Predictive processing of music and language in autism: Evidence from Mandarin and English speakers.

Atypical predictive processing has been associated with autism across multiple domains, based mainly on artificial antecedents and consequents. As structured sequences where expectations derive from implicit learning of combinatorial principles, language and music provide naturalistic stimuli for investigating predictive processing. In this study, we matched melodic and sentence stimuli in cloze probabilities and examined musical and linguistic prediction in Mandarin- (Experiment 1) and English-speaking (Experiment 2) autistic and non-autistic individuals using both production and perception tasks.

Exploring the role of singing, semantics, and amusia screening in speech-in-noise perception in musicians and non-musicians.

Sentence repetition has been the focus of extensive psycholinguistic research. The notion that music training can bolster speech perception in adverse auditory conditions has been met with mixed results. In this work, we sought to gauge the effect of babble noise on immediate repetition of spoken and sung phrases of varying semantic content (expository, narrative, and anomalous), initially in 100 English-speaking monolinguals with and without music training.

Adapted melodic intonation therapy can help raise trans women's singing and speaking fundamental frequencies.

Aim: Voice interventions for transgender individuals can address several speech and voice parameters - fundamental frequency, resonance, intonation, rhythm, and intensity. In this study, we focus on fundamental voice frequency and build on existing research to test one technique that has been shown in a preliminary study to effectively adjust fundamental voice frequency in line with clients' goals.

Method: More specifically, we employed an adaptation of melodic intonation therapy (MIT) to assess whether it can raise trans women's average fundamental frequency to a significant degree.

Phrase-Final Words in Greek Storytelling Speech: A Study on the Effect of a Culturally-Specific Prosodic Feature on Short-Term Memory.

Prosodic patterns of speech appear to make a critical contribution to memory-related processing. We considered the case of a previously unexplored prosodic feature of Greek storytelling and its effect on free recall in thirty typically developing children between the ages of 10 and 12 years, using short ecologically valid auditory stimuli. The combination of a falling pitch contour and, more notably, extensive final-syllable vowel lengthening, which gives rise to the prosodic feature in question, led to statistically significantly higher performance in comparison to neutral phrase-final prosody.

Preserved appreciation of aesthetic elements of speech and music prosody in an amusic individual: A holistic approach.

We present a follow-up study on the case of a Greek amusic adult, B.Z., whose impaired performance on scale, contour, interval, and meter was reported by Paraskevopoulos, Tsapkini, and Peretz in 2010, employing a culturally-tailored version of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia.