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Purpose: Previous research has indicated the beneficial effects of musical training on speech perception in children. However, little has been known about whether musical training exerts transfer effects on fine-grained perception of linguistic pitch and time information. This study aimed to investigate the effects of different musical training programs and training duration on preschoolers’ categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones and voice onset time (VOT) in Mandarin Chinese, which utilize pitch and time changes, respectively, to convey phonemic contrasts. Method: Sixty-one Mandarin-speaking children aged 4 years were randomly assigned to pitch-based musical training (carillon group), rhythm-based musical training (drum group), or handcraft learning (control group). Children completed the tests designed to assess their musical abilities, CP of lexical tones and VOT, IQ, and working memory at three time-points. Repeated-measures analyses of variance were conducted to evaluate the training-related effects in various tasks. Correlation analyses were used to infer the relationships between musical abilities and CP performance of speech. Results: The carillon group demonstrated advantages over the drum and control groups in music pitch processing and CP of lexical tones; besides, the drum group performed better in the music time processing and CP of VOT than the control group. Moreover, positive correlations were found between musical gains and improvements on CP of speech. Conclusions: These results provide evidence that transfer effects occur in CP of lexical tones and VOT in preschoolers. Our findings highlight the selectivity of musical advantages driven by different components of training programs and suggest that long-term musical training could be a means of early speech rehabilitation in children with communication disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In the context of music and speech perception, this study aimed to assess the effect of variation in one of two auditory attributes--pitch contour and timbre--on the perception of the other in prelingually deafened young cochlear implant (CI) users, and the relationship between pitch contour perception and two cognitive functions of interest. Method: Nine prelingually deafened CI users, aged 8.75-22.17 years, completed a melodic contour identification (MCI) task using stimuli of piano notes or sung speech with a fixed timbre (same word for each note) or a mixed timbre (different words for each note), a speech perception task identifying matrixstyled sentences naturally intonated or sung with a fixed pitch (same pitch for each word) or a mixed pitch (different pitches for each word), a forward digit span test indexing auditory short-term memory (STM), and the matrices section of the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test-Second Edition indexing nonverbal IQ. Results: MCI was significantly poorer for the mixed timbre condition. Speech perception was significantly poorer for the fixed and mixed pitch conditions than for the naturally intonated condition. Auditory STM positively correlated with MCI at 2- and 3-semitone note spacings. Relative to their normal-hearing peers from a related study using the same stimuli and tasks, the CI participants showed comparable MCI at 2- or 3-semitone note spacing, and a comparable level of significant decrement in speech perception across three pitch contour conditions. Conclusion: Findings suggest that prelingually deafened CI users show similar trends of normal-hearing peers for the effect of variation in pitch contour or timbre on the perception of the other, and that cognitive functions may underlie these outcomes to some extent, at least for the perception of pitch contour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Imagery can be described as experience that mimics real world experiences through the combination of using different sensory modalities in the absence of actual perceptions (43). One uses visual, auditory, kinesthetic (touch), smell, and taste to create a picture simulating real world environments and scenarios. Imagery can be used to enhance various aspects of performance by mentally preparing someone for an upcoming competition or helping an athlete focus specifically on a task (19). Virtual reality, understood in this study as a first-person filmed, computer presented, immersive simulation of a real environment (32), has become increasingly more utilized in sport performance settings (7, 37, 44). Combing these two elements, the purpose of this study was to investigate an applied Imagery Assisted Virtual Reality (IAVR) intervention on imagery ability and pitch recognition in a sample of eleven National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division One softball players at a Midwestern University. This study's results indicated a significant increase in global imagery ability as well as in four of the five functions of imagery (CS, CG, MG-A, MG-A) and in pitch type recognition. Practically, the results from this study suggest that the IAVR intervention can create an impactful experience to assist athletes in improving their performance and psychological skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Although variability of training materials has the potential to benefit the learning of lexical tones, the benefit is contingent on an individual's pitch aptitude. Previous studies did not segregate immediate learning and consolidation after an overnight interval, and little is known about how pitch aptitude differences affect consolidation. This study examined whether pitch aptitude predicts overnight consolidation of Cantonese level tones through high-variability (HV) and low-variability (LV) training. Method: Two groups of Mandarin-speaking participants were first assessed in terms of pitch threshold and tone discrimination, which tapped into different aspects of pitch aptitude. They then received Cantonese level tone identification training in either an HV or an LV condition. The participants were trained in the evening, were tested after training, and returned after 24 hr for overnight consolidation assessment. Results: The results indicate that pitch aptitude, measured through pitch threshold, may have predicted overnight consolidation and training progress of the HV group but not those of the LV group. In the HV group, compared with high-aptitude learners, low-aptitude learners benefited temporarily from training variability but did not consolidate the tonal knowledge as much as their highaptitude counterparts did after 24 hr. Conclusions: The findings suggest that individual learners had difficulty learning nonnative tones by virtue of memory consolidation. Higher pitch aptitude ability (pitch threshold) may provide protection against the decay of learned tones and facilitate tone consolidation. The findings imply that the early emergence of tonal representation is a dynamic process among individuals of nonnative speakers who are exposed to training variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Auditory-perceptual evaluation of dysphonic voice is an essential clinical activity that characterizes the nature of dysphonia and aids in planning its clinical management. Although there are multidimensional acoustic measures that correlate well with overall severity ratings, they tend to include measures that have only small or moderate correlations with individual voice characteristics frequently perceptually measured (e.g., breathiness or roughness). Given this difference between perceptual and acoustic measures, it is unclear how much individual voice characteristics contribute to a listener's perception of overall severity of dysphonia. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore individual voice characteristics' relative contribution to the rating of overall dysphonia severity and to explore sex-related differences. Method: Two hundred ninety-six voice samples were accessed from the Perceptual Voice Qualities Database. Roughness, breathiness, asthenia, strain, pitch, and loudness ratings from the Grade, Roughness, Breathiness, Asthenia, Strain and Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice scales were used to predict overall voice quality severity in linear regression with bootstrapped coefficients. Results: Roughness, breathiness, and strain were the strongest predictors of overall severity. Asthenia and, to a lesser extent, pitch were also significant predictors of overall severity. Loudness was not a significant predictor. There were several sex-related differences noted, as well as differences related to the scale used. Conclusions: Breathiness, roughness, and strain were all important predictors of overall severity for all regressions. Clinicians should be aware of scale-related differences if they are using auditory-perceptual measures to choose voice therapy targets. Analyses accounting for perceptual strategy differences were recommended for future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Voice feminization for transgender women remains a challenge. The fundamental frequency of the voice (fo) is one of the main parameters contributing to the perception of gender. One of the aims of voice therapy is to help transgender women acquire a new vocal motor behavior to increase their fo. We hypothesized that ambulatory biofeedback could help extend the new vocal behavior to daily life. Materials and methods: This prospective case study assessed the impact of two weeks of ambulatory vibrotactile biofeedback (VTBF) applied to one transgender woman, following two weeks of voice therapy (three 60-minute sessions). The VTBF was activated when the participant's voice was lower than 150 Hz for more than 500 ms and was accompanied by two 60-minute counseling sessions. Results: The results showed that mean fo monitored in daily activities tended to increase following the two weeks of voice therapy (Δ = 8 Hz or 1 semitone) and then increased significantly immediately after the two weeks of VTBF (Δ = 13 Hz or 1.5 semitones). The increase in mean fo from day to day and the decrease in the activation percentage from the first to the second week of VTBF (Δ = 6%) indicated a gradual integration of the motor behavior, making it possible to achieve the targeted female frequency. Conclusions: The results suggest