and all the words are ordered sequences of phonemes. Therefore, phoneme recognition is essential to automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Phonemes of a language can be classified together using a single machine learning (ML) model through the direct classification (also known as the baseline or flat classification) approach. However, it is observed that the performance of such phoneme recognition degrades with the increase in the number of phoneme classes. The challenge is pronounced in languages with a larger number of phoneme classes, like Hindi, which has 48 phonemes. In this paper, we propose a speaker‐independent hierarchical classification approach for 33 Hindi‐Devanagari consonants/phonemes using cepstral features with ML techniques like support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF) and fully connected deep neural network (DNN). In this hierarchical approach, a given phoneme is classified into successive subgroups until the particular phoneme class is identified. To perform the classification task, a binary or multi‐class classifier is invoked for each internal (non‐leaf) node in the hierarchy tree. Our model identified pairs of Optimal Feature Sets (based on mutual information) and the best suitable ML classifier for each internal decision node in the hierarchy using 10‐fold cross‐validation to help in efficient classification. Our proposed hierarchical model leads to better accuracy and 57% improved performance for phoneme recognition compared with the non‐hierarchical, that is, the direct classification approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between working memory and speech has been a topic of intense research interest and investigation for many years. Memory studies have found that the active processing of working memory is required for language comprehension and speech production. Though there are studies that discuss the capacity of working memory, the processing of verbal stimuli into verbal memory remains unclear. Therefore, it is essential to understand the functioning of the working memory and how it processes verbal information. As working memory is intricately linked with communication, any deficits in working memory could cause communication disorders. Also, the disruption in the storage and retrieval of verbal memory could cause a disturbance in the speech pattern. To this point, this review elaborates on the active processing of working memory and its role in communication. Further, by studying the deficits in working memory that could cause cognitive-communication disorders such as apraxia of speech, dementia, and dysarthria, this article highlights the importance of verbal memory in speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the importance of syllable position, duration, and tone/pitch for the assignment of stress in Chinese hums. Twenty native Mandarin speakers and 20 native English speakers were asked to assign primary stress to two-syllable Chinese hums. The importance of acoustic cues for stress assignment was also evaluated. Our findings indicate that syllable position plays the most prominent role in stress assignment. Native Chinese listeners preferred to assign stress to final syllables whereas native English listeners preferred to assign stress to initial syllables. Both language groups were sensitive to different acoustic cues in assigning stress. The effects of complex interactions of syllable position, tone, duration and intensity on stress assignment in Chinese hums for both language groups support the hypothesis that linguistic experience affects speech perception at the suprasegmental level.

Word stress is demanding for non-native learners of English, partly because speakers from different backgrounds weight perceptual cues to stress like pitch, intensity, and duration differently. Slavic learners of English and particularly those with a fixed stress language background like Czech and Polish have been shown to be less sensitive to stress in their native and non-native languages. In contrast, German English learners are rarely discussed in a word stress context. A comparison of these varieties can reveal differences in the foreign language processing of speakers from two language families. We use electroencephalography (EEG) to explore group differences in word stress cue perception between Slavic and German learners of English. Slavic and German advanced English speakers were examined in passive multi-feature oddball experiments, where they were exposed to the word impact as an unstressed standard and as deviants stressed on the first or second syllable through higher pitch, intensity, or duration. The results revealed a robust Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component of the eventrelated potential (ERP) in both language groups in response to all conditions, demonstrating sensitivity to stress changes in a non-native language. While both groups showed higher MMN responses to stress changes to the second than the first syllable, this effect was more pronounced for German than for Slavic participants. Such group differences in non-native English word stress perception from the current and previous studies are argued to speak in favor of customizable language technologies and diversified English curricula compensating for nonnative perceptual variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers' lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers are exposed to a novel accent in which these changes occur systematically. The flexibility to deal with different types of variation may not be the same for toddlers learning different first languages, however, as language structure shapes early phonological biases. We examined French-learning 19-month-olds' sensitivity and adaptation to a novel accent that shifted either the standard pronunciation of /a/ from [a] to [ɛ] (Experiment 1) or the standard pronunciation of /p/ from [p] to [t] (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, French-learning toddlers recognized words with /a/ produced as [ɛ], regardless of whether they were previously exposed to an accent that contained this vowel shift or not. In Experiment 