The influence of active listening on parents' perceptions of clinical empathy in a stuttering assessment: A preliminary study.

Purpose: The primary purpose of this preliminary study was to explore whether a clinician's use of active listening skills (i.e., client-directed eye gaze and paraphrasing) influenced parents' perceptions of clinical empathy in a stuttering assessment.

The development of tonal duration in Mandarin-speaking children.

Developmental changes in suprasegmental tonal duration were investigated in monolingual Mandarin-speaking children. Tone durations were acoustically measured in five- and eight-year-old children and adults. Children's tone duration and variability decreased with age.

Microaggression and the adult stuttering experience.

Background: Microaggressions are subtle insults, invalidations, or slights that target people due to their association with a marginalized group. Microaggressive experiences have been shown to degrade quality of life and corroborate negative stereotypes towards persons with disabilities. To date, minimal research has been dedicated to exploring microaggressions within adults who stutter.

Preliminary study of self-perceived communication competence amongst adults who do and do not stutter.

Purpose: Adults who stutter report a significant impact of stuttering on their quality of life, including negative thoughts and attitudes toward communication. In addition to this impact, adolescents who stutter also report lower levels of self-perceived communication competence (SPCC) compared to fluent peers. The purpose of this study was to extend the investigation of SPCC to adults who do and do not stutter.

College professors' perceptions of students who stutter and the impact on comfort approaching professors.

Purpose: Previous literature has documented that college professors view hypothetical students who stutter more negatively than their fluent peers. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether individuals who stutter report they experience more negative perceptions in the college classroom, and the impact of those perceptions on their comfort approaching professors.

Methods: Two hundred forty-six adults who do and do not stutter, matched for age, participated in this study.

The effects of amplitude and duration on the perception of English statements vs questions for native English and Chinese listeners.

The current study investigated whether amplitude and duration cues were salient for signaling English questions versus statements for native Mandarin Chinese listeners. The F0 contours of the final word were manipulated continuously from falling to rising patterns with the amplitude or duration varied. English-native and Chinese-native (EN and CN) listeners identified whether they heard a statement or a question.

Bimanual task performance: Adults who do and do not stutter.

Research has demonstrated children who stutter score significantly lower than children who do not stutter on the Purdue Pegboard Test. Past data also suggest performance on this task may be associated with stuttering frequency (Choo et al., 2016; Mohammadi et al.

Sentence recognition for native and non-native English listeners in quiet and babble: Effects of contextual cues.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference between English-native (EN) listeners and Chinese-native (CN) listeners using contextual cues to perceive speech in quiet and four-talker babble in English. Three types of sentences served as speech stimuli: high (semantic and syntactic cues), low (syntactic cues), and zero predictability. Results showed that CN listeners primarily relied on semantic information when perceiving speech, whereas EN listeners used both semantic and syntactic cues more equally.

Effect of blindness on mismatch responses to Mandarin lexical tones, consonants, and vowels.

According to the hypothesis of auditory compensation, blind listeners are more sensitive to auditory input than sighted listeners. In the current study, we employed the passive oddball paradigm to investigate the effect of blindness on listeners' mismatch responses to Mandarin lexical tones, consonants, and vowels. Twelve blind and twelve sighted age- and verbal IQ-matched adults with normal hearing participated in this study.

Vowel and tone recognition in quiet and in noise among Mandarin-speaking amusics.

Music and language are two intricately linked communication modalities in humans. A deficit in music pitch processing as manifested in the condition of congenital amusia has been related to difficulties in lexical tone processing for both tone and non-tonal languages. However, it is still unclear whether amusia also affects the perception of vowel phonemes in quiet and in noise.

The effect of phonetic complexity on the speed of single-word productions in adults who do and do not stutter.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of phonetic complexity as measured by the Word Complexity Measure (WCM) on the speed of single-word production in adults who do (AWS, n=15) and do not stutter (AWNS, n=15).

Method: Participants were required to name pictures of high versus low phonetic complexity and balanced for lexical properties. Speech reaction time was recorded from initial presentation of the picture to verbal response of participant for each word type.

Performance Pressure Enhances Speech Learning.

Real-world speech learning often occurs in high pressure situations such as trying to communicate in a foreign country. However, the impact of pressure on speech learning success is largely unexplored. In this study, adult, native speakers of English learned non-native speech categories under pressure or no-pressure conditions.

Auditory detection of non-speech and speech stimuli in noise: Native speech advantage.

Detection thresholds of Chinese vowels, Korean vowels, and a complex tone, with harmonic and noise carriers were measured in noise for Mandarin Chinese-native listeners. The harmonic index was calculated as the difference between detection thresholds of the stimuli with harmonic carriers and those with noise carriers. The harmonic index for Chinese vowels was significantly greater than that for Korean vowels and the complex tone.

English vowel identification and vowel formant discrimination by native Mandarin Chinese- and native English-speaking listeners: The effect of vowel duration dependence.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between English vowel identification and English vowel formant discrimination for native Mandarin Chinese- and native English-speaking listeners. The identification of 12 English vowels was measured with the duration cue preserved or removed. The thresholds of vowel formant discrimination on the F2 of two English vowels,/Λ/and/i/, were also estimated using an adaptive-tracking procedure.

Auditory detection of non-speech and speech stimuli in noise: Effects of listeners' native language background.

