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Cochlear implant (CI) users, even with substantial speech comprehension, generally have poor sensitivity to pitch information (or fundamental frequency, F0). This insensitivity is often attributed to limited spectral and temporal resolution in the CI signals. However, the pitch sensitivity markedly varies among individuals, and some users exhibit fairly good sensitivity. This indicates that the CI signal contains sufficient information about F0, and users' sensitivity is predominantly limited by other physiological conditions such as neuroplasticity or neural health. We estimated the upper limit of F0 information that a CI signal can convey by decoding F0 from simulated CI signals (multi-channel pulsatile signals) with a deep neural network model (referred to as the CI model). We varied the number of electrode channels and the pulse rate, which should respectively affect spectral and temporal resolutions of stimulus representations. The F0-estimation performance generally improved with increasing number of channels and pulse rate. For the sounds presented under quiet conditions, the model performance was at best comparable to that of a control waveform model, which received raw-waveform inputs. Under conditions in which background noise was imposed, the performance of the CI model generally degraded by a greater degree than that of the waveform model. The pulse rate had a particularly large effect on predicted performance. These observations indicate that the CI signal contains some information for predicting F0, which is particularly sufficient for targets under quiet conditions. The temporal resolution (represented as pulse rate) plays a critical role in pitch representation under noisy conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated whether expression of social meaning operationalized as individual gender identitity and politeness moderated pitch range in the two languages of female and male Japanese-English sequential bilinguals. The bilinguals were resident in either London (UK) or Tokyo (Japan) and read sentences to imagined addressees who varied in formality and sex. Results indicated significant differences in the pitch range of the two languages of the bilinguals, and this was confirmed for female and male bilinguals in London and Tokyo, with the language differences being more extreme in the London bilinguals than in the Tokyo bilinguals. Interestingly, self-attribution of masculine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the female bilinguals, whereas self-attribution of feminine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the male bilinguals. In addition, female and male bilinguals significantly varied their pitch range in Japanese, but not in English, as a function of the imagined addressees. Findings confirmed that bilinguals produce pitch range differently in their languages and suggest that expression of social meaning may affect pitch range of the two languages of female and male bilinguals differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has proposed that listeners use prosodic information to guide their processing of phonemic contrasts. Given that prosodic organization of the speech signal systematically modulates durational patterns (e.g., accentual lengthening and phrase-final (PF) lengthening), listeners' perception of durational contrasts has been argued to be influenced by prosodic factors. For example, given that sounds are generally lengthened preceding a prosodic boundary, listeners may adjust their perception of durational cues accordingly, effectively compensating for prosodically-driven temporal patterns. In the present study we present two experiments designed to test the importance of pitch-based cues to prosodic structure for listeners' perception of contrastive vowel length (CVL) in Tokyo Japanese along these lines. We tested if, when a target sound is cued as being PF, listeners compensatorily adjust categorization of vowel duration, in accordance with PF lengthening. Both experiments were a two-alternative forced choice task in which listeners categorized a vowel duration continuum as a phonemically short or long vowel. We manipulated only pitch surrounding the target sound in a carrier phrase to cue it as intonational phrase final, or accentual phrase medial. In Experiment 1 we tested perception of an accented target word, and in Experiment 2 we tested perception of an unaccented target word. In both experiments, we found that contextual changes in pitch influenced listeners' perception of CVL, in accordance with their function as signaling intonational structure. Results therefore suggest that listeners use tonal information to compute prosodic structure and bring this to bear on their perception of durational contrasts in speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article presents the history of Japanese jazz from the first musical contacts to contemporary successes and problems of the jazz music market. For the development and evolution of jazz in Japan, an important role was played by the presence of American military forces in the Philippines (even before the post-war occupation of Japan), which as an American dependent territory had the opportunity to remain in cultural contacts with the United States, where jazz was born at the beginning of the 20th century and became one of the most popular forms of music. Beside the contact with Filipino musicians, who were the first from whom the Japanese learned jazz, the establishment and development of jazz cafes (jazzu-kissa) were also important for the development of jazz in the Land of the Cherry Blossom, which played a huge role in the strengthening the interest in jazz and the shaping of musical tastes. The article also shows the influence of jazz on the formation of a modern, American-based lifestyle of middle-class representatives in Japan. In addition, the article discusses the complex issue of the authenticity of Japanese jazz in relation to American jazz and the influence of world-famous Japanese musicians, such as Toshiko Akiyoshi, on overcoming a given stereotype. The aim of the article is to show the universality and at the same time the locality of contemporary Japanese jazz as well as to show what the specificity of jazz in Japan is. [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]