2, toddlers did not recognize words with /p/ pronounced as [t] at test unless they were first familiarized with an accent that contained this consonant shift. These findings are consistent with evidence that French-learning toddlers privilege consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Together with previous work, these results demonstrate both differences and similarities in how French- and English-learning children treat variation, in line with their language-specific phonological biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhanced pitch perception has been identified in autistic individuals, but it remains understudied whether such enhancement can be observed in the lexical tone perception of language-delayed autistic children. This study examined the categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones in 23 language-delayed autistic children and two groups of non-autistic children, with one matched on chronological age (n = 23) and the other on developmental age in language ability (n = 23). The participants were required to identify and discriminate lexical tones. A wider identification boundary width and a lower between-category discrimination accuracy were found in autistic children than their chronological-age-matched non-autistic peers, but the autistic group exhibited seemingly comparable performance to the group of developmental-age-matched non-autistic children. While both non-autistic groups displayed a typical categorical perception pattern with enhanced sensitivity to between-category tone pairs relative to within-category ones, such a categorical perception pattern was not observed in the autistic group. These findings suggest among language-delayed autistic children with a developmental age around 4, categorical perception is still developing. Finally, we found categorical perception performance correlated with language ability, indicating autistic children's language disability might be predictive of their poor categorical perception of speech sounds. Some theories suggested that autistic people have better pitch perception skills than non-autistic people. However, in a context where pitch patterns are used to differentiate word meanings (i.e. lexical tones), autistic people may encounter difficulties, especially those with less language experience. We tested this by asking language-delayed autistic children to identify and discriminate two Mandarin lexical tones (/yi/ with Tone 1, meaning 'clothes'; /yi/ with Tone 2, meaning 'aunt'; /yi/: the standard romanization of Mandarin Chinese). On average, these autistic children were 7.35 years old, but their developmental age in language ability was 4.20, lagging behind 7-year-old non-autistic children in terms of language ability. Autistic children's performance in identifying and discriminating lexical tones was compared with two groups of non-autistic children: one group was matched with the autistic group on age, and the other was matched based on language ability. Autistic children performed differently from the non-autistic children matched on age, while autistic and non-autistic children matched on language ability exhibited seemingly similar performance. However, both the non-autistic groups have developed the perceptual ability to process lexical tones as different categories, but this ability was still developing in autistic children. Finally, we found autistic children who performed worse in identifying lexical tones had poorer language ability. The results suggest that language disability might have adverse influence on the development of skills of speech sound processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esophageal (ES) speech, tracheoesophageal (TE) speech, and the electrolarynx (EL) are common methods of communication following the removal of the larynx. Our recent study demonstrated that intelligibility may increase for Cantonese alaryngeal speakers using clear speech (CS) compared to their everyday "habitual speech" (HS), but the reasoning is still unclear [Hui, Cox, Huang, Chen, and Ng (2022). Folia Phoniatr. Logop. 74, 103–111]. The purpose of this study was to assess the acoustic characteristics of vowels and tones produced by Cantonese alaryngeal speakers using HS and CS. Thirty-one alaryngeal speakers (9 EL, 10 ES, and 12 TE speakers) read The North Wind and the Sun passage in HS and CS. Vowel formants, vowel space area (VSA), speaking rate, pitch, and intensity were examined, and their relationship to intelligibility were evaluated. Statistical models suggest that larger VSAs significantly improved intelligibility, but slower speaking rate did not. Vowel and tonal contrasts did not differ between HS and CS for all three groups, but the amount of information encoded in fundamental frequency and intensity differences between high and low tones positively correlated with intelligibility for TE and ES groups, respectively. Continued research is needed to understand the effects of different speaking conditions toward improving acoustic and perceptual characteristics of Cantonese alaryngeal speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). Amusic individuals have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the MMN in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusic and control participants; however, in controls, there was a tendency toward larger MMNs for inharmonicity than for beating cues, whereas the opposite tendency was observed for the amusic participants. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of nonspectral (beating) cues may be increased for amusic individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In rhythmic typology, languages are categorized into stress-timed and syllable-timed types. Earlier studies have highlighted the isochrony of interstress intervals and syllables in stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, respectively. Recent studies suggest that rhythm type depends on the characteristics of the phonological system of each language. Lexically marked stress, robust correlates of stress, stress-sensitive segmental rules, and complex syllable structures are the characteristics of stress-timed languages. On the other hand, the characteristic properties of syllable-timed languages are non-lexical stress, relatively weak correlates of stress, non-application of stress-sensitive segmental rules, and simple syllable structures. The present article investigated these phonological properties in Persian. Persian has been classified as a syllable-timed language. We hypothesized that the rhythmic type of Persian is the direct consequence of its phonological properties. Evidence shows that stress plays a weak role in Persian phonology. Hence, it seems to belong to the type of syllable-timed languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The auditory world is often cacophonous, with some sounds capturing attention and distracting us from our goals. Despite the universality of this experience, many questions remain about how and why sound captures attention, how rapidly behavior is disrupted, and how long this interference lasts. Here, we use a novel measure of behavioral disruption to test predictions made by models of auditory salience. Models predict that goal-directed behavior is disrupted immediately after points in time that feature a high degree of spectrotemporal change. We find that behavioral disruption is precisely time-locked to the onset of distracting sound events: Participants who tap to a metronome temporarily increase their tapping speed 750 ms after the onset of distractors. Moreover, this response is greater for more salient sounds (larger amplitude) and sound changes (greater pitch shift). We find that the time course of behavioral disruption is highly similar after acoustically disparate sound events: Both sound onsets and pitch shifts of continuous background sounds speed responses at 750 ms, with these effects dying out by 1,750 ms. These temporal distortions can be observed using only data from the first trial across participants. A potential mechanism underlying these results is that arousal increases after distracting sound events, leading to an expansion of time perception, and causing participants to misjudge when their next movement should begin., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

It has been long held that languages of the world are divided into rhythm classes so that they are either stress-timed, syllable-timed or mora-timed. It is also known for a long time that duration serves various informational functions in speech. But it is unclear whether these two kinds of uses of duration are complementary to each other, or they are actually one and the same. There has been much empirical research that raises questions about the rhythm class hypothesis due to lack of evidence of the suggested isochrony in any language. Yet the alleged cross-language rhythm classification is still widely taken for granted and continues to be researched. Here we conducted a corpus study of English, an archetype of a stress-timed language, and Mandarin, an alleged syllable-timed language, to look for evidence of at least a tendency toward isochrony when much of the informational use of duration is controlled for. We examined the relationship between segment and syllable duration and the relationship of syllable and phrase duration in the two languages. The results show that in English syllables are largely incompressible to allow stress-timing because segment duration is inflexible to allow variable syllable duration beyond its functional use. Surprisingly, Mandarin does show a small tendency toward both equal syllable duration and equal phrase duration. Additionally, the duration of pre-boundary syllables in English increases linearly with break index, whereas in Mandarin, the duration increase stops after break index 2, which is accompanied by the insertion of silent pauses. We conclude, therefore, timing and duration in speech are predominantly used for encoding information rather being controlled by a rhythmic principle, and the residual equal-duration tendency in the two languages examined here show exactly the opposite patterns from the predictions of the rhythm class hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second language (L2) learners of Spanish whose first language (L1) is English tend to find Spanish lexical stress patterns difficult to acquire. This study investigates whether such difficulty derives, at least in part, from an obstacle encountered during perceptual processing: reduced perceptual sensitivity to stress distinctions. Participants were adult L1 English L2 Spanish learners of various proficiency levels. The experiment was a categorical matching task with triads of auditory stimuli minimally contrasting in stress (target) or segmental composition (baseline), an ABX task. The results show that learners were more accurate in the baseline condition than in the target condition, suggesting reduced perceptual sensitivity to stress relative to other contrasts. The reduction in accuracy, however, was restricted to trials in which matching items were not adjacent, further suggesting an obstacle with phonological processing in working memory rather than perceptual categorization. The default stress processing routines of L1 English L2 Spanish learners, optimized for their L1 (not their L2), may be responsible for their acquisitional obstacles with this feature of the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the predictions of second language (L2) speech acquisition models — SLM(-r), PAM(-L2), and L2LP — on how native (L1) Japanese speakers implement the spectral and temporal aspects of L2 American English vowel categories. Data were obtained from 102 L1 Japanese speakers in the J-AESOP corpus, which also includes nativelikeness judgments by trained phoneticians. Spectrally, speakers judged to be non-nativelike showed a strong influence from L1 categories, except L2 /ʌ/ which could be deflected away from L1 /a/ according to SLM(-r) and L2 /ɑː/ which seemed orthographically assimilated to L1 /o/ according to PAM(-L2). More nativelike speakers showed vowel spectra similar to those of native English speakers across all vowels, in accordance with L2LP. Temporally, although speakers tended to equate the phonetic length of English vowels with Japanese phonemic length distinctions, segment-level L1-L2 category similarity was not a significant predictor of the speakers' nativelikeness. Instead, the implementation of prosodic-level factors such as stress and phrase-final lengthening were better predictors. The results highlight the importance of suprasegmental factors in successful category learning and also reveal a weakness in current models of L2 speech acquisition, which focus primarily on the segmental level. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second-language speakers have been found to face difficulties marking prosodic features of new and given information in English. Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners speak English with a different intonation from L1 speakers, which can lead to misunderstanding. However, there is a dearth of research on the prosodic marking of new and given information by Chinese English speakers and on the extent to which Mandarin might influence the marking of new and given information. To fill this research gap, an empirical study of the prosodic features of English and Mandarin was conducted using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate the prosodic marking of new and given information in English and Mandarin by Chinese speakers. The results show that the prosodic marking of new and given information in English and Mandarin was similar with new information having a longer duration and a larger pitch range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stress is a linguistic property of a word that specifies which syllable in the word is stronger than any of the others. Early studies such as Fry (1955, 1958), Lieberman (1960), Beckman (1986), Harrington, Beckman, and Palethorpe (1998) (see also Laver, 1994 for an overview) have shown that there are clear acoustic differences between stressed and unstressed syllables: stressed syllables are realized with higher pitch, higher intensity, longer duration, and more peripheral vowel quality than unstressed syllables. Studies in many stress-accent languages show that the stressed realization of a syllable differs from the unstressed realization of the same syllable by having higher pitch. Also, results have showed that speakers consistently use duration to distinguish between open and central vowels that contrasted in stress at the word level. In contrast with F0 and duration, the relation of intensity variation in the speech signal to word stress is still controversial. In this paper, we investigated the role of acoustic factors involved in perceptually differentiating simple past from present perfect verbs in Persian, through manipulation of fundamental frequency (F0) and duration. Thus, tokens were resynthesized from the phonetic forms of Persian simple past and present perfect verbs in which F0 and duration were manipulated in several steps. The target tokens were presented to some native Persian participants to identify as simple past or present perfect. Results suggested that Persian listeners’ judgements of the tense of the target tokens depend, to a great extent, on the local F0 values of the verbs’ syllables as any amount of increase in the local F0 points of the respective syllables can categorically change the listeners’ judgements about the temporal reading of the verbs involved. On the other hand, results for duration showed that values of this parameter fail to produce a significant effect on listeners’ judgements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children who enter school not yet reading need some systematic phonics to get them started, but cannot be expected to cope with the whole alphabet or more than a subset of phoneme–grapheme correspondences and grapheme–phoneme correspondences at that stage. So phonics schemes necessarily adopt some sequence for the introduction of graphemes and phonemes. The Letters and Sounds scheme began with satpin, that is, those graphemes and their most frequent correspondences with phonemes, /s æ t p ɪ n/, and the two most widely used British phonics schemes incorporate variants of that initial sequence. Yet why those graphemes and phonemes? This article traces satpin back to its origins in the 1960s in the work of Sally B. Childs and Aylett Royall Cox, American exponents of Orton–Gillingham methods. The article focuses upon a 1967 publication by Cox featuring a version of satpin and explains and explores its scientific basis. We then show both where Cox's insight has been influential (or not) in British literacy schemes and where authors of phonics materials have taken a different tack, or suggested alternative phonetic starting points. The phonetic analysis underlying Cox's rationale needs updating. When that is done, both it and the rediscovered original logic may suggest useful changes in the initial teaching sequence of phonemes and graphemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on speech categorization and phoneme recognition has relied heavily on tasks in which participants listen to stimuli from a speech continuum and are asked to either classify each stimulus (identification) or discriminate between them (discrimination). Such tasks rest on assumptions about how perception maps onto discrete responses that have not been thoroughly investigated. Here, we identify critical challenges in the link between these tasks and theories of speech categorization. In particular, we show that patterns that have traditionally been linked to categorical perception could arise despite continuous underlying perception and that patterns that run counter to categorical perception could arise despite underlying categorical perception. We describe an alternative measure of speech perception using a visual analog scale that better differentiates between processes at play in speech categorization, and we review some recent findings that show how this task can be used to better inform our theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categorical perception (CP) is likely the single finding from speech perception with the biggest impact on cognitive science. However, within speech perception, it is widely known to be an artifact of task demands. CP is empirically