This study investigated whether native listeners processed speech differently from non-native listeners in a speech detection task. Detection thresholds of Mandarin Chinese and Korean vowels and non-speech sounds in noise, frequency selectivity, and the nativeness of Mandarin Chinese and Korean vowels were measured for Mandarin Chinese- and Korean-native listeners. The two groups of listeners exhibited similar non-speech sound detection and frequency selectivity; however, the Korean listeners had better detection thresholds of Korean vowels than Chinese listeners, while the Chinese listeners performed no better at Chinese vowel detection than the Korean listeners.

Mandarin Chinese vowel-plus-tone identification in noise: Effects of language experience.

Several studies found better English vowel identification in English multi-talker babble (MTB) and temporally-modulated (TM) noise, but not in quiet condition for native Chinese listeners in the US (CNU) with the US residency of 1-3 years than native Chinese listeners in China (CNC) with no residency history in English speaking countries. Two possible explanations were proposed: (1) CNU listeners used temporal dips of noise more efficiently than CNC listeners; and (2) CNU listeners had less informational masking of MTB than their CNC peers. The current study explored whether the difference in noise processing between CNU and CNC listeners was also presented for their native speech perception.

Phonetic complexity of words immediately following utterance-initial productions in children who stutter.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to analyze phonetic complexity in the speech of children who stutter in a manner distinct from previous research with specific emphasis on three methodological considerations: (1) analysis of the word immediately following the initial word in the utterance; (2) accounting for other additional linguistic and lexical factors; and (3) discrimination of disfluency types produced.

Methods: Parent-child conversations were transcribed for 14 children who stutter (mean age=3 years, 7 months; SD=11.20 months) and coded for phonetic complexity using the Word Complexity Measure (WCM).

Vowel identification in temporal-modulated noise for native and non-native listeners: Effect of language experience.

A previous study found that English vowel identification in babble was significantly different between Chinese-native listeners in China and in the U.S. One possible explanation is that native English experiences might change Chinese-native listeners' ability to take advantage of the temporal modulation in noise for their English vowel perception.

Just-noticeable difference of tone pitch contour change for Mandarin congenital amusics.

Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder that may affect the processing of both music pitch and lexical tone. In the present study, the just-noticeable differences (JNDs) of tone pitch contour change were examined for three groups of Mandarin-native listeners: amusics with (tone agnosics) and without lexical tone difficulties (pure amusics), and matched controls. Tone agnosics showed significantly larger JNDs than normal controls, while pure amusics performed comparably with the controls.

The layering of auditory experiences in driving experience-dependent subcortical plasticity.

In this review article, we focus on recent studies of experiential influences on brainstem function. Using these studies as scaffolding, we then lay the initial groundwork for the Layering Hypothesis, which explicates how experiences combine to shape subcortical auditory function. Our hypothesis builds on the idea that the subcortical auditory system reflects the collective auditory experiences of an individual, including interactions with sound that occurred in the distant past.

Contribution of low-frequency harmonics to Mandarin Chinese tone identification in quiet and six-talker babble background.

The goal of this study was to investigate Mandarin Chinese tone identification in quiet and multi-talker babble conditions for normal-hearing listeners. Tone identification was measured with speech stimuli and stimuli with low and/or high harmonics that were embedded in three Mandarin vowels with two fundamental frequencies. There were six types of stimuli: all harmonics (All), low harmonics (Low), high harmonics (High), and the first (H1), second (H2), and third (H3) harmonic.

Just noticeable difference of tone pitch contour change for English- and Chinese-native listeners.

Just noticeable differences of tone pitch contour discrimination were examined for young English- and Mandarin Chinese-native listeners to examine categorical features of tone perception for the two groups of listeners. Three types of stimuli were used: A Mandarin Chinese vowel, an English vowel, and tonal glides. Level, rising, and falling tones within or across tone boundaries served as the standard stimuli to measure thresholds of tone pitch discrimination.

Description of multilingual participants who stutter.

Purpose: The purpose of this review was to examine the descriptions of multilingual participants provided in stuttering literature to determine how frequently and consistently relevant factors of language profile are reported.

Method: We conducted a systematic search of published studies that included multilingual participants who stutter and reviewed the level of detail provided regarding language history, function, proficiency, stability, mode, accent, covert speech, and affective factors.

Results: Twenty-three studies qualified to be included in the systematic review, consisting of 342 different multilingual stuttering participants.

The vowel inherent spectral change of English vowels spoken by native and non-native speakers.

The current study examined Vowel Inherent Spectral Change (VISC) of English vowels spoken by English-, Chinese-, and Korean-native speakers. Two metrics, spectral distance (amount of spectral shift) and spectral angle (direction of spectral shift) of formant movement from the onset to the offset, were measured for 12 English monophthongs produced in a /hvd/ context. While Chinese speakers showed significantly greater spectral distances of vowels than English and Korean speakers, there was no significant speakers' native language effect on spectral angles.

English sentence recognition in speech-shaped noise and multi-talker babble for English-, Chinese-, and Korean-native listeners.

This study aimed to investigate English sentence recognition in quiet and two types of maskers, multi-talker babble (MTB) and long-term speech-shaped noise (LTSSN), with varied signal-to-noise ratios, for English-, Chinese-, and Korean-native listeners. Results showed that first, sentence recognition for non-native listeners was affected more by background noise than that for native listeners; second, the masking effects of LTSSN were similar between Chinese and Korean listeners, but the masking effects of MTB were greater for Chinese than for Korean listeners, suggesting possible interaction effects between the non-native listener's native language and speech-like competing noise in sentence recognition.