Enhanced syllable discrimination thresholds in musicians.

Speech processing inherently relies on the perception of specific, rapidly changing spectral and temporal acoustic features. Advanced acoustic perception is also integral to musical expertise, and accordingly several studies have demonstrated a significant relationship between musical training and superior processing of various aspects of speech. Speech and music appear to overlap in spectral and temporal features; however, it remains unclear which of these acoustic features, crucial for speech processing, are most closely associated with musical training.

Generalization of non-linguistic auditory perceptual training to syllable discrimination.

Purpose: The generalization of non-linguistic auditory perceptual training to syllable discrimination was investigated in two experiments.

Methods: Participants were divided into a control and training group. Both groups came for pre and post-testing sessions spaced ten days apart.

The effect of spectral manipulations on the identification of affective and linguistic prosody.

We investigated the effect of various spectral manipulations on the identification of sentential prosody. Two main categories of prosody--affective (happy, angry, sad) and linguistic (statement, question, continuation)--were studied. Thirty-six subjects were presented with stimuli that were recorded by a female native speaker of American English.