that ambulatory VTBF helped the participant to generalize the techniques acquired during the voice therapy sessions to real-life communication situations. These results are promising for therapeutic programs that integrate tools that can be used outside the clinical context. Design: Prospective case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional English classroom teaching is difficult to meet the oral learning needs of most learners. Thanks to the continuous advancement of speech processing technology, computer-assisted language learning systems are becoming more intelligent, not only pointing out learners' pronunciation errors but also assessing their overall pronunciation level. Method. This paper uses the method of tree kernel function to measure the similarity of two ontology trees. According to the features of nodes in ontology tree, methods to calculate the external features and internal features of nodes are proposed, respectively. External features are mainly obtained by calculating the hierarchical centrality, node density, and node coverage of nodes in the ontology tree; internal features are mainly obtained by measuring the richness of internal information. According to the similarity of ontology tree and the external features and internal features of nodes, the calculation formula of structural comprehensive similarity is improved, and the features of ontology itself can be fully considered in the calculation. According to the difference of the structure, the weights of the corresponding features during the calculation are adjusted autonomously, so that the calculation results are closer to reality. In spectral image preprocessing, endpoint detection utilizes the harmonic characteristics presented by narrowband spectrograms with high frequency resolution and eliminates useless nonspeech segments by detecting the presence of voiced segments. When building the neural network model, four convolutional layers, two fully connected layers, and one softmax output layer were conceived, and dropout was used to randomly suspend the work of some neurons to avoid overfitting. Results/Discussion. Through the data analysis of mean and variance and verified by one-way analysis of variance, it proves that the sentiment evaluation method in this paper is effective. The traditional multiple linear regression method is not suitable for the corpus and application scenarios of this paper. This paper proposes a decision tree structure, which is similar to the overall scoring process of raters, and uses the Interactive Dicremiser version 3 (ID3) algorithm to build a comprehensive evaluation decision tree for pitch, rhythm, intonation, speech rate, and emotion indicators. It is proved by experiments that the accurate consistency rate of the human-machine evaluation in this paper is 93%, the adjacent consistency rate is 96%, and the Pearson correlation coefficient value of the human-machine evaluation results is 0.89. The data results prove that the evaluation method in this paper is credible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To characterize the scapular pitching biomechanics in symptomatic GIRD pitchers (SG) compared to asymptomatic GIRD (ASG) and healthy pitchers. The scapular kinematics and associated muscle activities during pitching were recorded in 33 high school pitchers. Compared to healthy, GIRD pitchers had less scapular posterior tilt in each pitching event (average difference, AD=14.4°, p<0.01) and ASG demonstrated less scapular upward rotation at ball release (AD=12.8°, p<0.01) and greater muscle activity in the triceps brachii in the early-cocking phase (AD=9.9%, p=0.015) and in the serratus anterior in the late-cocking phase (AD=30.8%, p<0.01). Additionally, SG had less muscular activity on triceps brachii in the acceleration phase and serratus anterior in the cocking phase (AD=37.8%, p=0.016; AD=15.5%, p<0.01, respectively) compared to ASG. GIRD pitchers exhibited less scapular posterior tilt during pitching, which may cause impingement. Since tightness of the anterior shoulder is a common cause of inadequacy of posterior tilt during arm elevation, stretching exercise of the anterior shoulder is recommended. Given the inadequate recruitment during pitching in the GIRD pitchers, symptoms may develop following potential impingement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard Japanese uses pitch accent to distinguish words such as initially-accented hashi "chopsticks" and finally-accented hashi "bridge." Research on the second language acquisition of pitch accent shows considerable variation: in accuracy scores in identification, in different dominant accent types in production, and in the unstable accent types of repeated words. This study investigates pitch accent production in English-speaking learners of Japanese, asking how accuracy and stability vary (a) with amount of Japanese experience and (b) between learners. Two groups of learners (13 less experienced; 8 more experienced) produced 180 words in three contexts (e.g., ame "rain," ame da "it's rain," and ame ga furu "rain falls"). Three Japanese phoneticians identified the accent types of the words that the learners produced. The results showed no difference in accuracy or stability between the two groups and little inter-learner variation in accuracy: all had low accuracy. Although some learners had relatively high stability, they did not maintain accent type contrasts across contexts. These results suggest that first language English speakers do not encode pitch accent in long-term memory, raising questions for future research and language teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aging and language background have been shown to affect pitch information encoding at the subcortical level. To study the individual and compounded effects on subcortical pitch information encoding, Frequency Following Responses were recorded from subjects across various ages and language backgrounds. Differences were found in pitch information encoding strength and accuracy among the groups, indicating that language experience and aging affect accuracy and magnitude of pitch information encoding ability at the subcortical level. Moreover, stronger effects of aging were seen in the magnitude of phase-locking in the native language speaker groups, while language background appears to have more impact on the accuracy of pitch tracking in older adult groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Previous masticatory studies have focused on a variety of measurements of foods and boluses or kinematic parameters and sound during mastication. To date, the masticatory sound research of has been limited due to the difficulties of sound collection and accurate analysis. Therefore, significant progress in masticatory sound has not been made. Meanwhile, the correlation between acoustic parameters and mastication performance remains unclear. For the purpose of exploring the acoustic parameters in measuring mastication performance, the bone-conduction techniques and sound analysis were used, and a statistical analysis of acoustic and occlusal parameters were conducted. Methods: The gnathosonic and chewing sounds of fifty-six volunteers with healthy dentate were recorded by a bone-conduction microphone and further analyzed by Praat 5.4.04 when intercuspally occluding natural foods (peanuts) were consumed. The granulometry of the expectorated boluses from the peanuts was characterized by the median particle size of the whole chewing sequence (D50a) and the median particle size during the fixed chewing strokes (D50b). The chewing time of the whole chewing sequence (CTa), the chewing time of the fixed chewing strokes (CTb), the chewing cycles (CC), and the chewing frequency (CF) were recorded and analyzed by the acoustic software. The acoustic parameters, including gnathosonic pitch, gnathosonic intensity, mastication sound pitch of the whole chewing sequence (MPa), mastication sound pitch of the fixed chewing strokes (MPb), mastication sound intensity of the whole chewing sequence (MIa) and mastication sound intensity of the fixed chewing strokes (MIb), were analyzed. Independent sample t-test, Spearman and Pearson correlation analyses were used where applicable. Results: Significant difference in parameters CC, MIa, CF and D50a were found by sex (t-test, p < 0.01). The masticatory degree of the test foods was higher in women (CC, 24.25 ± 5.23; CF, 1.70 ± 0.21 s−1; D50a, 1655.07 ± 346.21 μm) than in men (CC, 18.14 ± 6.38; CF, 1.48 ± 0.18 s−1; D50a, 2159.21 ± 441.26 μm). In the whole chewing sequence study, a highly negative correlation was found between MIa and D50a, and a highly positive correlation was found between MIa and CF (r = − 0.94, r = 0.82, respectively, p < 0.01). No significant correlation was found between the remaining acoustic parameters and mastication parameters. In the fixed chewing strokes study, a highly negative correlation was found between MIb and D50b (r = − 0.85, p < 0.01). There was no significant correlation between the rest of the acoustic parameters and the mastication parameters. Conclusions: Mastication sound intensity may be a valuable indicator for assessing mastication. Acoustic analysis can provide a more convenient and quick method of assessing mastication performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to establish and characterize age- and gender-specific normative data of the singing voice using the voice range profile for clinical diagnostics. Furthermore, associations between the singing voice and the socioeconomic status were examined. Methods: Singing voice profiles of 1,578 mostly untrained children aged between 7.0 and 16.11 years were analyzed. Participants had to reproduce sung tones at defined pitches, resulting in maximum and minimum fundamental frequency and sound pressure level (SPL). In addition, maximum phonation time (MPT) was measured. Percentile curves of frequency, SPL and MPT were estimated. To examine the associations of socioeconomic status, multivariate analyses adjusted for age and sex were performed. Results: In boys, the mean of the highest frequency was 750.9 Hz and lowered to 397.1 Hz with increasing age. Similarly, the minimum frequency was 194.4 Hz and lowered to 91.9 Hz. In girls, the mean maximum frequency decreased from 754.9 to 725.3 Hz. The mean minimum frequency lowered from 202.4 to 175.0 Hz. For both sexes, the