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Purpose: Greater recognition of the impact of hearing loss on cognitive functions has led speech/hearing clinics to focus more on auditory memory outcomes. Typically evaluated by scoring participants' recall on a list of unrelated words after they have heard the list read out loud, this method implies pitch and timing variations across words. Here, we questioned whether these variations could impact performance differentially in one language or another. Method: In a series of online studies evaluating auditory short-term memory in normally hearing adults, we examined how pitch patterns (Experiment 1), timing patterns (Experiment 2), and interactions between the two (Experiment 3) affected free recall of words, cued recall of forgotten words, and mental demand. Note that visual memory was never directly tested; written words were only used after auditory encoding in the cued recall part. Studies were administered in both French and English, always conducted with native listeners. Result: Confirming prior work, grouping mechanisms facilitated free recall, but not cued recall (the latter being only affected by longer presentation time) or ratings of mental demand. Critically, grouping by pitch provided more benefit for French than for English listeners, while grouping by time was equally beneficial in both languages. Conclusion: Pitch is more useful to French-than to English-speaking listeners for encoding spoken words in short-term memory, perhaps due to the syllablebased versus stress-based rhythms inherent to each language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine the relationship between the perceptual measure of speech naturalness and objective measures of pitch, loudness, and rate control as a potential tool for assessment of ataxic dysarthria. Method: Twenty-seven participants with ataxia and 29 age- and sex-matched control participants completed the pitch glide and loudness step tasks drawn from the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment-Second Edition (FDA-2) in addition to speech diadochokinetic (DDK) tasks. First, group differences were compared for pitch variability in the pitch glide task, loudness variability in the loudness step task, and syllable duration and speech rate in the DDK task. Then, these acoustic measures were compared with previously collected ratings of speech naturalness by speech-language pathology graduate students. Results: Robust group differences were measured for pitch variability and both DDK syllable duration and speech rate, indicating that the ataxia group had greater pitch variability, longer DDK syllable duration, and slower DDK speech rate than the control group. No group differences were measured for loudness variability. There were robust relationships between speech naturalness and pitch variability, DDK syllable duration, and DDK speech rate, but not for loudness variability. Conclusions: Objective acoustic measures of pitch variability in the FDA-2 pitch glide task and syllable duration and speech rate in the DDK task can be used to validate perceptual measures of speech naturalness. Overall, speechlanguage pathologists can incorporate both perceptual measures of speech naturalness and acoustic measures of pitch variability and DDK performance for a comprehensive evaluation of ataxic dysarthria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We investigated speech and nonspeech auditory processing of temporal and spectral cues in people who do and do not stutter. We also asked whether self-reported stuttering severity was predicted by performance on the auditory processing measures. Method: People who stutter (n = 23) and people who do not stutter (n = 28) completed a series of four auditory processing tasks online. These tasks consisted of speech and nonspeech stimuli differing in spectral or temporal cues. We then used independent-samples t-tests to assess differences in phonetic categorization slopes between groups and linear mixed-effects models to test differences in nonspeech auditory processing between stuttering and nonstuttering groups, and stuttering severity as a function of performance on all auditory processing tasks. Results: We found statistically significant differences between people who do and do not stutter in phonetic categorization of a continuum differing in a temporal cue and in discrimination of nonspeech stimuli differing in a spectral cue. A significant proportion of variance in self-reported stuttering severity was predicted by performance on the auditory processing measures. Conclusions: Taken together, these results suggest that people who stutter process both speech and nonspeech auditory information differently than people who do not stutter and may point to subtle differences in auditory processing that could contribute to stuttering. We also note that these patterns could be the consequence of listening to one's own speech, rather than the cause of production differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The present study examined whether participants respond to unperturbed parameters while experiencing specific perturbations in auditory feedback. For instance, we aim to determine if speakers adjust voice loudness when only pitch is artificially altered in auditory feedback. This phenomenon is referred to as the “accompanying effect” in the present study. Method: Thirty native Mandarin speakers were asked to sustain the vowel /ɛ/ for 3 s while their auditory feedback underwent single shifts in one of the three distinct ways: pitch shift (±100 cents; coded as PT), loudness shift (±6 dB; coded as LD), or first formant (F1) shift (±100 Hz; coded as FM). Participants were instructed to ignore the perturbations in their auditory feedback. Response types were categorized based on pitch, loudness, and F1 for each individual trial, such as Popp_Lopp_Fopp indicating opposing responses in all three domains. Results: The accompanying effect appeared 93% of the time. Bayesian Poisson regression models indicate that opposing responses in all three domains (Popp_Lopp_Fopp) were the most prevalent response type across the conditions (PT, LD, and FM). The more frequently used response types exhibited opposing responses and significantly larger response curves than the less frequently used response types. Following responses became more prevalent only when the perturbed stimuli were perceived as voices from someone else (external references), particularly in the FM condition. In terms of isotropy, loudness and F1 tended to change in the same direction rather than loudness and pitch. Conclusion: The presence of the accompanying effect suggests that the motor systems responsible for regulating pitch, loudness, and formants are not entirely independent but rather interconnected to some degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Pitch variations (tone productions) have been reported as a measure to differentiate Cantonese-speaking children with and without childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). This study aims to examine fundamental frequency (F0) changes within syllables and the effects of syllable structure, lexical status, and syllable positions on F0 in Cantonese-speaking preschool children with and without CAS. Method: Six children with CAS, six children with non-CAS speech sound disorder plus language disorder (S&LD), 22 children with speech sound disorder only (SSD), and 63 children with typical speech-language development (TD) performed the tone sequencing task (TST). Growth curve analysis was employed to analyze and compare the F0 values within syllables with three Cantonese tones (high level, high rising, and low falling). The analysis considered the effects of syllable structure (vowel and consonant–vowel), lexical status (word and nonword), and syllable position (initial, medial, and final) on F0, as well as comparisons within and between groups. Results: Within each group, the effects of syllable structure and position on F0 values were found with different patterns. Between-group comparisons showed that the CAS group had reduced F0 contrasts. The CAS group could be differentiated from the control groups based on interactions of F0 with syllable structure and position, but not lexical status. The dissimilarity of F0 values detected between the CAS and SSD/TD groups was more prominent than that observed between the CAS and S&LD groups. Conclusions: This study demonstrated that Cantonese-speaking children with CAS had difficulty in varying F0 within syllables as compared to those without CAS, suggesting pitch variation difficulty and language-specific impairment profiles in CAS. Future investigations of objective measures for identifying Cantonese speakers with CAS and cross-linguistic investigations using growth curve analysis and the TST are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: According to the interpersonal synergy model of spoken dialogue, interlocutors modify their communicative behaviors to meet the contextual demands of a given conversation. Although a growing body of research supports this postulation for linguistic behaviors (e.g., semantics, syntax), little is understood about how this model applies to speech behaviors (e.g., speech rate, pitch). The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that interlocutors adjust their speech behaviors across different conversational tasks with different conversational goals. Method: In this study, 28 participants each engaged in two different types of conversations (i.e., relational and informational) with two partners (i.e., Partner 1 and Partner 2), yielding a total of 112 conversations. We compared six acoustic measures of participant speech behavior across conversational task and partner. Results: Linear mixed-effects models demonstrated significant differences between speech feature measures in informational and relational conversations. Furthermore, these findings were generally robust across conversations with different partners. Conclusions: Results suggest that contextual demands influence speech behaviors. These findings provide empirical support for the interpersonal synergy model and highlight important considerations for assessing speech behaviors in individuals with communication disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study set out to investigate whether individuals with dysphonia, as determined by either self-assessment or clinician-based auditory-perceptual judgment, exhibited differences in perilaryngeal muscle activities using surface electromyography (sEMG) during various phonatory tasks. Additionally, the study aimed to assess the effectiveness of sEMG in identifying dysphonic cases. Method: A total of 77 adults (44 women, 33 men, Mage = 30.4 years) participated in this study, with dysphonic cases identified separately using either a 10-item Voice Handicap Index (VHI-10) or clinician-based auditory-perceptual voice quality (APVQ) evaluation. sEMG activities were measured from the areas of suprahyoid and sternocleidomastoid muscles during prolonged vowel /i/ phonations at different pitch and loudness levels. Normalized root-mean-square value against the maximal voluntary contraction (RMS %MVC) of the sEMG signals was obtained for each phonation and compared between subject groups and across phonatory tasks. Additionally, binary logistic regression analysis was performed to determine how the sEMG measures could predict the VHI-10-based or APVQ-based dysphonic cases. Results: Participants who scored above the criteria on either the VHI-10 (n = 29) or APVQ judgment (n = 17) exhibited significantly higher RMS %MVC in the right suprahyoid muscles compared to the corresponding control groups. Although the RMS %MVC value from the right suprahyoid muscles alone was not a significant predictor of self-evaluated dysphonic cases, a combination of the RMS %MVC values from both the right and left suprahyoid muscles significantly predicted APVQ-based dysphonic cases with a 69.66% fair level. Conclusions: This study found that individuals with dysphonia, as determined by either self-assessment or APVQ judgment, displayed more imbalanced suprahyoid muscle activities in voice production compared to nondysphonic groups. The combination of the sEMG measures from both left and right suprahyoid muscles showed potential as a predictor of dysphonia with a fair level of confidence. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25112804 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study examined how speakers adapt to fundamental frequency (fo) errors that affect the use of prosody to convey linguistic meaning, whether fo adaptation in that context relates to adaptation in linguistically neutral sustained vowels, and whether cue trading is reflected in responses in the prosodic cues of fo and amplitude. Method: Twenty-four speakers said vowels and sentences while fo was digitally altered to induce predictable errors. Shifts in fo (±200 cents) were applied to the entire sustained vowel and one word (emphasized or unemphasized) in sentences. Two prosodic cues-o and amplitude-were extracted. The effects of fo shifts, shift direction, and emphasis on fo response magnitude were evaluated with repeated-measures analyses of variance. Relationships between adaptive fo responses in sentences and vowels and between adaptive fo and amplitude responses were evaluated with Spearman correlations. Results: Speakers adapted to fo errors in both linguistically meaningful sentences and linguistically neutral vowels. Adaptive fo responses of unemphasized words were smaller than those of emphasized words when fo was shifted upward. There was no relationship between adaptive fo responses in vowels and emphasized words, but adaptive fo and amplitude responses were strongly, positively correlated. Conclusions: Sensorimotor adaptation occurs in response to fo errors regardless of how disruptive the error is to linguistic meaning. Adaptation to fo errors during sustained vowels may not involve the exact same mechanisms as sensorimotor adaptation as it occurs in meaningful speech. The relationship between adaptive responses in fo and amplitude supports an integrated model of prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Dynamic pitch, which is defined as the variation in fundamental frequency in speech, is one of the acoustic cues that affect speech recognition in noise. Built on the evidence that a symmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch led to poorer speech recognition, the present study examined the effect of an asymmetrical manipulation method on speech recognition in noise by younger and older adults. Method: Speech recognition accuracy in noise was measured from younger adults with normal hearing in Experiment 1, and speech reception threshold (in dB SNR) from older adults with normal hearing to mild–moderate hearing loss in Experiment 2. The dynamic pitch contours of the speech stimuli were manipulated using both symmetrical and asymmetrical methods. Results: Younger adults recognized speech better in noise with asymmetrical than symmetrical manipulation, and with weakened than strengthened dynamic pitch. A substantial amount of variability was observed in a group of older listeners. This variability was predominately predicted by the listeners’ age but not hearing thresholds or their ability to perceive dynamic pitch in fluctuating noise. Conclusions: The asymmetrical manipulation of dynamic pitch had a less negative effect than the symmetrical manipulation. This effect also interacted with pitch-change direction. These findings suggest the influence of perceptual naturalness on speech recognition with signal modification. Directions for future research are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Literature on apraxia of speech (AOS) in Chinese speakers is sparse compared to the English literature. This study aims to examine the pitch variation skills of Cantonese adults with AOS poststroke in terms of perceptual tone accuracy, acoustic fundamental frequency (fo) changes, and repetition durations on items with different syllable structures, lexical status, and tone syllables in various positions in a sequencing context. Method: Six Cantonese adults with AOS poststroke (AOS group), six adults without AOS poststroke (nAOS group), and six healthy controls (HC group) performed the tone sequencing task (TST), which was adapted from oral diadochokinetic tasks, with three different tone syllables. Tone accuracy, fo values across 10 time points, and acoustic repetition durations were compared within and between the groups. Results: The AOS group produced significantly lower tone accuracy and different fo changes on the three Cantonese tone syllables compared with the control groups and significantly longer repetition durations than the HC group. The AOS group showed more difficulty with the tone syllables with the consonant– vowel structure, while a priming effect was observed on the T2 (high-rising) syllables with lexical meanings. A unique lowering of fo in the final syllable of the trisyllabic items