Learning a language with vowelless words.

Vowelless words are exceptionally typologically rare, though they are found in some languages, such as Tashlhiyt (e.g., fkt 'give it').

The relationship between sentence intelligibility, band importance, and signal covariance.

The present study investigates the relationship between sentence intelligibility, band importance, and patterns of spectro-temporal covariation between frequency bands. Sixteen listeners transcribed sentences acoustically degraded to 5, 8, or 15 frequency bands. Half of the sentences retained the frequency bands that captured more signal covariance.

Intelligibility of Noise-Adapted and Clear Speech in Energetic and Informational Maskers for Native and Nonnative Listeners.

Purpose: This study explored clear speech (CS) and noise-adapted speech (NAS) intelligibility benefits for native and nonnative English listeners. It also examined how the two speaking style adaptations interact with maskers that vary from purely energetic to largely informational at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).

Method: Materials consisted of 40 sentences produced by 10 young adult talkers in a conversational and a clear speaking style under two conditions: (a) in quiet and (b) in response to speech-shaped noise (SSN) played over headphones (NAS).

Reading aloud in clear speech reduces sentence recognition memory and recall for native and non-native talkers.

Speaking style variation plays a role in how listeners remember speech. Compared to conversational sentences, clearly spoken sentences were better recalled and identified as previously heard by native and non-native listeners. The present study investigated whether speaking style variation also plays a role in how talkers remember speech that they produce.

Face masks and speaking style affect audio-visual word recognition and memory of native and non-native speech.

Though necessary, protective mask wearing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic presents communication challenges. The present study examines how signal degradation and loss of visual information due to masks affects intelligibility and memory for native and non-native speech. We also test whether clear speech can alleviate perceptual difficulty for masked speech.

Acoustic cues and linguistic experience as factors in regional dialect classification.

Listeners are able to classify talkers by regional dialect of their native language when provided with even short speech samples. However, the way in which American English listeners use segmental and prosodic information to make such decisions is largely unknown. This study used a free classification task to assess native American English listeners' ability to group together talkers from six major dialect regions of American English.

Clear speech improves listeners' recall.

The present study examined the effect of intelligibility-enhancing clear speech on listeners' recall. Native (n = 57) and non-native (n = 31) English listeners heard meaningful sentences produced in clear and conversational speech, and then completed a cued-recall task. Results showed that listeners recalled more words from clearly produced sentences.

The Effect of Talker and Listener Depressive Symptoms on Speech Intelligibility.

Purpose This study examined the effect of depressive symptoms on production and perception of conversational and clear speech (CS) sentences. Method Five talkers each with high-depressive (HD) and low-depressive (LD) symptoms read sentences in conversational and clear speaking style. Acoustic measures of speaking rate, mean fundamental frequency (F0; Hz), F0 range (Hz), and energy in the 1-3 kHz range (dB) were obtained.

Effects of intelligibility on within- and cross-modal sentence recognition memory for native and non-native listeners.

The goal of the study was to examine whether enhancing the clarity of the speech signal through conversational-to-clear speech modifications improves sentence recognition memory for native and non-native listeners, and if so, whether this effect would hold when the stimuli in the test phase are presented in orthographic instead of auditory form (cross-modal presentation). Sixty listeners (30 native and 30 non-native English) participated in a within-modal (i.e.

Acoustics of Clear and Noise-Adapted Speech in Children, Young, and Older Adults.

Purpose: This study investigated acoustic-phonetic modifications produced in noise-adapted speech (NAS) and clear speech (CS) by children, young adults, and older adults.

Method: Ten children (11-13 years of age), 10 young adults (18-29 years of age), and 10 older adults (60-84 years of age) read sentences in conversational and clear speaking style in quiet and in noise. A number of acoustic measurements were obtained.

Intelligibility of Noise-Adapted and Clear Speech in Child, Young Adult, and Older Adult Talkers.

Purpose: This study examined intelligibility of conversational and clear speech sentences produced in quiet and in noise by children, young adults, and older adults. Relative talker intelligibility was assessed across speaking styles.

Method: Sixty-one young adult participants listened to sentences mixed with speech-shaped noise at -5 dB signal-to-noise ratio.

Perception of the Lexical Accent Contrast in One Variety of East Norwegian.

The perception of the lexical pitch accents was examined in the Trøndersk dialect of Norwegian. Based on a production study, a categorization of stimuli with manipulated pitch contours was conducted. The experiment tested which acoustic cues (height and alignment of fundamental frequency (F0) minimum, and alignment of F0 maximum and turning point from maximum to minimum) are necessary for the perception of the tonal contrast.