This study investigated the lexical use of Japanese pitch accent in Japanese‐learning infants. A word–object association task revealed that 18‐month‐old infants succeeded in learning the associations between two nonsense objects paired with two nonsense words minimally distinguished by pitch pattern (Experiment 1). In contrast, 14‐month‐old infants failed (Experiment 2). Eighteen‐month‐old infants succeeded even for sounds that contained only the prosodic information (Experiment 3). However, a subsequent experiment revealed that 14‐month‐old infants succeeded in an easier single word–object task using pitch contrast (Experiment 4). These findings indicate that pitch pattern information is robustly available to 18‐month‐old Japanese monolingual infants in a minimal pair word‐learning situation, but only partially accessible in the same context for 14‐month‐old infants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A noun can be potentially ambiguous as to whether it is a head on its own, or is a modifier of a Noun + Noun compound waiting for its head. This study investigates whether young children can exploit the prosodic information on a modifier constituent preceding the head to facilitate resolution of such ambiguity in Japanese. Evidence from English suggests that young speakers are not sensitive to compound stress in distinguishing between compounds and syntactic phrases unless the compound is very familiar (Good, 2008; Vogel & Raimy, 2002). This study concerns whether children in general have such limited capability to use prosodic cues to promptly compute a compound representation without the lexical boost, or whether they might show greater sensitivity to more categorical compound prosody such as that associated with the Compound Accent Rule (CAR) in Japanese. A previous study (Hirose & Mazuka, 2015) demonstrated that adult Japanese speakers can predict the compound structure prior to the head if the prosodic information on the modifier unambiguously signals that the CAR is being applied. The present study conducted the same on-line experiment with children (6- to 7-year-olds) and compared the time course of the effects with that of adults using permutation-based analysis (Maris & Oosternveld, 2007). The results reveal that children are sensitive to pitch accent information that facilitates the quicker processing of the compound or the single head noun representation compared to when such prosodic signals are less apparent, depending on the type of the lexical accent of the noun in question. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to the language-specific prosodic architecture, a phrase-medial pitch expansion in Japanese may signal either a narrow contrast or the beginning of a new syntactic phrase. To examine how visual and discourse context affects the tug of war between these two interpretations, three eye-tracking experiments tested the interpretation of a pitch expansion in referential contexts that varied in the plausibility of contrastive interpretation. The results showed that the degree of structural interpretation was inversely related to the plausibility of contrastive interpretation. Although there was no direct evidence of contrastive processing of the pitch prominence, participants responded to the trials with the pitch expansion much slower than to those without the expansion only when the contrastive interpretation of the pitch prominence was contextually infelicitous. These results suggest that the phrase-medial pitch expansion may have been simultaneously processed for contrast and structural disambiguation. However, the task that demanded resolutions of standing referential ambiguities seemed to make the structural disambiguation the best use of the prosodic cue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conclusions: Acute idiopathic sensorineural hearing impairment at a frequency exceeding 8 kHz (high-frequency range) was recognized in patients suffering from acute tinnitus without hearing loss. The cases in this study may contribute to clarifying the pathogenesis of tinnitus without hearing loss and evaluating its response to steroid therapy. Objectives: The aim of this study was to demonstrate the existence of acute idiopathic sensorineural hearing impairment only in the high-frequency range and to investigate its relation to tinnitus without hearing loss. Methods: Five patients aged 29 years or younger who consulted a hospital within a few days after the onset of unilateral tinnitus without hearing loss were studied. We conducted audiometry involving the high-frequency range on first medical examination and on improvement in tinnitus, and investigated the association between the hearing findings in the high-frequency range and a tinnitus prognosis. Results: All five patients showed abnormalities in the threshold in the high-frequency range on the affected side. In the three cases given prednisolone, tinnitus and the threshold abnormalities were reduced within 20 days. In contrast, tinnitus and the threshold abnormalities showed little change in two patients who were not treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the "10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC)" and the "3rd Triennial Conference of the Asia-Pacific Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (APSCOM 3)" to be held in Sapporo, Japan from August 25 to 29, 2008.

The article offers information on the 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC 10) and the 3rd Triennial Conference of the Asia-Pacific Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (APSCOM 3) that will be held in Sapporo, Japan from August 25 to 29, 2008.