was observed only in the AOS group. Conclusions: The AOS group showed degraded pitch variation skills. The effects of the three linguistic elements were discussed. Future investigations are called for to adapt the TST in other tonal languages to determine if degraded pitch variation skills are present in other tonal language speakers with AOS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The practice of removing “following” responses from speech perturbation analyses is increasingly common, despite no clear evidence as to whether these responses represent a unique response type. This study aimed to determine if the distribution of responses to auditory perturbation paradigms represents a bimodal distribution, consisting of two distinct response types, or a unimodal distribution. Method: This mega-analysis pooled data from 22 previous studies to examine the distribution and magnitude of responses to auditory perturbations across four tasks: adaptive pitch, adaptive formant, reflexive pitch, and reflexive formant. Data included at least 150 unique participants for each task, with studies comprising younger adult, older adult, and Parkinson’s disease populations. A Silverman’s unimodality test followed by a smoothed bootstrap resampling technique was performed for each task to evaluate the number of modes in each distribution. Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests were also performed for each distribution to confirm significant compensation in response to the perturbation. Results: Modality analyses were not significant (p > .05) for any group or task, indicating unimodal distributions. Our analyses also confirmed compensatory reflexive responses to pitch and formant perturbations across all groups, as well as adaptive responses to sustained formant perturbations. However, analyses of sustained pitch perturbations only revealed evidence of adaptation in studies with younger adults. Conclusion: The demonstration of a clear unimodal distribution across all tasks suggests that following responses do not represent a distinct response pattern, but rather the tail of a unimodal distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Communication is as much persuasion as it is the transfer of information. This creates a tension between the interests of the speaker and those of the listener, as dishonest speakers naturally attempt to hide deceptive speech and listeners are faced with the challenge of sorting truths from lies. Listeners with hearing impairment in particular may have differing levels of access to the acoustical cues that give away deceptive speech. A greater tendency toward speech pauses has been hypothesized to result from the cognitive demands of lying convincingly. Higher vocal pitch has also been hypothesized to mark the increased anxiety of a dishonest speaker. Method: Listeners with or without hearing impairments heard short utterances from natural conversations, some of which had been digitally manipulated to contain either increased pausing or raised vocal pitch. Listeners were asked to guess whether each statement was a lie in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Participants were also asked explicitly which cues they believed had influenced their decisions. Results: Statements were more likely to be perceived as a lie when they contained pauses, but not when vocal pitch was raised. This pattern held regardless of hearing ability. In contrast, both groups of listeners self-reported using vocal pitch cues to identify deceptive statements, though at lower rates than pauses. Conclusions: Listeners may have only partial awareness of the cues that influence their impression of dishonesty. Listeners with hearing impairment may place greater weight on acoustical cues according to the differing degrees of access provided by hearing aids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Using the visual world paradigm with the eye-tracking technique, this study examined the extent to which lexical tone similarity influences spoken word recognition. Method: In two experiments, participants were audibly presented with a target word and visually presented with the same target word, a tonal competitor, and two distractors, and they were required to identify the target word. In Experiment 1, the two tonal competitors shared either acoustically highly similar tones (e.g., target word: "..." /yang2tai2/, "balcony" vs. competitor: "..."/yang3zi3/, "adopted son") or acoustically lowly similar tones (e.g., target word: "..." /yang2tai2/, "balcony" vs. competitor: "..." /yang4ben3/, "sample"). In Experiment 2, the acoustic similarity of the target words and the tonal competitors shared either acoustically highly similar tones or acoustically lowly similar tones or identical tones (e.g., target word: "..." /yang2tai2/, "balcony" vs. competitor: "..." /yang2mao2/, "wool"). Results: The results of the two experiments consistently demonstrated a graded tonal competitor effect, in which acoustically highly similar tonal competitors attracted more visual attention than acoustically lowly similar tonal competitors. Conclusion: Tonal similarity plays a graded constraining role in spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine selected baseline acoustic features of hypokinetic dysarthria in Spanish speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and identify potential acoustic predictors of ease of understanding in Spanish. Method: Seventeen Spanish-speaking individuals with mild-to-moderate hypokinetic dysarthria secondary to PD and eight healthy controls were recorded reading a translation of the Rainbow Passage. Acoustic measures of vowel space area, as indicated by the formant centralization ratio (FCR), envelope modulation spectra (EMS), and articulation rate were derived from the speech samples. Additionally, 15 healthy adults rated ease of understanding of the recordings on a visual analogue scale. A multiple linear regression model was implemented to investigate the predictive value of the selected acoustic parameters on ease of understanding. Results: Listeners' ease of understanding was significantly lower for speakers with dysarthria than for healthy controls. The FCR, EMS from the first 10 s of the reading passage, and the difference in EMS between the end and the beginning sections of the passage differed significantly between the two groups of speakers. Findings indicated that 67.7% of the variability in ease of understanding was explained by the predictive model, suggesting a moderately strong relationship between the acoustic and perceptual domains. Conclusions: Measures of envelope modulation spectra were found to be highly significant model predictors of ease of understanding of Spanishspeaking individuals with hypokinetic dysarthria associated with PD. Articulation rate was also found to be important (albeit to a lesser degree) in the predictive model. The formant centralization ratio should be further examined with a larger sample size and more severe dysarthria to determine its efficacy in predicting ease of understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Pitch variations of the fundamental frequency (fo) contour contribute to speech perception in noisy environments, but whether musicians confer an advantage in speech in noise (SIN) with altered fo information remains unclear. This study investigated the effects of different levels of degraded fo contour (i.e., conveying lexical tone or intonation information) on musician advantage in speech-in-noise perception. Method: A cohort of native Mandarin Chinese speakers, comprising 30 trained musicians and 30 nonmusicians, were tested on the intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese sentences with natural, flattened-tone, flattened-intonation, and flattened-all fo contours embedded in background noise masked under three signal-to-noise ratios (0, −5, and −9 dB). Pitch difference thresholds and innate musical skills associated with speech-in-noise benefits were also assessed. Results: Speech intelligibility score improved with increasing signal-to-noise level for both musicians and nonmusicians. However, no musician advantage was observed for identifying any type of flattened-fo contour SIN. Musicians exhibited smaller fo pitch discrimination limens than nonmusicians, which correlated with benefits for perceiving speech with intact tone-level fo information. Regardless of musician status, performance on the pitch and accent musical-skill subtests correlated with speech intelligibility score. Conclusions: Collectively, these