The Effect of Focus and Phrase Position on East Norwegian Lexical Tonal Accents.

Two experiments examined the acoustic correlates of the disyllabic tonal accent contrast in the Trøndersk dialect of Norwegian, and how narrow focus and phrasal position shape the contrast. Production results showed that both tonal accents have a high-low (HL) pitch contour, with different timing. In narrow focus, the pitch contrast was enlarged through asymmetrical F0 changes.

Differences in the Association between Segment and Language: Early Bilinguals Pattern with Monolinguals and Are Less Accurate than Late Bilinguals.

Early bilinguals often show as much sensitivity to L2-specific contrasts as monolingual speakers of the L2, but most work on cross-language speech perception has focused on isolated segments, and typically only on neighboring vowels or stop contrasts. In tasks that include sounds in context, listeners' success is more variable, so segment discrimination in isolation may not adequately represent the phonetic detail in stored representations. The current study explores the relationship between language experience and sensitivity to segmental cues in context by comparing the categorization patterns of monolingual English listeners and early and late Spanish-English bilinguals.

The neural processing of foreign-accented speech and its relationship to listener bias.

Foreign-accented speech often presents a challenging listening condition. In addition to deviations from the target speech norms related to the inexperience of the nonnative speaker, listener characteristics may play a role in determining intelligibility levels. We have previously shown that an implicit visual bias for associating East Asian faces and foreignness predicts the listeners' perceptual ability to process Korean-accented English audiovisual speech (Yi et al.

Enhancing speech intelligibility: interactions among context, modality, speech style, and masker.

Purpose: The authors sought to investigate interactions among intelligibility-enhancing speech cues (i.e., semantic context, clearly produced speech, and visual information) across a range of masking conditions.

Recognition memory in noise for speech of varying intelligibility.

This study investigated the extent to which noise impacts normal-hearing young adults' speech processing of sentences that vary in intelligibility. Intelligibility and recognition memory in noise were examined for conversational and clear speech sentences recorded in quiet (quiet speech, QS) and in response to the environmental noise (noise-adapted speech, NAS). Results showed that (1) increased intelligibility through conversational-to-clear speech modifications led to improved recognition memory and (2) NAS presented a more naturalistic speech adaptation to noise compared to QS, leading to more accurate word recognition and enhanced sentence recognition memory.

Acoustic and semantic enhancements for children with cochlear implants.

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined how signal clarity interacts with the use of sentence context information in determining speech-in-noise recognition for children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing.

Method: One hundred and twenty sentences in which the final word varied in predictability (high vs. low semantic context) were produced in conversational and clear speech.

Can older adults enhance the intelligibility of their speech?

Speech understanding difficulties for older adults (OAs) are well documented. Very little is known about whether age-related changes affect their speech production as well. Intelligibility of conversational and clear speech sentences produced by five OA talkers was examined.

Nonnative English speaker performance on the Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentences.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population.

Method: The BEL sentences were presented to 102 nonnative speakers of English with normal hearing and varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Five hundred sentences were presented mixed with noise spectrally matched to the target sentences.

Effects of speech clarity on recognition memory for spoken sentences.

Extensive research shows that inter-talker variability (i.e., changing the talker) affects recognition memory for speech signals.

New sentence recognition materials developed using a basic non-native English lexicon.

Purpose: The objective of this project was to develop new sentence test materials drawing on a basic non-native English lexicon that could be used to test speech recognition for various listener populations. These materials have been designed to provide a test tool that is less linguistically biased, compared with materials that are currently available, for sentence recognition for non-native as well as native speakers of English.

Method: One hundred non-native speakers of English were interviewed on a range of 20 conversational topics.

Bidirectional clear speech perception benefit for native and high-proficiency non-native talkers and listeners: intelligibility and accentedness.

This study investigated how native language background interacts with speaking style adaptations in determining levels of speech intelligibility. The aim was to explore whether native and high proficiency non-native listeners benefit similarly from native and non-native clear speech adjustments. The sentence-in-noise perception results revealed that fluent non-native listeners gained a large clear speech benefit from native clear speech modifications.

Effects of gender and regional dialect on prosodic patterns in American English.

While cross-dialect prosodic variation has been well established for many languages, most variationist research on regional dialects of American English has focused on the vowel system. The current study was designed to explore prosodic variation in read speech in two regional varieties of American English: Southern and Midland. Prosodic dialect variation was analyzed in two domains: speaking rate and the phonetic expression of pitch movements associated with accented and phrase-final syllables.