defined as a relationship between phoneme identification and discrimination. As discrimination tasks do not appear to require categorization, this was thought to support the claim that listeners perceive speech solely in terms of linguistic categories. However, 50 years of work using discrimination tasks, priming, the visual world paradigm, and event related potentials has rejected the strongest forms of CP and provided little strong evidence for any form of it. This paper reviews the origins and impact of this scientific meme and the work challenging it. It discusses work showing that the encoding of auditory input is largely continuous, not categorical, and describes the modern theoretical synthesis in which listeners preserve fine-grained detail to enable more flexible processing. This synthesis is fundamentally inconsistent with CP. This leads to a different understanding of how to use and interpret the most basic paradigms in speech perception—phoneme identification along a continuum—and has implications for understanding language and hearing disorders, development, and multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children as young as five have some ability to produce contrastive focus [Wells et al. (2004) J. Child Lang. 31, 749–778]. However, adult listeners' ability to identify the location of contrastive focus depends on whether the speech came from a 4-, 7-, or 11-year-old [Patel and Brayton (2009) J. Speech. Lang. Hear. Res. 52, 790–801]. Recent acoustic studies have also reported the use of F0 vs duration in contrastive focus productions by American English–speaking 2-year-olds [Thorson and Morgan (2021) J. Child Lang. 48, 541–568] and 4-year-olds [Wonnacott and Watson (2008) Cognition 107, 1093–1101], respectively. This study, therefore, evaluated the extent to which older 6-year-olds, with more language experience, used F0 and/or duration when producing contrastive focus, and compared this to adult speech. Monosyllabic and disyllabic adjective + noun targets (e.g., green ball) in utterance medial and final position were elicited from 20 Australian English–speaking 6-year-olds and 14 adults in adjective focus and noun focus conditions. Although both adults and children used high F0, only adults consistently used word and stressed syllable duration as well. This suggests that children may master the different acoustic cues to contrastive focus at different stages of development, with late cue integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder that compromises the normal development of musical abilities in 1.5–4% of the general population. There is a substantial genetic contribution to congenital amusia, and it bears similarities to neurodevelopmental disorders of language. Here, we examine the extent to which variants in the forkhead box P2 gene (FOXP2)—the first gene to be identified as causal in developmental speech deficits—are associated with the amusic trait. Using a cohort of 49 individuals with amusia, of which 27 were unrelated, the role of FOXP2 variants in amusia was evaluated. Fourteen variants were examined in the cohort. None segregated with the amusic trait among participants for whom family information was available; nor were they predicted to be deleterious to protein function. Thus, variants in FOXP2 are not likely to cause amusia. Implications for ongoing debates about the distinction between musicality and language are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every normally developing human infant solves the difficult problem of mapping their native-language phonology, but the neural mechanisms underpinning this behavior remain poorly understood. Here, motor constellation theory, an integrative neurophonological model, is presented, with the goal of explicating this issue. It is assumed that infants' motor-auditory phonological mapping takes place through infants' orosensory "reaching" for phonological elements observed in the language-specific ambient phonology, via reference to kinesthetic feedback from motor systems (e.g., articulators), and auditory feedback from resulting speech and speech-like sounds. Attempts are regulated by basal ganglion-cerebellar speech neural circuitry, and successful attempts at reproduction are enforced through dopaminergic signaling. Early in life, the pace of anatomical development constrains mapping such that complete language-specific phonological mapping is prohibited by infants' undeveloped supralaryngeal vocal tract and undescended larynx; constraints gradually dissolve with age, enabling adult phonology. Where appropriate, reference is made to findings from animal and clinical models. Some implications for future modeling and simulation efforts, as well as clinical settings, are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The WHO uses the better ear PTA(0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0 kHz) to infer speech recognition in noise (SRN) ability. The purpose of this study was to determine the ability of this measure to detect an SRN disorder. The reference standard was the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT). The index test was better ear PTA(0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0 kHz). Diagnostic accuracy was determined with receiver operating characteristic curves and the area under the curve (AUC) for data sets with and without complete audibility of the HINT stimuli. Data from previously published studies (n = 381) were retrospectively divided into disordered and control groups. For the All Data analysis, better ear PTA(0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0 kHz) was a significant predictor of an SRN disorder, however, the AUC was just above chance (AUC = 0.59, p < 0.001). For the Partial Audibility analysis, better ear PTA(0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0 kHz) was a significant predictor of the target disorder (AUC = 0.85, p = 0.001). The utilization of better ear PTA(0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0 kHz) to infer SRN ability is questionable for individuals with complete audibility of the reference test speech and noise stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]