results provide no evidence for a musician advantage for perceiving speech with distorted fo information in noisy environments. Results further show that perceptual musical skills on pitch and accent processing may benefit the perception of SIN, independent of formal musical training. Our findings suggest that the potential application of music training in speech perception in noisy backgrounds is not contingent on the ability to process fo pitch contours, at least for Mandarin Chinese speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Previous studies have shown that individuals with congenital amusia exhibit deficient pitch processing across music and language domains. This study investigated whether adult Chinese-speaking listeners with amusia were still able to learn Thai lexical tones based on stimulus frequency of statistical distribution via distributional learning, despite their degraded lexical tone perception. Method: Following a pretest–training–posttest design, 21 amusics and 23 typi- cal, musically intact listeners were assigned into bimodal and unimodal distribu- tion conditions. Listeners were asked to discriminate minimal pairs of Thai mid- level tone and falling tone superimposed on variable base syllables and uttered by different speakers. The perceptual accuracy for each test session and improvement from pretest to posttest were collected and analyzed between the two groups using generalized mixed-effects models. Results: When discriminating Thai lexical tones, amusics were less accurate than typical listeners. Nonetheless, similarly to control listeners, perceptual gains from pretest to posttest were observed in bimodally rather than unimod- ally trained amusics, as evidenced by both trained and nontrained test words. Conclusions: Amusics are able to learn lexical tones in a second or foreign context of speech. This extends previous research by showing that amusics’ distributional learning of linguistic pitch remains largely preserved despite their degraded pitch processing. It is thus likely that manifestations of amusia in speech could not result from their abnormal statistical learning mechanism. This study meanwhile provides a heuristic approach for future studies to apply this paradigm into amusics’ treatment to mitigate their pitch-processing disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Although children’s prosodic sensitivity links with their reading com- prehension, the factors affecting this link remain unclear. By simultaneously measuring first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English pro- sodic sensitivity and reading comprehension, this study examined the mediating role of syntactic awareness on prosody–reading comprehension among Hong Kong Chinese–English bilingual children. Method: A group of 227 Hong Kong Chinese–English bilingual fourth graders completed L1 and L2 prosodic sensitivity (Cantonese lexical tone awareness and English prosodic sensitivity), syntactic awareness, and reading comprehen- sion and control measures of cognitive (nonverbal IQ, short-term memory, and working memory), metalinguistic (phonological awareness and morphological awareness), linguistic (vocabulary knowledge), and word reading skills. Results: The within-language analyses showed a partial mediation effect of Chinese syntactic awareness on the relation between Cantonese lexical tone awareness and Chinese reading comprehension, but a full mediation effect of English syntactic awareness on the relation between English prosodic sensitivity and English reading comprehension. The cross-language analyses revealed a significant direct effect of Cantonese lexical tone awareness on English reading comprehension and a significant indirect effect of English prosodic sensitivity on Chinese reading comprehension via Chinese syntactic awareness. Conclusion: These findings suggest that, despite the language-independent mediating role of syntactic awareness in bridging prosody and reading compre- hension, the degree of this mediation is shaped by language-specific prosody and its relations with other linguistic structures, including semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Using clear speech is a communication strategy audiologists commonly recommend to their patients' frequent communication partners. Recent findings indicate that clear speech can sound angrier than conversational speech, which may have a negative impact on interactions. Method: We examined the acoustic characteristics of clear versus conversational speech in 12 talkers selected from the Ferguson Clear Speech Database: six whose clear speech sounded angry and six whose clear speech did not sound angry. Acoustic analyses of median voice fundamental frequency (fomed), voice fundamental frequency range (foIQR), and energy in the spectral band 1000-3150 Hz (mid-frequency energy) were conducted in MATLAB. Results: All three acoustic metrics showed significant speaking style effects, indicating that all were significantly higher in clear speech compared to conversational speech. While foIQR and mid-frequency energy increases in clear speech were similar for talkers whose clear speech sounded angry and talkers whose clear speech did not sound angry, increases in fomed were only seen for talkers whose clear speech sounded angry. Conclusion: These findings suggest that elevated voice fundamental frequency contributes to clear speech sounding angry and, to avoid sounding angry, patients' frequent communication partners should be advised to avoid raising their voice pitch when speaking clearly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic– phonemic normalization) were investigated through the lexical tone identification task in nonspeech contexts and speech contexts, respectively. Besides, another aim of this study was to reveal how domain-general cognitive abilities contribute to the development of the speech normalization process. Method: In this study, 94 five- to eight-year-old Mandarin-speaking children (50 boys, 44 girls) and 24 young adults (14 men, 10 women) were asked to identify ambiguous Mandarin high-level and mid-rising tones in either speech or non-speech contexts. Furthermore, in this study, we tested participants’ pitch sensitivity through a nonlinguistic pitch discrimination task and their working memory using the digit span task. Results: Higher level acoustic–phonemic normalization of lexical tones emerged at the age of 6 years and was relatively stable thereafter. However, lower level acoustic normalization was less stable across different ages. Neither pitch sen)sitivity nor working memory affected children’s lexical tone normalization. Conclusions: Mandarin-speaking children above 6 years of age successfully achieved constancy in lexical tone normalization based on speech contextual cues. The perceptual normalization of lexical tones was not affected by pitch sensitivity and working memory capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of online testing in a quiet room for three auditory perception experiments in normal-hearing listeners: speech, music, and binaural cue. Method: Under Experiment 1, sentence perception was measured using fixed signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs: +10 dB, 0 dB, and -10 dB) and using adaptive speech reception threshold (SRT) procedures. The correct scores were compared between quiet room and soundproof booth listening environments. Experiment 2 was designed to compare melodic contour identification between the two listening environments. Melodic contour identification was assessed with 1, 2, and 4 semitone spacings. Under Experiment 3, interaural level difference (ILD) and interaural time differences (ITD) were measured as a function of carrier frequency. For both measures, two modulated tones (400-ms duration and 100-Hz modulation rate) were sequentially presented through headphones to both ears, and subjects were asked to indicate whether the sound moved to the left or right ear. The measured ITD and ILD were then compared between the two listening environments. Results: There were no significant differences in any outcome measures (SNR-and SRT-based speech perception, melodic contour identification, and ITD/ILD) between the two listening environments. Conclusions: These results suggest that normal-hearing listeners may not require a controlled listening environment in any of the three auditory assessments. As comparable data can be obtained via the online testing tool, using the online auditory experiments is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to analyze the development of gesture-speech temporal alignment patterns in children's narrative speech from a longitudinal perspective and, specifically, the potential differences between different gesture types, namely, gestures that imagistically portray or refer to semantic content in speech (i.e., referential gestures) and those that lack semantic content (i.e., non-referential gestures). Method: This study uses an audiovisual corpus of narrative productions (n = 332) from 83 children (43 girls, 40 boys) who participated in a narrative retelling task at two time points in development (at 5-6 and 7-9 years of age). The 332 narratives were coded for both manual co-speech gesture types and prosody. Gestural annotations included gesture phasing (i.e., preparation, stroke, hold, and recovery) and gesture types (in terms of referentiality, i.e., referential and non-referential), whereas prosodic annotations included pitch-accented syllables. Results: Results revealed that by ages 5-6 years, children already temporally aligned the stroke of both referential and non-referential gestures with pitchaccented syllables, showing no significant differences between these two gesture types. Conclusions: The results of the present study contribute to the view that both referential and non-referential gestures are aligned with pitch accentuation, and therefore, this is not only a characteristic of non-referential gestures. Our results also add support to McNeill's phonological synchronization rule from a developmental perspective and indirectly back up recent theories about the biomechanics of gesture-speech alignment, suggesting that this is an inherent ability of oral communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study measured and compared the acoustic short-term effects of pitch elevation training (PET) and articulation-resonance training (ART) and the combination of both programs, in transgender women. Method: A randomized controlled study with cross-over design was used. Thirty transgender women were included and received 14 weeks of speech training. All participants started with 4 weeks of sham training; after which they were randomly assigned to one of two groups: One group continued with PET (5 weeks), followed by ART (5 weeks); the second group received both trainings in opposite order. Participants were recorded 4 times, in between the training blocks: pre, post 1 (after sham), post 2 (after training 1), and post 3 (after training 2). Speech samples included a sustained vowel, continuous speech during reading, and spontaneous speech and were analyzed using Praat software. Fundamental frequency (fo), intensity, voice range profile, vowel formant frequencies (F1-2-3-4-5 of /a/-/i/-/u/), formant contrasts, vowel space, and vocal quality (Acoustic Voice Quality Index) were determined. Results and Conclusions: Fundamental frequencies increased after both the PET and ART program, with a higher increase after PET. The combination of both interventions showed a mean increase of the fo of 49 Hz during a sustained vowel, 49 Hz during reading, and 29 Hz during spontaneous speech. However, the lower limit (percentile 5) of the fo during spontaneous speech did not change. Higher values were detected for F1-2 of /a/, F3 of /u/, and vowel space after PET and ART separately. F1-2-3 of /a/, F1-3-4 of /u/, vowel space, and formant contrasts increased after the combination of PET and ART; hence, the combination induced more increases in formant frequencies. Intensity and voice quality measurements did not change. No order effect was detected; that is, starting with PET or ART did not change the outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Pitch plays an important role in auditory perception of music and language. This study provides a systematic review with meta-analysis to investigate whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have enhanced pitch processing ability and to identify the potential factors associated with processing differences between ASD and neurotypicals. Method: We conducted a systematic search through six major electronic databases focusing on the studies that used nonspeech stimuli to provide a qualitative and quantitative assessment across existing studies on pitch perception in autism. We identified potential participant- and methodology-related moderators and conducted metaregression analyses using mixed-effects models. Results: On the basis of 22 studies with a total of 464 participants with ASD, we obtained a small-to-medium positive effect size (g = 0.26) in support of enhanced pitch perception in ASD. Moreover, the mean age and nonverbal IQ of participants were found to significantly moderate the between-studies heterogeneity. Conclusions: Our study provides the first meta-analysis on auditory pitch perception in ASD and demonstrates the existence of different developmental trajectories between autistic individuals and neurotypicals. In addition to age, nonverbal ability is found to be a significant contributor to the lower level/local processing bias in ASD. We highlight the need for further investigation of pitch perception in ASD under challenging listening conditions. Future neurophysiological and brain imaging studies with a longitudinal design are also needed to better understand the underlying neural mechanisms of atypical pitch processing in ASD and to help guide auditory-based interventions for improving language and social functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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: This study investigates how Cantonese language experience influences the potential effects of (a) musicianship and (b) musical ability on English stress perception. Method: The sample contained 124 participants, evenly split into Cantonese musician, Cantonese nonmusician, English musician, and English nonmusician groups. They completed the English stress discrimination task, English stress sequence recall task, Musical Ear Test, and nonverbal intelligence task. Following the musicianship-based analysis, 44 Cantonese and English listeners were reassigned to four groups based on their musical ability—Cantonese high musical ability, Cantonese low musical ability, English high musical ability, and English low musical ability groups. Results: Musicianship-based analysis on English stress perception revealed a significant interaction between musicianship and language. Specifically, musicians outperformed nonmusicians only among the English but not the Cantonese listeners. By contrast, ability-based analysis showed significant main effects of musical ability and language. For both Cantonese and English listeners, those with a high musical ability outperformed those with a low musical ability. Regardless of musical ability, Cantonese listeners outperformed English listeners. Correlational analyses yielded consistent findings. Conclusions: This study has found cross-sectional evidence that musical ability, but not musicianship, facilitates Cantonese English as a second language (ESL) listeners’ English stress perception. From a theoretical perspective, the current findings motivate two potential additions to the OPERA (Overlap, Precision, Emotion, Repetition, and Attention) hypothesis for music-to-language transfer—unsaturation and utilization. Practically, the findings cast doubt on the application of nonperceptual based instrumental music training to enhance Cantonese ESL learners’ perceptual learning of English stress. [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]

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]

Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine if and how the subcortical neural representation of pitch cues in listeners with normal hearing is affected by systematic manipulation of vocoder parameters. Method: This study assessed the effects of temporal envelope cutoff frequency (50 and 500 Hz), number of channels (1-32), and carrier type (sine-wave and noise-band) on brainstem neural representation of fundamental frequency (fo) in frequency-following responses (FFRs) to vocoded vowels of 15 young adult listeners with normal hearing. Results: Results showed that FFR fo strength (quantified as absolute fo magnitude divided by noise floor [NF] magnitude) significantly improved with 500-Hz vs. 50-Hz temporal envelopes for all channel numbers and both carriers except the 1-channel noise-band vocoder. FFR fo strength with 500-Hz temporal envelopes significantly improved when the channel number increased from 1 to 2, but it either declined (sine-wave vocoders) or saturated (noise-band vocoders) when the channel number increased from 4 to 32. FFR fo strength with 50-Hz temporal envelopes was similarly small for both carriers with all channel numbers, except for a significant improvement with the 16-channel sine-wave vocoder. With 500-Hz temporal envelopes, FFR fo strength was significantly greater for sine-wave vocoders than for noise-band vocoders with channel numbers 1-8; no significant differences were seen with 16 and 32 channels. With 50-Hz temporal envelopes, the carrier effect was only observed with 16 channels. In contrast, there was no significant carrier effect for the absolute fo magnitude. Compared to sine-wave vocoders, noise-band vocoders had a higher NF and thus lower relative FFR fo strength. Conclusions: It is important to normalize the fo magnitude relative to the NF when analyzing the FFRs to vocoded speech. The physiological findings reported here may result from the availability of fo-related temporal periodicity and spectral sidelobes in vocoded signals and should be considered when selecting vocoder parameters and interpreting results in future physiological studies. In general, the dependence of brainstem neural phase-locking strength to fo on vocoder parameters may confound the comparison of pitch-related behavioral results across different vocoder designs. [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: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody--the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud--predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades 3 and 4), and oral reading prosody in Taiwanese third-grade children (N = 109). In the oral reading prosody task, children were asked to read aloud a passage designed for third graders and then to answer forced-choice questions. Their oral reading prosody was measured through acoustic analyses including the number of pause intrusions, intersentential pause duration, phrase-final comma pause duration, child--adult pitch match, and sentence-final pitch change. Results: Analyses of variance revealed that children's number of pause intrusions differed as a function of word reading. After controlling for age, vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, and word reading, we found that different dimensions of oral reading prosody contributed to reading rate. In contrast, the number of pause intrusions, phrase-final comma pause duration, and child--adult pitch match predicted reading accuracy and comprehension. Conclusions: Oral reading prosody plays an important role in children's reading fluency and reading comprehension in tone languages like Mandarin. Specifically, children need to read texts prosodically as evidenced by fewer pause intrusions, shorter phrase-final comma pause duration, and closer child--adult pitch match, which are early predictive makers of reading fluency and comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Previous studies have shown enhanced pitch and impaired time perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether such deviated patterns of auditory processing depending on acoustic dimensions would transfer to the higher level linguistic pitch and time processing. In this study, we compared the 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: The data were collected from 22 Mandarin-speaking adolescents with ASD and 20 age-matched neurotypical controls. In addition to the identification and discrimination tasks to test CP performance, all the participants were evaluated with their language ability and phonological working memory. Linear mixed-effects models were constructed to evaluate the identification and discrimination scores across different groups and conditions. Results: The basic CP pattern of cross-boundary benefit when perceiving both native lexical tones and VOT was largely preserved in high-functioning adolescents with ASD. The degree of CP of lexical tones in ASD was similar to that in typical controls, whereas the degree of CP of VOT in ASD was greatly reduced. Furthermore, the degree of CP of lexical tones correlated with language ability and digit span in ASD participants. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the unbalanced acoustic processing capacities for pitch and time can be generalized to the higher level linguistic processing in ASD. Furthermore, the higher degree of CP of lexical tones correlated with better language ability in Mandarin-speaking individuals with ASD. [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 purpose of this study was to measure Mandarin Chinese vowel-plus-tone identification in quiet and noise for younger and older listeners. Method: Two types of noise served as the masker, namely, six-talker babble and babble-modulated noise, at two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of -4and -8 dB. Fourteen listeners from both age groups were recruited, and three sets of data analyses were conducted: the identification of vowel plus tone, the identification of vowel, and the identification of tone. Results: Younger listeners outperformed older listeners in all listening conditions, whereas the younger--older listener difference became greater in noise than in quiet, indicating a more detrimental effect of noise for older listeners than for younger listeners. In addition, vowel identification showed slightly better scores than tone identification in noise, suggesting that noise appeared to affect tone perception more negatively than vowel perception in Mandarin Chinese. At -4 dB SNR, there was a significantly greater amount of informational masking (IM) and a greater amount of energetic masking (EM) for older listeners than for younger listeners. At -8 dB SNR, there was a greater amount of EM for older listeners than for younger listeners but with no group difference in the amount of IM. Conclusion: These results suggest that older listeners received a more negative impact of noise for Mandarin Chinese phonemic and tone recognition and had a larger amount of IM or EM from competing speech noise than younger listeners, depending on the SNR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Around 80%--93% of the individuals with tinnitus have hearing loss. Researchers have found that tinnitus pitch was related to the frequencies of hearing loss, but unclear about the relationship between tinnitus pitch and audiometry edge frequency. The comorbidity of tinnitus and speech perception in noise problems had also been reported, but the relationship between tinnitus pitch and speech perception in noise had seldom been investigated. This study was designed to estimate the relationship between tinnitus pitch, audiogram edge frequency, and speech perception in noise. The speech perception in noise was measured using auditory stream segregation paradigm. Method: Thirteen individuals with bilateral mild-to-severe tonal tinnitus and minimal-to-mild cochlear hearing loss were selected. Thirteen individuals with hearing loss without tinnitus were also selected. The audiogram of each participant with tinnitus was matched with that of the participant without tinnitus. Tinnitus pitch of the participants with tinnitus was measured and compared with audiogram edge frequency. The stream segregation thresholds were calculated at the participants' admitted tinnitus pitch and one octave below the tinnitus pitch. The stream segregation thresholds were estimated at fission and fusion boundary using pure-tone stimuli in ABA paradigm. Results: High correlation between tinnitus pitch and audiogram edge frequency was noted. Overall stream segregation thresholds were higher for individuals with tinnitus. Higher thresholds indicated poorer stream segregation abilities. Within tinnitus participants, the thresholds were significantly lesser at frequency corresponding to admitted tinnitus pitch than at one octave below the tinnitus pitch. Conclusions: The information from this study may be helpful in educating the patients about the relationship between hearing loss and tinnitus. The findings may also account for speech-perception-in-noise difficulties often reported by the individuals with tinnitus. [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]

