Race Identification in American English.

Purpose: This study examined the race identification of Southern American English speakers from two geographically distant regions in North Carolina. The purpose of this work is to explore how talkers' self-identified race, talker dialect region, and acoustic speech variables contribute to listener categorization of talker races.

Method: Two groups of listeners heard a series of /h/-vowel-/d/ (/hVd/) words produced by Black and White talkers from East and West North Carolina, respectively.

Effect of Competition, Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Race, and Sex on Southern American English Dialect Talkers' Sentence Recognition.

Background: Although numerous studies have examined regional and racial-ethnic labeling of talker identity, few have evaluated speech perception skills of listeners from the southern United States.

Purpose: The objective of the study was to examine the effect of competition, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), race, and sex on sentence recognition performance in talkers from the Southern American English dialect region.

Research Design: A four-factor mixed-measures design was used.

Mechanisms of Vowel Variation in African American English.

Purpose: This research explored mechanisms of vowel variation in African American English by comparing 2 geographically distant groups of African American and White American English speakers for participation in the African American Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift.

Method: Thirty-two male (African American: n = 16, White American controls: n = 16) lifelong residents of cities in eastern and western North Carolina produced heed,hid,heyd,head,had,hod,hawed,whod,hood,hoed,hide,howed,hoyd, and heard 3 times each in random order. Formant frequency, duration, and acoustic analyses were completed for the vowels /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ɔ, u, ʊ, o, aɪ, aʊ, oɪ, ɝ/ produced in the listed words.

Lexical diversity in Parkinson's disease.

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative syndrome of the basal ganglia (BG) believed to disrupt cortical-subcortical pathways critical to motor, cognitive and expressive language function. Recent studies have shown subtle deficits in expressive language performance among individuals with PD even in the earliest stage of the disease. The objective of this study was to use measures of lexical diversity to examine expressive language performance during discourse production in a sample of individuals with PD.