Language Specificity in Phonetic Cue Weighting: Monolingual and Bilingual Perception of the Stop Voicing Contrast in English and Spanish.

Background/aims: This work examines the perception of the stop voicing contrast in Spanish and English along four acoustic dimensions, comparing monolingual and bilingual listeners. Our primary goals are to test the extent to which cue-weighting strategies are language-specific in monolinguals, and whether this language specificity extends to bilingual listeners.

Methods: Participants categorized sounds varying in voice onset time (VOT, the primary cue to the contrast) and three secondary cues: fundamental frequency at vowel onset, first formant (F1) onset frequency, and stop closure duration.

Reliability of individual differences in degraded speech perception.

Listeners' speech perception abilities vary extensively in challenging listening conditions. There is little evidence as to whether this variability is a result of true, stable individual differences or just variability arising from measurement error. This study examines listeners' word recognition abilities across multiple sessions and a variety of degraded speech tasks (noise-vocoded, time-compressed, and speech in babble noise).

Discriminating simulated vocal tremor source using amplitude modulation spectra.

Objectives/hypothesis: Sources of vocal tremor are difficult to categorize perceptually and acoustically. This article describes a preliminary attempt to discriminate vocal tremor sources through the use of spectral measures of the amplitude envelope. The hypothesis is that different vocal tremor sources are associated with distinct patterns of acoustic amplitude modulations.