Purpose: People with hearing impairment (HI) face numerous challenges that can be minimized with the use of hearing aids and cochlear implants. Despite technological advances in these assistive hearing devices, musical perception remains difficult for these people. Tests and protocols developed to assess the musical perception of this audience were the target of this systematic review, whose objective was to investigate how assessments of musical perception in people with HI are carried out. Method: Searches for primary articles were carried out in the PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature, and ASHAWire databases. Search results were managed using EndNote X9 software, and analysis was performed according to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) Statement. Results: The 16 cross-sectional included studies analyzed music perception data from people with HI compared to a control group of participants with normal hearing. Among these, four studies were selected to be included in a metaanalysis, performed with timbre and melody. Variability was observed in the tests and between the levels of auditory perception skills analyzed in relation to the components of music. With respect to the tests, sound stimuli generated by synthesizers were the most used stimuli; with the exception of timbre evaluation, the most frequent test environment was a booth with sound attenuation, and the average intensity for presenting sound stimuli was 70 dB SPL. The most evaluated sound component was pitch, followed by rhythm and timbre, with a pattern of responses based on adaptive and psychoacoustic methods. Conclusions: The heterogeneity of the musical parameters and the auditory abilities evaluated by the tests is a fact that can compromise evidence found in this area of study. It is worth considering the quality of samples that were recorded with real musical instruments and digitized afterward, in comparison with synthesized samples that do not seem to accurately represent real instruments. The need to minimize semantic parallelism that involves the auditory skills and elements of music involved in the assessment of musical perception is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Pitch variation, which refers to one's ability to vary fundamental frequency (F0) within or between syllables when speaking, has not been investigated in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). However, pitch variation plays an important role in tone languages, as varying F0 patterns communicate different lexical meanings. This study investigated pitch variation abilities in individuals with CAS via the tone-sequencing tasks (TSTs), focusing on task performance and the effects of syllable structure, lexical status, and tones. Method: Three Cantonese-speaking children with CAS (aged 3;7-5;8 [years;months]) and six children without CAS participated in the study. Children without CAS were divided into two control groups, comprising those with speech and/or language impairment or typical development. TSTs consisted of 56 sets of five repetitions of stimuli. The stimuli varied in syllable structure, lexical status, and tones. Percentage of tones correct (PTC), consistency scores, F0 values, and acoustic repetition duration were measured. Results: The CAS group performed more poorly than the control groups on the TST with respect to tone accuracy, consistency, and repetition duration. No interaction effects between group and syllable structure or group and lexical status were found. No significant difference was found on F0 values across time between Tone 1 and Tone 2 syllables in the CAS group. However, interaction effects between group and time points of F0 values on Tone 2 syllables were found. Discussion: The results suggest that children with CAS have difficulty with pitch variation, which was revealed on the TST with respect to tone accuracy, consistency, and repetition duration. Moreover, children with CAS have difficulty in varying F0 values to produce high-rising tones and tend to use high-level tones to substitute. Clinically, the TST may be useful to assist in the diagnosis of CAS. Isolated vowel stimuli may be useful to test young children or children with severe impairment. Future investigations and development of a normed tool for children with CAS are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Former studies suggested that music perception can help produce certain accentual features in the first and second language (L2), such as intonational contours. What was missing in many of these studies was the identification of the exact relationship between specific music perception skills and the production of different accentual features in a foreign language. Our aim was to verify whether empirically tested musical hearing skills can be related to the acquisition of English vowels by learners of English as an L2 before and after a formal accent training course. Method: Fifty adult Polish speakers of L2 English were tested before and after a two-semester accent training in order to observe the effect of musical hearing on the acquisition of English vowels. Their L2 English vowel formant contours produced in consonant-vowel-consonant context were compared with the target General British vowels produced by their pronunciation teachers. We juxtaposed these results with their musical hearing test scores and self-reported musical experience to observe a possible relationship between successful L2 vowel acquisition and musical aptitude. Results: Preexisting rhythmic memory was reported as a significant predictor before training, while musical experience was reported as a significant factor in the production of more native-like L2 vowels after training. We also observed that not all vowels were equally acquired or affected by musical hearing or musical experience. The strongest estimate we observed was the closeness to model before training, suggesting that learners who already managed to acquire some features of a native-like accent were also more successful after training. Conclusions: Our results are revealing in two aspects. First, the learners' former proficiency in L2 pronunciation is the most robust predictor in acquiring a native-like accent. Second, there is a potential relationship between rhythmic memory and L2 vowel acquisition before training, as well as years of musical experience after training, suggesting that specific musical skills and music practice can be an asset in learning a foreign language accent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The challenges associated with cochlear implant (CI)–mediated listening are well documented; however, they can be mitigated through the provision of aided acoustic hearing in the contralateral ear—a configuration termed bimodal hearing. This study extends previous literature to examine the effect of acoustic bandwidth in the non-CI ear for music perception. The primary aim was to determine the minimum and optimum acoustic bandwidth necessary to obtain bimodal benefit for music perception and speech perception. Method: Participants included 12 adult bimodal listeners and 12 adult control listeners with normal hearing. Music perception was assessed via measures of timbre perception and subjective sound quality of real-world music samples. Speech perception was assessed via monosyllabic word recognition in quiet. Acoustic stimuli were presented to the non-CI ear in the following filter conditions: < 125, < 250, < 500, and < 750 Hz, and wideband (full bandwidth). Results: Generally, performance for all stimuli improved with increasing acoustic bandwidth; however, the bandwidth that is both minimally and optimally beneficial may be dependent upon stimulus type. On average, music sound quality required wideband amplification, whereas speech recognition with a male talker in quiet required a narrower acoustic bandwidth (< 250 Hz) for significant benefit. Still, average speech recognition performance continued to improve with increasing bandwidth. Conclusion: Further research is warranted to examine optimal acoustic bandwidth for additional stimulus types; however, these findings indicate that wideband amplification is most appropriate for speech and music perception in individuals with bimodal hearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Difficulties in speech-in-noise understanding are often reported in individuals with tinnitus. Building on our previous findings that speech-in-noise performance is correlated with subjective loudness of tinnitus, this study aimed to investigate the effect of tinnitus pitch on consonant recognition in noise. Method: Pure-tone audiometry and the Quick Speech-in-Noise Test were conducted on 66 participants categorized into four groups by their hearing sensitivity and selfreport of tinnitus. Consonant recognition scores at various frequency ranges were obtained at the 5 dB SNR condition of the Quick Speech-in-Noise Test. Participants with tinnitus also completed a tinnitus pitch-matching procedure. Correlation analyses were conducted between tinnitus pitch and the frequency of the worst consonant recognition, and the error rates based on word and sentence position were compared. Results: Regardless of hearing sensitivity, tinnitus pitch did not correlate with the frequency of the worst consonant recognition. Sentence-initial word recognition was affected by hearing loss, whereas sentence-final word recognition was not affected by hearing loss or tinnitus. In contrast to individuals with normal hearing, participants with hearing loss varied in full-sentence recognition, with those reporting tinnitus exhibiting significantly higher error rates. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the effect of tinnitus on consonant recognition in noise may involve higher level functions more than perceptual characteristics of tinnitus. Furthermore, for individuals with speech-in-noise concerns, clinical evaluation should address both hearing sensitivity and the presence of tinnitus. Future speech-in-noise studies should incorporate cognitive tests and, possibly, brain imaging to parse out the contribution of cognitive factors, such as cognitive control, in speech-in-noise in tinnitus. [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]

Purpose: This descriptive cohort pilot study, using a convenience sample, examined whether evidence from vocal function measures, auditory–perceptual ratings, and/or endoscopic signs of aging supported singing in senior chorales as a possible intervention to preserve the speaking voice in aging adults. Method: Thirteen singers and five nonsinging controls, all over 65 years of age, participated. They were assessed at two visits, 15–20 months apart. Vocal function measures and auditory–perceptual ratings of estimated age and the presence of voice disorders were compared across singing status and visit. Changes in the presence and degree of laryngeal signs of aging between visits were compared across singing status. Results: Using an alpha of .2, deemed acceptable for pilot studies, vocal function measures supported choral singing as an intervention to preserve the speaking voice as less noise energy between 2 and 3 kHz (p = .01) and lower phonation threshold pressures (PTPs) were present (p = .09) for singers compared to nonsinging controls. Greater flows at comfortable pitch (p = .04) and high pitch (p = .06) as well as lower cepstral peak prominence smoothed (CPPS) for the vowel /a/ (p < .01) were found at Visit 2 for both groups, but singers demonstrated lower flows at Visit 2 than nonsinging controls at comfortable pitch (p = .06). Auditory–perceptual ratings did not support preservation of speaking voice, although a larger percentage of listeners rated nonsinging controls as voice disordered at Visit 2. Endoscopic ratings supported preservation, as singers were more likely than nonsinging controls to be rated as having laryngeal signs of aging absent at both visits (p = .02). Conclusion: The findings from this pilot study provide evidence that regular singing in senior chorales may assist in preserving older adults’ speaking voices. [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]

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]

The article discusses the evolution of speech throughout history, and it mentions writer Eric Lenneberg's monograph entitled "The Biological Foundations of Language" from 1967, the human brain's role in data processing, and an ontogentic perspective on language which was developed by the late man of letters Charles de Brosses. The deceased linguist Heymann Steinthal and the late naturalist Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law recapitulation theory are assessed.

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]

Purpose: A group of 10 prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants (CIs) formed a choir and received 21 months of formal music training. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the singing proficiency of these children. Method: The participants included all choir members (7 girls and 3 boys, mean age of 9.5 years old) who were unilateral CI users. Meanwhile, 8 age-matched children with normal hearing were recruited as controls and were trained on 1 song for 2 weeks. Individual singing samples without instrument accompaniment were recorded from all participants. The singing samples were subject to acoustic analysis in which the fundamental frequency (F0) of each note was extracted and the duration was measured. Five metrics were developed and computed to quantify the accuracy of their pitch and rhythm performance. The 5 metrics included (a) percent correct of F0 contour direction of adjacent notes, (b) mean deviation of the normalized F0 across the notes, (c) mean deviation of the pitch intervals, (d) mean deviation of adjacent note duration ratio, and (e) mean absolute deviation of note duration. Results: The choir members with CIs demonstrated high accuracy in both pitch and tempo measures and performed on par with the children with normal hearing. Early start of music training after implantation and use of bimodal hearing contributed to the development of better music ability in these children with CIs. Conclusion: These findings indicated that rigorous music training could facilitate high singing proficiency in prelingually deafened children with CIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tonal languages, as CIs do not efficiently code pitch information. Mandarin is a tonal language with lexical tones and tonal processes such as neutral tone and tone sandhi, exhibiting contextually conditioned tonal realizations. Previous studies suggest that early implantation and long CI experience facilitate the acquisition of lexical tones by children with CIs. However, there is lack of acoustic evidence on children's tonal productions demonstrating that this is the case, and it is unclear whether and how children with CIs are able to acquire contextual tones. This study therefore examined the acoustic realization of both lexical tones and contextual tones as produced by children fitted with CIs, exploring the potential effects of age at implantation and length of CI experience on their acquisition of the Mandarin tonal system. Method: Seventy-two Mandarin-learning preschoolers with CIs, varying in age at implantation (13-42 months) and length of CI experience (2-49 months), and 44 normal hearing 3-year-old controls were recruited. Tonal productions were elicited from both groups using picture-naming tasks and acoustically compared. Results: Only the early implanted group (i.e., implanted before the age of 2 years) produced normal-like lexical tones and generally had contextual tones approximating those of the normal-hearing children. The other children, including those with longer CI experience, did not have typical tonal productions; their pitch patterns for lexical tones tended to be flatter, and contextual tone productions were unchanged across tonal contexts. Conclusion: Children with CIs face challenges in acquiring Mandarin tones, but early implantation may help them to develop normal-like lexical tone categories, which further facilitates their implementation of contextual tones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Chronic tinnitus ("ringing in the ears") is a phantom auditory perception with no cure. A goal of treatment is often to reduce the loudness of tinnitus. However, tinnitus loudness cannot be measured objectively. It is most commonly assessed by obtaining a loudness match (LM) with a pure tone and by using a numeric rating scale (NRS). Constrained loudness scaling (CLS) is a more recent measure of tinnitus loudness that utilizes auditory training of a fixed loudness scale to guide tinnitus loudness judgments. The purpose of this study was to compare results using these 3 measures of tinnitus loudness. Method: This study obtained tinnitus loudness measures of LM, NRS, and CLS with 170 participants. These participants are part of a larger study obtaining repeated measures over 6 months. Only baseline data are presented. Results: Correlations between all measures were weak to moderate: LM versus CLS (r = .46), CLS versus NRS (r = .49), and LM versus NRS (r = .38). Conclusion: Further systematic research is needed to more fully understand the relationships between these different measures and to establish a valid measure of tinnitus loudness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]