mean frequency range ∆f showed a constant range of roughly 24 semitones. The MPT increased with age, for boys and girls. There was neither an effect of age nor sex on SPLmin or SPLmax, ranging between 52.6 and 54.1 dBA and between 86.5 and 82.8 dBA, respectively. Socioeconomic status was not associated with the above-mentioned variables. Conclusion: To our knowledge, this study is the first to present large normative data on the singing voice in childhood and adolescence based on a high number of measurements. In addition, we provide percentile curves for practical application in clinic and vocal pedagogy which may be applied to distinguish between normal and pathological singing voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of cognitive load (CL) on the categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical tones to discuss the application of the generalized pulseskipping hypothesis. This hypothesis assumes that listeners might miss/skip temporal pulses and lose essential speech information due to CL, which consequently affects both the temporal and spectral dimensions of speech perception. Should CL decrease listeners' pitch sensitivity and impair the distinction of tone categories, this study would support the generalized pulse-skipping hypothesis. Method: Twenty-four native Mandarin-speaking listeners were recruited to complete a dual-task experiment where they were required to identify or discriminate tone stimuli while concurrently memorizing six Chinese characters or graphic symbols. A no-load condition without a memory recall task was also included as a baseline condition. The position of categorical boundary, identification slope, between-and within-category discrimination, and discrimination peakedness were compared across the three conditions to measure the impact of CL on tone perception. The recall accuracy of Chinese characters and graphic symbols was used to assess the difficulty of memory recall. Results: Compared with the no-load condition, both load conditions showed a boundary shift to Tone 3, shallower identification slope, poorer between-category discrimination, and lower discrimination peakedness. Within-category discrimination was negatively affected by CL in the graphic symbol condition only, not in the Chinese character condition. Conclusions: CL degraded listeners' sensitivity to subtle fundamental frequency changes and impaired CP of Mandarin lexical tones. This provides support for the generalized pulse-skipping hypothesis. Besides, the involvement of lexical information modulated the effect of CL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine the long-term associations of musical training with speech perception in adverse conditions and cognition in a longitudinal cohort study of middle-age to older adults. Method: This study is based on Epidemiology of Hearing Loss Study participants. We asked participants at baseline (1993--1995) about their musical training. Speech perception (word recognition in competing message; Northwestern University Auditory Test Number 6), cognitive function (cognitive test battery), and impairment (self-report or surrogate report of Alzheimer's disease or dementia, and/or a Mini-Mental State Examination score ≤ 24) were assessed up to 5 times over the 20-year follow-up. We included 2,938 Epidemiology of Hearing Loss Study participants who had musical training data and at least one follow-up of speech perception and/or cognitive assessment. We used linear mixed-effects models to determine associations between musicianship and decline in speech perception and cognitive function over time and Cox regression models to evaluate associations of musical training with 20-year cumulative incidence of speech perception and cognitive impairment. Models were adjusted for age, sex, and occupation and repeated with additional adjustment for health-related confounders and education. Results: Musicians showed less speech perception decline over time with stronger effects in women (0.16% difference, 95% confidence interval [CI] [0.05, 0.26]). Among men, musicians had, on average, better speech perception than nonmusicians (3.41% difference, 95% CI [0.62, 6.20]) and were less likely to develop a cognitive impairment than nonmusicians (hazard ratio = 0.58, 95% CI [0.37, 0.91]). Conclusions: Musicians showed an advantage in speech perception abilities and cognition later in life and less decline over time with different magnitudes of effect sizes in men and women. Associations remained with further adjustment, indicating that some degree of the advantage of musical training is independent of socioeconomic or health differences. If confirmed, these findings could have implications for developing speech perception intervention and prevention strategies. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha. 14825454 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The current study investigates pitch coding among vocalists, violinists, and non-musicians to Carnatic musical stimuli. Material and methods: Three groups of participants were included in the study: 10 trained Carnatic vocalists, 10 violinists,and 10 non-musicians. Their ages ranged from 18 to 45 years. Two types of stimuli were given: three notes of a Carnatic raga (S R2 G3) sung by a trained vocalist and three notes of a Carnatic raga (S R2 G3) played on violin by a trained violinist. Frequency following responses (FFRs) were recorded binaurally at 80 dBSPL for both stimuli using Neuroscan equipment. Results: Grand average responses of all participants were generated. To assess a participant's pitch tracking to the Carnatic music stimuli, stimulusto- response correlation, pitch strength, and pitch error were calculated. Vocalists and violinists had better stimulus-to-response correlation and pitch strength values with lower pitch error values than non-musicians for both vocal and violin stimuli. Within both the vocalist and violinist groups, superior performance was noticed for the vocal stimulus compared to the violin stimulus. No such preference was evident among non-musicians. Conclusions: Classical music training dependent plasticity can be demonstrated at brainstem level itself. This holds true for both vocal and violin music, a finding not reported previously. Further a link between musical training and the FFR response can be more strongly demonstrated for vocalists than for violinists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing the F0-contour of English words does not change their lexical meaning. However, it changes the meaning in tonal languages such as Mandarin. Given this important difference and knowing that words in the two languages of a bilingual lexicon interact, the question arises as to how Mandarin-English speakers process pitch in their bilingual lexicon. The few studies that addressed this question showed that Mandarin-English speakers did not perceive pitch in English words as native English speakers did. These studies, however, used English words as stimuli failing to examine nonwords and Mandarin words. Consequently, possible pre-lexical effects and L1 transfer were not ruled out. The present study fills this gap by examining pitch perception in Mandarin and English words and nonwords by Mandarin-English speakers and a group of native English controls. Results showed the tonal experience of Chinese-English speakers modulated their perception of pitch in their non-tonal language at both pre-lexical and lexical levels. In comparison to native English controls, tonal speakers were more sensitive to the acoustic salience of F0-contours in the pre-lexical processing due to top-down feedback. At the lexical level, Mandarin-English speakers organized words in their two languages according to similarity criteria based on both F0 and segmental information, whereas only the segmental information was relevant to the control group. These results in perception together with consistently reported production patterns in previous literature suggest that Mandarin-English speakers process pitch in English as if it was a one-tone language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interaural place-of-stimulation mismatch for bilateral cochlear-implant (BI-CI) listeners is often evaluated using pitch-comparison tasks that can be susceptible to procedural biases. Bias effects were compared for three sequential interaural pitch-comparison tasks in six BI-CI listeners using single-electrode direct stimulation. The reference (right ear) was a single basal, middle, or apical electrode. The comparison electrode (left ear) was chosen from one of three ranges: basal half, full array, or apical half. In Experiment 1 (discrimination), interaural pairs were chosen randomly (method of constant stimuli). In Experiment 2 (ranking), an efficient adaptive procedure rank ordered 3 reference and 6 or 11 comparison electrodes. In Experiment 3 (matching), listeners adjusted the comparison electrode to pitch match the reference. Each experiment was evaluated for testing-range bias (point of subjective equality [PSE] vs. comparison-range midpoint) and reference-electrode slope bias (PSE vs. reference electrode). Discrimination showed large biases for both metrics; matching showed a smaller but significant reference-electrode bias; ranking showed no significant biases in either dimension. Ranking and matching were also evaluated for starting-point bias (PSE vs. adaptive-track starting point), but neither showed significant effects. A response-distribution truncation model explained a nonsignificant bias for ranking but it could not fully explain the observed biases for discrimination or matching. It is concluded that (a) BI-CI interaural pitch comparisons are inconsistent across test methods; (b) biases must be evaluated in more than one dimension before accepting the results as valid; and (c) of the three methods tested, ranking was least susceptible to biases and therefore emerged as the optimal approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tonotopic model of tinnitus claims that the tinnitus pitch corresponds to the audiometric edge; the homeostatic model suggests that it falls within the hearing loss (HL) area. The existing evidence mostly supports the homeostatic model, but the relationship between the tinnitus pitch and the HL frequencies has been insufficiently explored. To investigate the association between the tinnitus pitch and the audiometric profile in the largest study population to date. Three hundred and ninety-three patients with tonal or narrow-band tinnitus participated. HL frequencies included 30, 40, 50 (F50), 60 dB, and maximum HL. We defined edge frequencies in four different ways according to the existing studies. We assessed the association between all estimated frequencies and the tinnitus pitch using t-tests, Spearman's correlation, and multiple regression. All calculated frequencies differed significantly from the tinnitus pitch except for F50. None were correlated with the tinnitus pitch. F50 was the only significant predictor among the estimated frequencies in multiple regression. The tinnitus pitch fell within the HL area, and was mildly associated with F50. Our results support the homeostatic tinnitus model, and provide reliable evidence that tinnitus pitch does not correspond to the audiometric edge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congenital amusia is a lifelong impairment in musical ability. Individuals with amusia are found to show reduced sensitivity to emotion recognition in speech prosody and silent facial expressions, implying a possible cross-modal emotion-processing deficit. However, it is not clear whether the observed deficits are primarily confined to socio-emotional contexts, where visual cues (facial expression) often co-occur with auditory cues (emotion prosody) to express intended emotions, or extend to linguistic emotion processing. In order to better understand the underlying deficiency mechanism of emotion processing in individuals with amusia, we examined whether reduced sensitivity to emotional processing extends to the recognition of emotion category and valence of written words in individuals with amusia. Twenty Cantonese speakers with amusia and 17 controls were tested in three experiments: (1) emotion prosody rating, in which participants rated how much each spoken sentence was expressed in each of the four emotions on 7-point rating scales; (2) written word emotion recognition, in which participants recognized the emotion of written emotion words; and (3) written word valence judgment, in which participants judged the valence of written words. Results showed that participants with amusia preformed significantly less accurately than controls in emotion prosody recognition; in contrast, the two groups showed no significant difference in accuracy rates in both written word tasks (emotion recognition and valence judgment). The results indicate that the impairment of individuals with amusia in emotion processing may not generalize to linguistic emotion processing in written words, implying that the emotion deficit is likely to be restricted to socio-emotional contexts in individuals with amusia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To investigate the amount of laryngeal lift during the pitch glide speech task and during a bolus swallow. Method: Modified Barium Swallows (MBS) videos captured speech tasks and bolus trials. Using SwallowTail®, laryngeal elevation was measured by the amount of laryngeal lift from rest to its maximum excursion during each subject's pitch glide and 5 mL thin liquid, 20 mL thin liquid, and 15 mL puree trials. Paired t-tests, with Bonferroni correction, determined if there was a difference in laryngeal lift between the pitch glide and the bolus trials. Two methods were used to compare the methodology of measuring laryngeal lift. Result: Each subject's pitch glide was compared to their swallows. Laryngeal lift during the bolus swallow was greater than the lift during the pitch glide by an average of 1.10 cm, 1.38 cm, and 1.34 cm for 5 mL thin liquid, 20 mL thin liquid, and 15 mL puree, respectively. There was a significant difference in laryngeal lift between the pitch glide task and the 20 mL thin liquid, 5 mL thin liquid, and 15 mL puree swallows. Measurement tracking the posterior cricoid detected greater differences than the previous methodology using the hyoid. Conclusion: In this group of dysphagic patients, the larynx lifted significantly less during a pitch glide than during bolus swallows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetes self-management is a complex process in which individuals are asked to modify established health behaviors. Healthcare providers are instrumental in enhancing individual self-management and are encouraged to consider the patient perspective, often expressed indirectly. Using multidimensional analysis, this study analyzed talk to compare linguistic features used by adherent and non-adherent individuals with diabetes. In-depth telephone interviews were conducted with 108 individuals. Recruitment was stratified by sex, race and glycated hemoglobin (A1C) score. Interviewer contributions were removed from the transcripts, leaving only the participants' contributions. Using A1C score (=7%, >7%) the texts were divided into adherent and non-adherent datasets. Based on computer-assisted, quantitative analysis, ten linguistic features had a significant difference in frequency of use between the two groups. The participants in the adherent group used a greater frequency of linguistic features related to personal stance than the non-adherent group, and these expressions of personal stance were considered in relation to the participant's sense of agency. A better understanding of the way in which different subsets of individuals talk about diabetes self-management would facilitate greater healthcare provider understanding of the patient's perspective during clinical encounters to improve adherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Shanghai Chinese as well as many other Wu dialects, breathy voice is a well-documented accompaniment of the low-register tone syllables with obstruent as well as sonorant onsets. But Shanghai Chinese is rapidly changing and the breathy voice associated with low-register tones tends to disappear in young speakers' productions. In this study, we asked whether breathy voice is nevertheless still perceived and whether it pushes tone identification toward low-register tones. We conducted forced-choice tone identification tests on young native listeners of Shanghai Chinese, using low-high register tone continua--from tone T3 (23) to tone T2 (34)--imposed on base syllables with either modal or breathy voice quality, and beginning with various onset consonants. We used continua constructed from either naturally produced or synthesized syllables. Our results show that breathy voice does bias tone identification responses toward the low-register tone T3. This result held for both synthesized and natural stimuli, except for the /m/-onset stimuli derived from naturally produced syllables. We propose that the phonetic change at issue--loss of breathiness in production--is not due to misperception but reflects the ever-stronger influence of Standard Mandarin Chinese. In other words, this particular case of sound change seems to be led by production rather than perception. It remains an open question whether this kind of sound change is only determined by sociolinguistic factors (here, the dominance of Mandarin Chinese) or is independently motivated by phonetic and/or phonological factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pitch accent serves multiple duties (encoding lexical accent, syntactic structure, and focus) in spoken Japanese. This study investigates how listeners interpret a role-ambiguous pitch prominence surfacing as F0 rise, which could be a cue to the resolution of a syntactic ambiguity between two possible branching structures, or a signal of contrastive focus on the constituent accompanied by the rise. Two visual world paradigm experiments tested the same Japanese linguistic stimuli with and without pitch emphasis on the second word of structures of the following form: modifier + N1 + N2. In Experiment 1, the visual context suppressed the availability of the contrastive interpretation; in Experiment 2, the visual context made the contrastive interpretation available. We found that the same pitch event can be interpreted as both syntax-encoding and contrastencoding information within the course of processing the same sentence, as long as contextual information is made visually available. When contrastive focus is pragmatically felicitous, it is computed immediately, as soon as the incoming input is accompanied by a notable pitch prominence (Experiment 2). The same prosodic cue can then be re-interpreted as a signal to syntax after the branching ambiguity is recognized due to subsequent input (Experiments 1 and 2). This is most consistent with the view that an initially assigned prosodic boundary is exploited for re-interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Given the role of auditory perception in voice production, studies have investigated whether impairments in auditory perception may underlie the noted disruptions in speech in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Studies of loudness perception in PD show impairments in the perception of self-generated speech, but not external tones. Studies of pitch perception in PD have only examined external tones, but these studies differed in terms of the interstimulus intervals (ISIs) that were used, did not examine the impact of cognition, and report conflicting results. To clarify pitch perception in PD, this work investigated perception of self-generated vocal pitch, controlling for cognition and ISI. Method: A total of 30 individuals with and without PD completed (a) hearing threshold testing, (b) the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and (c) an adaptive just-noticeable-difference paradigm under two separate ISIs (100 ms and 1,000 ms) to assess acuity to self-generated vocal pitch. Results: There was no significant difference in acuity between individuals with and without PD. Both groups demonstrated significantly worse acuity for longer compared to shorter ISIs. Montreal Cognitive Assessment scores were not a significant predictor of acuity. Conclusions: The results suggest that acuity to self-generated vocal pitch does not differ between individuals with and without PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare release from masking (RM) between Mandarin-speaking and Englishspeaking listeners with normal hearing for competing speech when target--masker sex cues, spatial cues, or both were available. Method: Speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) for competing speech were measured in 21 Mandarin-speaking and 15 English-speaking adults with normal hearing using a modified coordinate response measure task. SRTs were measured for target sentences produced by a male talker in the presence of two masker talkers (different male talkers or female talkers). The target sentence was always presented directly in front of the listener, and the maskers were either colocated with the target or were spatially separated from the target (+90°, -90°). Stimuli were presented via headphones and were virtually spatialized using head-related transfer functions. Three masker conditions were used to measure RM relative to the baseline condition: (a) talker sex cues, (b) spatial cues, or (c) combined talker sex and spatial cues. Results: The results showed large amounts of RM according to talker sex and/or spatial cues. There was no significant difference in SRTs between Chinese and English listeners for the baseline condition, where no talker sex or spatial cues were available. Furthermore, there was no significant difference in RM between Chinese and English listeners when spatial cues were available. However, RM was significantly larger for Chinese listeners when talker sex cues or combined talker sex and spatial cues were available. Conclusion: Listeners who speak a tonal language such as Mandarin Chinese may be able to take greater advantage of talker sex cues than listeners who do not speak a tonal language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examined the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on supra-threshold auditory processing abilities in children. Design: Cross-sectional study. Study sample: Ninety children participated in the study, based on the number of languages they know children were assigned into three groups, i.e. monolingual, bilingual and multilingual. Amplitude modulation detection threshold, gap detection threshold, pitch discrimination threshold and spectral ripple discrimination threshold were measured. Results: Results showed superior supra-threshold auditory processing abilities among multilingual and bilingual children than monolingual children. The results further showed that, the supra-threshold auditory processing of multilingual children was better than bilingual children. Conclusion: This finding suggests that knowledge of multiple languages improves supra-threshold auditory processing abilities. This study adds to the growing body of literature supporting the superior supra-threshold auditory processing abilities among bilingual and multilingual individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In typical Western music, important pitches occur disproportionately often on important beats, referred to as the tonal-metric hierarchy (Prince & Schmuckler, 2014, Music Perception, 31, 254–270). We tested whether listeners are sensitive to this alignment of pitch and temporal structure. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were 200 artificial melodies with random pitch contours; all melodies had both a regular beat and a pitch class distribution that favored one musical key, but had either high or low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Thirty-two listeners rated the goodness of each melody, and another 41 listeners rated the melodies' metric clarity (how clear the beat was). The tonal-metric hierarchy did not affect either rating type, likely because the melodies may have only weakly (at best) established a musical key. In Experiment 2, we shuffled the pitches in 60 composed melodies (scrambling pitch contour, but not rhythm) to generate versions with high and low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Both ratings of goodness (N = 40) and metric clarity (N = 40) revealed strong evidence of the tonal-metric hierarchy influencing ratings; there was no effect of musical training. In Experiment 3, we phase-shifted, rather than shuffled, the pitches from the composed melodies, thus preserving pitch contour. Both rating types (goodness N = 43, metric clarity N = 32) replicated the results of Experiment 2. These findings establish the psychological reality of the tonal-metric hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social meaning is not conveyed through words alone, but also through how words are produced phonetically. This paper investigates the role of loudness and pitch in determining the perception of politeness-related judgments in Korean. It has been proposed that high pitch is universally associated with polite or deferential social meanings. In contrast to this, Experiment 1 examined the perceptual effect of pitch and found no effect. Experiment 2 tested the effect of loudness, and found that listeners associate quieter speech with deference. Finally, Experiment 3 investigated the simultaneous effects of loudness and pitch, and found again that loudness had a consistent effect, whereas pitch only had a weak effect. Analyses of individual differences suggest that in contrast to loudness, which is interpreted uniformly across Korean listeners, pitch has more variegated social meanings: Some listeners associate high pitch with deferential meaning, others associate low pitch with deferential meaning. Thus, we find loudness to be a more unambiguous indicator of deferential speech than pitch. These findings shed light on how different acoustic properties contribute to the indexing of social stances, and they suggest that the role of pitch in conveying politeness may have been overstated in past research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Theoretical models and substantial research have proposed that general auditory sensitivity is a developmental foundation for speech perception and language acquisition. Nonetheless, controversies exist about the effectiveness of general auditory training in improving speech and language skills. This research investigated the relationships among general auditory sensitivity, phonemic speech perception, and word-level speech perception via the examination of pitch and lexical tone perception in children. Method: Forty-eight typically developing 4- to 6-year-old Cantonese-speaking children were tested on the discrimination of the pitch patterns of lexical tones in synthetic stimuli, discrimination of naturally produced lexical tones, and identification of lexical tone in familiar words. Results: The findings revealed that accurate lexical tone discrimination and identification did not necessarily entail the accurate discrimination of nonlinguistic stimuli that followed the pitch levels and pitch shapes of lexical tones. Although pitch discrimination and tone discrimination abilities were strongly correlated, accuracy in pitch discrimination was lower than that in tone discrimination, and nonspeech pitch discrimination ability did not precede linguistic tone discrimination in the developmental trajectory. Conclusions: Contradicting the theoretical models, the findings of this study suggest that general auditory sensitivity and speech perception may not be causally or hierarchically related. The finding that accuracy in pitch discrimination is lower than that in tone discrimination suggests that comparable nonlinguistic auditory perceptual ability may not be necessary for accurate speech perception and language learning. The results cast doubt on the use of nonlinguistic auditory perceptual training to improve children’s speech, language, and literacy abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the perception of Mandarin lexical tones by native speakers of Burmese who use lexical tones in their first language (L1) but are naïve to Mandarin. Unlike Mandarin tones, which are primarily cued by pitch, Burmese tones are cued by phonation type as well as pitch. The question of interest is whether Burmese listeners can utilize their L1 experience in processing unfamiliar Mandarin tones. Burmese listeners' discrimination accuracy was compared with that of Mandarin listeners and Australian English listeners. The Australian English group was included as a control group with a non-tonal background. Accuracy of perception of six tone pairs (T1-T2, T1-T3, T1-T4, T2-T3, T2-T4, T3-T4) was assessed in a discrimination test. Our main findings are 1) Mandarin listeners were more accurate than non-native listeners in discriminating all tone pairs, 2) Australian English listeners naïve to Mandarin were more accurate than similarly naïve Burmese listeners in discriminating all tone pairs except for T2-T4, and 3) Burmese listeners had the greatest trouble discriminating T2-T3 and T1-T2. Taken together, the results suggest that merely possessing lexical tones in L1 may not necessarily facilitate the perception of non-native tones, and that the active use of phonation type in encoding L1 tones may have played a role in Burmese listeners' less than optimal perception of Mandarin tones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine developmental trends in spectral ripple discrimination (SRD) and to compare the performance of typically developing children to children with auditory processing disorder (APD). Study design: Cross-sectional study. Study sample: Fifteen children with APD, as well as 17 typically developing children and 14 adults reporting no listening or academic difficulties participated. Results: Typically developing children showed poor SRD thresholds compared to adults, indicating prolonged maturation of spectral shape recognition. Both typically developing children and APD children showed a maturational trend in SRD, but a General Linear Model fit to their thresholds showed that children with APD displayed SRD thresholds that were significantly poorer than those of typically developing children when controlling for age. This suggests that in APD children, SRD maturation lags behind typically developing children. Conclusion: Poor spectral ripple discrimination may explain some of the listening difficulties experienced by children with APD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of nonmodal phonation on estimates of subglottal pressure (Ps) derived from the magnitude of a neck-surface accelerometer (ACC) signal and to confirm previous findings regarding the impact of vowel contexts and pitch levels in a larger cohort of participants. Method: Twenty-six vocally healthy participants (18 women, 8 men) were asked to produce a series of p-vowel syllables with descending loudness in 3 vowel contexts (/a/, /i/, and /u/), 3 pitch levels (comfortable, high, and low), and 4 elicited phonatory conditions (modal, breathy, strained, and rough). Estimates of Ps for each vowel segment were obtained by averaging the intraoral air pressure plateau before and after each segment. The root-mean-square magnitude of the neck-surface ACC signal was computed for each vowel segment. Three linear mixed-effects models were used to statistically assess the effects of vowel, pitch, and phonatory condition on the linear relationship (slope and intercept) between Ps and ACC signal magnitude. Results: Results demonstrated statistically significant linear relationships between ACC signal magnitude and Ps within participants but with increased intercepts for the nonmodal phonatory conditions; slopes were affected to a lesser extent. Vowel and pitch contexts did not significantly affect the linear relationship between ACC signal magnitude and Ps. Conclusion: The classic linear relationship between ACC signal magnitude and Ps is significantly affected when nonmodal phonation is produced by a speaker. Future work is warranted to further characterize nonmodal phonatory characteristics to improve the ACC-based prediction of Ps during naturalistic speech production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether merging the clinical pitch pattern test procedure with psychoacoustic adaptive methods would create a new tool feasible to capture individual differences in pitch temporal processing and patterning capacity of children and adults. Method: Sixty-six individuals, young children (ages 10-- 12 years, n = 22), older children (ages 13--15 years, n = 23), and adults (ages 18--33 years, n = 21), were recruited and assigned to subgroups based on reported duration (years) of instrumental music instruction. Additional background information was collected in order to assess if the pitch temporal processing and patterning span developed, the Pspan, was sensitive to individual differences across participants. Results: The evaluation of the Pspan task as a scale indicated good parallel reliability across runs assessed by Cronbach's alpha, and scores were normally distributed. Between- subjects analysis of variance indicated main effects for both age groups and music groups recruited for the study. A multiple regression analysis with the Pspan scores as the dependent variable found that 3 measures of music instruction, age in years, and paternal education were predictive of enhanced temporal processing and patterning capacity for pitch input. Conclusions: The outcomes suggest that the Pspan task is a time-efficient data collection tool that is sensitive to the duration of instrumental music instruction, maturation, and paternal education. In addition, results indicate that the task is sensitive to age-related auditory temporal processing and patterning performance changes during adolescence when children are 10--15 years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Congenital amusia is a neurological dysfunction which is defined as an anomaly in pitch processing. This dysfunction might negatively affect individuals' pitch perception in both musical contexts and in speaking. Methods: In this study, an on-line MBEA test is used in order to evaluate musical pitch perception of 38 stutterers who receive speech therapy and 31 stutterers who do not receive speech therapy, in comparison with 70 fluent speaking individuals. Results: Between online MBEA scores of speech therapy receiving group and non- speech therapy group, any statistically substantial relation could not be detected (p >.05). Speech therapy receiving group scored better in online MBEA test that non- speech therapy group. Especially, together with the decrease in intensity of stuttering, the mean average of the test increases. A statistically substantial relation between the online MBEA scores of stutterer groups and the control group has been detected (p >.05). A linear relationship was seen between patients' age and online MBEA scores, at the rate of 28.3%. Conclusions: With accordance to findings in the study, it has been hypothesized that stuttering individuals might have problems in terms of musical pitch perception. Individuals who stuttering has tone deafness The Tone Deafness Evaluation Test will be an alternate evaluation instrument for developmental stuttering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Pitch pattern sequence (PPS) and duration pattern sequence (DPS) tests are frequently used in the assessment of auditory processing disorder. Current recommendations suggest alternate, interchangeable modes for responding to stimuli. Purpose: The objective of the study is to evaluate the influence of response mode (i.e., humming, pointing, and labeling) and age on PPS and DPS performance of 7- to 11-year-old children. Research Design: Laboratory-based testing of school children. Cross-sectional comparison of age, with repeated measures of age, test, ear, and response mode. Study Sample: From 452 children recruited, 228 right-handed children (109 girls) aged 7 years to 11 years 11 months (mean age 9 years 4 months) completed at least one test (PPS: 211, DPS: 198), and 181 children completed both tests. Audiology inclusion criteria include normal hearing thresholds (≤15 dB HL at octave frequencies 250-8000 Hz); word recognition in quiet ≥92%; tympanogram peak compensated static acoustic compliance 0.4-1.6 mmhos; and tympanometric peak pressure -100 to +50 daPa, all in both ears. Other inclusion criteria were Portuguese as first language; right handed; no musical training; no related, known, or observed phonological, learning, neurologic, psychiatric, or behavioral disorder; otologic history; and delayed neuropsychomotor or language development. Data Collection and Analysis: PPS: 30 trials per ear and response condition of three consecutive 500 msec duration intermixed high (1430 Hz) or low (880 Hz) frequency tones presented monaurally at 50 dB HL. The first response condition was humming followed by labeling (naming: high or low). DPS: As per PPS except 1000 Hz tones of intermixed 500 (long) and 250 msec (short) duration. First response was pointing (at a symbolic object) followed by labeling. Trends across age and between tests were assessed using repeated measures generalized linear mixed models. Correlation coefficients were calculated to assess relations among test scores. The two-sided significance level was 0.05. Results: Older children performed better than younger children in all tasks. Humming the tone pattern (PPS humming) produced generally better performance than either articulating the attributes of the tones (labeling) or pointing to objects representing tone duration. PPS humming produced ceiling performance for many children of all ages. For both labeling tasks and DPS pointing, performance was better on the PPS than on the DPS, for stimulation of the right than the left ear, and in boys than girls. Individual performance on the two tasks was highly correlated. Conclusions: Response mode does matter in the PPS and DPS. Results from humming should not be combined with or be a substitute for results obtained from a labeling response. Tasks that rely on labeling a tonal stimulus should be avoided in testing hearing in children or other special populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the perceptual trade-off between knowledge of a language’s statistical regularities and reliance on the acoustic signal during L2 spoken word recognition. We test how early learners track and make use of segmental and suprasegmental cues and their relative frequencies during non-native word recognition. English learners of Mandarin were taught an artificial tonal language in which a tone’s informativeness for word identification varied according to neighborhood density. The stimuli mimicked Mandarin’s uneven distribution of syllable+tone combinations by varying syllable frequency and the probability of particular tones co-occurring with a particular syllable. Use of statistical regularities was measured by four-alternative forced-choice judgments and by eye fixations to target and competitor symbols. Half of the participants were trained on one speaker, that is, low speaker variability while the other half were trained on four speakers. After four days of learning, the results confirmed that tones are processed according to their informativeness. Eye movements to the newly learned symbols demonstrated that L2 learners use tonal probabilities at an early stage of word recognition, regardless of speaker variability. The amount of variability in the signal, however, influenced the time course of recovery from incorrect anticipatory looks: participants exposed to low speaker variability recovered from incorrect probability-based predictions of tone more rapidly than participants exposed to greater variability. These results motivate two conclusions: early L2 learners track the distribution of segmental and suprasegmental co-occurrences and make predictions accordingly during spoken word recognition; and when the acoustic input is more variable because of multi-speaker input, listeners rely more on their knowledge of tone-syllable co-occurrence frequency distributions and less on the incoming acoustic signal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To evaluate the feasibility of predictable or unpredictable amplitude-modulated sounds for tinnitus therapy. Design: The study consisted of two parts. (1) An adaptation experiment. Loudness level matches and rating scales (10-point) for loudness and distress were obtained at a silent baseline and at the end of three counterbalanced 30-min exposures (silence, predictable and unpredictable). (2) A qualitative 2-week sound therapy feasibility trial. Participants took home a personal music player (PMP). Study sample: Part 1: 23 individuals with chronic tinnitus and part 2: seven individuals randomly selected from Part 1. Results: Self-reported tinnitus loudness and annoyance were significantly lower than baseline ratings after acute unpredictable sound exposure. Tinnitus annoyance ratings were also significantly lower than the baseline but the effect was small. The feasibility trial identified that participant preferences for sounds varied. Three participants did not obtain any benefit