Performance analysis of various fundamental frequency estimation algorithms in the context of pathological speech.

Reliable fundamental frequency (f) extraction algorithms are crucial in many fields of speech research. The current bulk of studies testing the robustness of different algorithms have focused on healthy speech and/or measurements of sustained vowels. Few studies have tested f estimations in the context of pathological speech, and even fewer on continuous speech.

Music of infant-directed singing entrains infants' social visual behavior.

Infant-directed singing is a culturally universal musical phenomenon known to promote the bonding of infants and caregivers. Entrainment is a widely observed physical phenomenon by which diverse physical systems adjust rhythmic activity through interaction. Here we show that the simple act of infant-directed singing entrains infant social visual behavior on subsecond timescales, increasing infants' looking to the eyes of a singing caregiver: as early as 2 months of age, and doubling in strength by 6 months, infants synchronize their eye-looking to the rhythm of infant-directed singing.

Construction of an automatic score for the evaluation of speech disorders among patients treated for a cancer of the oral cavity or the oropharynx: The Carcinologic Speech Severity Index.

Background: Speech disorders impact quality of life for patients treated with oral cavity and oropharynx cancers. However, there is a lack of uniform and applicable methods for measuring the impact on speech production after treatment in this tumor location.

Objective: The objective of this work is to (1) model an automatic severity index of speech applicable in clinical practice, that is equivalent or superior to a severity score obtained by human listeners, via several acoustics parameters extracted (a) directly from speech signal and (b) resulting from speech processing and (2) derive an automatic speech intelligibility classification (i.

Bridging music and speech rhythm: rhythmic priming and audio-motor training affect speech perception.

Following findings that musical rhythmic priming enhances subsequent speech perception, we investigated whether rhythmic priming for spoken sentences can enhance phonological processing - the building blocks of speech - and whether audio-motor training enhances this effect. Participants heard a metrical prime followed by a sentence (with a matching/mismatching prosodic structure), for which they performed a phoneme detection task. Behavioural (RT) data was collected from two groups: one who received audio-motor training, and one who did not.

Words and melody are intertwined in perception of sung words: EEG and behavioral evidence.

Language and music, two of the most unique human cognitive abilities, are combined in song, rendering it an ecological model for comparing speech and music cognition. The present study was designed to determine whether words and melodies in song are processed interactively or independently, and to examine the influence of attention on the processing of words and melodies in song. Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were recorded while non-musicians listened to pairs of sung words (prime and target) presented in four experimental conditions: same word, same melody; same word, different melody; different word, same melody; different word, different melody.

Similar cerebral networks in language, music and song perception.

Two fMRI experiments were conducted using song to investigate the domain specificity of linguistic and musical processing. In Experiment 1, participants listened to pairs of spoken words, "vocalise" (i.e.

Structural influences on initial accent placement in French.

In addition to the phrase-final accent (FA), the French phonological system includes a phonetically distinct Initial Accent (IA). The present study tested two proposals: that IA marks the onset of phonological phrases, and that it has an independent rhythmic function. Eight adult native speakers of French were instructed to read syntactically ambiguous French sentences (e.

Influence of syllabic lengthening on semantic processing in spoken French: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

The present work investigates the relationship between semantic and prosodic (metric) processing in spoken language under 2 attentional conditions (semantic and metric tasks) by analyzing both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data. Participants listened to short sentences ending in semantically and/or metrically congruous or incongruous trisyllabic words. In the metric task, ERP data showed that metrically incongruous words elicited both larger early negative and late positive components than metrically congruous words, thereby demonstrating the online processing of the metric structure of words.

On-line processing of "pop-out" words in spoken French dialogues.

Highlighting relevant information in a discourse context is a major aim of spoken language communication. Prosodic cues such as focal prominences are used to fulfill this aim through the pragmatic function of prosody. To determine whether listeners make on-line use of focal prominences to build coherent representations of the informational structure of the utterances, we used the brain event-related potential (ERP) method.

Brain potentials during semantic and prosodic processing in French.

The present experiment was aimed at investigating the on-line processing of semantic and prosodic information. We recorded the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to semantically and/or prosodically congruous and incongruous sentences that were presented aurally, to study the time course of semantic and prosodic processing, and to determine whether these two processes are independent or interactive. The prosodic mismatch was produced by cross-splicing the beginning of statements with the end of questions, and vice-versa.