from either sound. Three participants preferred unpredictable compared to predictable sounds. Some participants had difficulty using the PMP, the average self-report hours of use were low (less <1 h/day). Conclusions: Unpredictable surf-like sounds played using a PMP is a feasible tinnitus treatment. Further work is required to improve the acceptance of the sound and ease of PMP use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, pitch accents are understood to relate to the information structure of a sentence and its discourse connections, while prosodic boundaries indicate groupings of words and affect how constituents attach into a syntactic structure. Here, we show that accents also affect syntactic attachment in multiple different syntactic structures. Three auditory questionnaires on ambiguous attachment sentences (such as Tom reported that Bill was bribed [last May]) find that accenting the higher or lower verb (reported or bribed) increases the attachment of the final adverbial phrase as a modifier of the accented verb. A fourth experiment shows that accents on verbs or object nouns (in sentences like Jenny sketched a child [with crayons]) also increase the attachment of the final prepositional phrase to the accented head (sketched with crayons versus a child with crayons). Accent effects were small but consistent across sentences with different levels of bias and did not depend on prosodic boundaries. The results suggest that focused elements are important to the main assertion of the sentence and therefore draw the attachment of upcoming material (though the salience of attachment sites may also be important). The results also demonstrate that both prosodic phrasing and pitch accents can affect basic syntactic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The scalp-recorded frequency-following response (FFR) has been widely accepted in assessing the brain's processing of speech stimuli for people who speak tonal and nontonal languages. Characteristics of scalp-recorded FFRs with increasing number of sweeps have been delineated through the use of an exponential curve-fitting model in Chinese adults; however, characteristics of speech processing for people who speak a nontonal language remain unclear. Purpose: This study had two specific aims. The first was to examine the characteristics of speech processing in neonates and adults who speak a nontonal language, to evaluate the goodness of fit of an exponential model on neonatal and adult FFRs, and to determine the differences, if any, between the two groups of participants. The second aim was to assess effective recording parameters for American neonates and adults. Research Design: This investigation employed a prospective between-subject study design. Study Sample: A total of 12 American neonates (1-3 days old) and 12 American adults (24.1 ± 2.5 yr old) were recruited. Each neonate passed an automated hearing screening at birth and all adult participants had normal hearing and were native English speakers. Data Collection and Analysis: The English vowel /i/with a rising pitch contour (117-166 Hz) was used to elicit the FFR. A total of 8,000 accepted sweeps were recorded from each participant. Three objective indices (Frequency Error, Tracking Accuracy, and Pitch Strength) were computed to estimate the frequency-tracking acuity and neural phase-locking magnitude when progressively more sweeps were included in the averaged waveform. For each objective index, the FFR trends were fit to an exponential curve-fitting model that included estimates of asymptotic amplitude, noise amplitude, and a time constant. Results: Significant differences were observed between groups for Frequency Error, Tracking Accuracy, and Pitch Strength of the FFR trends. The adult participants had significantly smaller Frequency Error (p < 0.001), better Tracking Accuracy (p = 0.001), and larger Pitch Strength (p = 0.003) values than the neonate participants. The adult participants also demonstrated a faster rate of improvement (i.e., a smaller time constant) in all three objective indices compared to the neonate participants. The smaller time constants observed in adults indicate that a larger number of sweeps will be needed to adequately assess the FFR for neonates. Furthermore, the exponential curve-fitting model provided a good fit to the FFR trends with increasing number of sweeps for American neonates (mean r² = 0.89) and adults (mean r² = 0.96). Conclusions: Significant differences were noted between the neonatal and adult participants for Frequency Error, Tracking Accuracy, and Pitch Strength. These differences have important clinical implications in determining when to stop a recording and the number of sweeps needed to adequately assess the frequency-encoding acuity and neural phase-locking magnitude in neonates and adults. These findings lay an important foundation for establishing a normative database for American neonates and adults, and may prove to be useful in the development of diagnostic and therapeutic paradigms for neonates and adults who speak a nontonal language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background The Transsexual Voice Questionnaire (TVQMtF) was designed to capture the voice-related perceptions of individuals whose gender identity as female is the opposite of their birth-assigned gender (MtF women). Evaluation of the psychometric properties of the TVQMtF is ongoing. Aims To investigate associations between TVQMtF scores and (1) self-perceptions of voice femininity and (2) acoustic parameters of voice pitch and voice quality in order to evaluate further the validity of the TVQMtF. A strong correlation between TVQMtF scores and self-ratings of voice femininity was predicted, but no association between TVQMtF scores and acoustic measures of voice pitch and quality was proposed. Methods & Procedures Participants were 148 MtF women (mean age 48.14 years) recruited from the La Trobe Communication Clinic and the clinics of three doctors specializing in transgender health. All participants completed the TVQMtF and 34 of these participants also provided a voice sample for acoustic analysis. Pearson product-moment correlation analysis was conducted to examine the associations between TVQMtF scores and (1) self-perceptions of voice femininity and (2) acoustic measures of F0, jitter (%), shimmer (dB) and harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR). Outcomes & Results Strong negative correlations between the participants' perceptions of their voice femininity and the TVQMtF scores demonstrated that for this group of MtF women a low self-rating of voice femininity was associated with more frequent negative voice-related experiences. This association was strongest with the vocal-functioning component of the TVQMtF. These strong correlations and high levels of shared variance between the TVQMtF and a measure of a related construct provides evidence for the convergent validity of the TVQMtF. The absence of significant correlations between the TVQMtF and the acoustic data is consistent with the equivocal findings of earlier research. This finding indicates that these two measures assess different aspects of the voice-related experience. Conclusions & Implications Evidence supporting the validity of the TVQMtF is strong and indicates that it is a sound measure for capturing the MtF woman's self-perceptions of her vocal functioning and how her voice impacts on her everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: With bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users there is typically a place mismatch between the locations stimulated by the left and right electrode arrays. This mismatch can affect performance, potentially limiting binaural benefits. One way to address this is by perceptually realigning the arrays such that a given frequency in the input stimulates perceptually matched locations in the two ears. A clinically feasible technique is needed that can determine the appropriate perceptual alignment. A pitch matching task can potentially be used for this, but only if it can be performed in a clinically feasible amount of time. The objective of this study was to determine the minimal number of electrodes that need to be pitch matched to accurately determine pitch matches across the entire array.Design: A retrospective analysis of pitch matching data was conducted. Subsets of pitch matches were selected and the predicted pitch matching across the array was compared to that predicted by the full dataset.Study sample: 16 bilateral CI users.Results: The results indicated that nine pitch matches are sufficient, which can typically be obtained in approximately 7 min.Conclusion: The results reveal a clinically feasible method for determining pitch matches across the array. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of an experimental pitch-coding strategy for improving recognition of Mandarin lexical tone in cochlear implant (CI) recipients. Design: Adult CI recipients were tested on recognition of Mandarin tones in quiet and speech-shaped noise at a signal-to-noise ratio of +10 dB; Mandarin sentence speech-reception threshold (SRT) in speech-shaped noise; and pitch discrimination of synthetic complex-harmonic tones in quiet. Two versions of the experimental strategy were examined: (OPAL) linear (1:1) mapping of fundamental frequency (F0) to the coded modulation rate; and (OPAL+) transposed mapping of high F0s to a lower coded rate. Outcomes were compared to results using the clinical ACE™ strategy. Study sample: Five Mandarin speaking users of Nucleus® cochlear implants. Results: A small but significant benefit in recognition of lexical tones was observed using OPAL compared to ACE in noise, but not in quiet, and not for OPAL+ compared to ACE or OPAL in quiet or noise. Sentence SRTs were significantly better using OPAL+ and comparable using OPAL to those using ACE. No differences in pitch discrimination thresholds were observed across strategies. Conclusions: OPAL can provide benefits to Mandarin lexical tone recognition in moderately noisy conditions and preserve perception of Mandarin sentences in challenging noise conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Evidence suggests that extensive experience with lexical tones or musical training provides an advantage in perceiving nonnative lexical tones. This investigation concerns whether such an advantage is evident in learning nonnative lexical tones based on the distributional structure of the input. Method: Using an established protocol, distributional learning of lexical tones was investigated with tone language (Mandarin) listeners with no musical training (Experiment 1) and nontone language (Australian English) listeners with musical training (Experiment 2). Within each experiment, participants were trained on a bimodal (2-peak) or a unimodal (single peak) distribution along a continuum spanning a Thai lexical tone minimal pair. Discrimination performance on the target minimal pair was assessed before and after training. Results: Mandarin nonmusicians exhibited clear distributional learning (listeners in the bimodal, but not those in the unimodal condition, improved significantly as a function of training), whereas Australian English musicians did not (listeners in both the bimodal and unimodal conditions improved as a function of training). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that veridical perception of lexical tones is not sufficient for distributional learning of nonnative lexical tones to occur. Rather, distributional learning appears to be modulated by domain-specific pitch experience and is constrained possibly by top-down interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of dynamic pitch in target speech on older and younger listeners' speech recognition in temporally modulated noise. First, we examined whether the benefit from dynamic-pitch cues depends on the temporal modulation of noise. Second, we tested whether older listeners can benefit from dynamicpitch cues for speech recognition in noise. Last, we explored the individual factors that predict the amount of dynamic-pitch benefit for speech recognition in noise. Method: Younger listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with varying levels of hearing sensitivity participated in the study, in which speech reception thresholds were measured with sentences in nonspeech noise. Results: The younger listeners benefited more from dynamic pitch for speech recognition in temporally modulated noise than unmodulated noise. Older listeners were able to benefit from the dynamic-pitch cues but received less benefit from noise modulation than the younger listeners. For those older listeners with hearing loss, the amount of hearing loss strongly predicted the dynamic-pitch benefit for speech recognition in noise. Conclusions: Dynamic-pitch cues aid speech recognition in noise, particularly when noise has temporal modulation. Hearing loss negatively affects the dynamic-pitch benefit to older listeners with significant hearing loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker's intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relative to H* accents. The second replicates this finding and demonstrates that the facilitation is caused by early derivation of the implicature in the L+H* condition. We attribute the effect to a link between L+H* and pragmatic considerations, such as speaker knowledge effects, or the saliency of alternatives relevant to the computation of implicatures. More generally our findings illustrate how intonation interacts at a cognitive level with pragmatic inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We investigated cross-linguistic differences in fundamental frequency range (FFR) in Welsh-English bilingual speech. This is the first study that reports gender-specific behavior in switching FFRs across languages in bilingual speech. Method: FFR was conceptualized as a behavioral pattern using measures of span (range of fundamental frequency—in semitones—covered by the speaker's voice) and level (overall height of fundamental frequency maxima, minima, and means of speaker's voice) in each language. Results: FFR measures were taken from recordings of 30 Welsh-English bilinguals (14 women and 16 men), who read 70 semantically matched sentences, 35 in each language. Comparisons were made within speakers across languages, separately in male and female speech. Language background and language use information was elicited for qualitative analysis of extralinguistic factors that might affect the FFR. Conclusions: Cross-linguistic differences in FFR were found to be consistent across female bilinguals but random across male bilinguals. Most female bilinguals showed distinct FFRs for each language. Most male bilinguals, however, were found not to change their FFR when switching languages. Those who did change used different strategies than women when differentiating FFRs between languages. Detected cross-linguistic differences in FFR can be explained by sociocultural factors. Therefore, sociolinguistic factors are to be taken into account in any further study of language-specific pitch setting and cross-linguistic differences in FFR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way to provide pitch information to cochlear implant users is through amplitude-modulation rate. It is currently unknown whether amplitude-modulation rate can provide cochlear implant users with pitch information adequate for perceiving melodic information. In the present study, the notes of a song were encoded via amplitude-modulation rate of pulse trains on single electrodes at the apex or middle of long electrode arrays. The melody of the song was either physically correct or modified by compression or expansion. Nine cochlear implant users rated the extent to which the song was out of tune in the different conditions. Cochlear implant users on average did not show sensitivity to melody compression or expansion regardless of place of stimulation. These results were found despite the fact that three of the cochlear implant users showed the expected sensitivity to melody compression and expansion with the same task using acoustic pure tones in a contralateral acoustic ear. Normal-hearing listeners showed an inconsistent and weak effect of melody compression and expansion when the notes of the song were encoded with acoustic pulse rate. The results suggest that amplitude-modulation rate provides insufficient access to melodic information for cochlear-implant and normal-hearing listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Models of speech production often abstract away from shared physiology in pitch control and lingual articulation, positing independent control of tone and vowel units. We assess the validity of this assumption in Mandarin Chinese by evaluating the stability of lingual articulation for vowels across variation in tone. Method: Electromagnetic articulography was used to track flesh points on the tongue (tip, body, dorsum), lips, and jaw while native Mandarin speakers (n = 6) produced 3 vowels, /pa/, /pi/, /pu/, combined with 4 Mandarin tones: T1 “high,” T2 “rising,” T3 “low,” and T4 “falling.” Results: Consistent with physiological expectations, tones that begin low, T2 and T3, conditioned a lower position of the tongue body for the vowel /a/. For the vowel /i/, we found the opposite effect, whereby tones that begin low, T2 and T3, conditioned a higher tongue body position. Conclusions: The physiology of pitch control exerts systematic variation on the lingual articulation of /a/ across tones. The effects of tone on /i/ articulation are in the opposite direction predicted by physiological considerations. Physiologically arbitrary variation of the type observed for /i/ challenges the assumption that phonetic patterns can be determined by independent control of tone (source) and vowel (filter) production units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential for estimating subglottal air pressure using a neck-surface accelerometer and to compare the accuracy of predicting subglottal air pressure relative to predicting acoustic sound pressure level (SPL). Method: Indirect estimates of subglottal pressure (Psg') were obtained from 10 vocally healthy speakers during loud-tosoft repetitions of 3 different /p/-vowel gestures (/pa/, /pi/, /pu/) at 3 pitch levels in the modal register. Intraoral air pressure, neck-surface acceleration, and radiated acoustic pressure were recorded, and the root-mean-square amplitude of the acceleration signal was correlated with Psg' and SPL. Results: The coefficient of determination between accelerometer level and Psg' was high when data were pooled from all vowel and pitch contexts for each participant (r² = .68-.93). These relationships were stronger than corresponding relationships between accelerometer level and SPL (r² = .46-.81). The average 95% prediction interval for estimating Psg' using accelerometer level was ±2.53 cm H2O, ranging from ±1.70 to ±3.74 cm H2O across participants. Conclusions: Accelerometer signal amplitude correlated more strongly with Psg' than with SPL. Future work is warranted to investigate the robustness of the relationship in nonmodal voice qualities, individuals with voice disorders, and accelerometerbased ambulatory monitoring of subglottal pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The relationship between short-term memory for phonology and pitch was explored by examining accuracy scores for typically developing children for 5 experimental tasks: immediate nonword repetition (NWR), nonword repetition with an 8-s silent interference (NWRS), pitch discrimination (PD), pitch discrimination with an 8-s silent interference (PDS), and pitch matching (PM). Method: Thirty-six 7- and 8-year-old children (21 girls, 15 boys) with normal hearing, language, and cognition were asked to listen to and repeat nonsense words (NWR, NWRS), make a same versus different decision between 2 tones (PD, PDS), and listen to and then vocally reproduce a tone (PM). Results: Results showed no significant correlations between tasks of phonological memory and tests of pitch memory, that participants scored significantly better on nonword repetition tasks than PD and PM tasks, and that participants performed significantly better on tasks with no silent interference. Discussion: These findings suggest that, for typically developing children, pitch may be stored and rehearsed in a separate location than phonological information. Because of fundamental task differences, further research is needed to corroborate these data and determine the presence of developmental effects and neuroanatomical locations where a potential language/music overlap is occurring in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]