A dichotic pitch can be perceived due to the binaural presentation of white noise with a particular interaural phase relationship. Three perceptual aspects are characteristic: the pitch value, the timbre of the phenomenon, and the lateralized position of the pitch image. As dichotic pitch phenomena are generally considered to be natural epiphenomena of the mechanisms of binaural hearing, infere...

This study assessed attentional effects on the right-ear advantage (REA) for a dichoticlistening task that used synthetic-speech syllables. Presenting subjects with monaural tone cues at various intervals prior to dichotic pairs of natural-speech syllables, T. A. Mondor and M. P. Bryden 1991 (The influence of attention on the dichotic REA. Neuropsychologia, 29, 1179-1190) found a reduced REA wi...

This study accounts for the acquisition of the consonant clusters of English syllable structures both in onset and coda positions by Persian EFL learners. Persian syllable structure is "CV(CC)", composed of one consonant at the initial position and two optional consonants at the final position; whereas English syllable structure is "(CCC)V(CCCC)". Therefore, Persian EFL learners need to resolve...

In the present paper vowel lengthenings and non-lexicalized filled pauses were studied in the spontaneous speech of children and adults (focusing more on the much less studied phenomenon: vowel lengthening). The results revealed different usage and appearance of lengthenings in the two age groups, therefore, differences in speech skills and strategies can be concluded. LEs and FPs differ mostly...

Recent studies have shown that talkers implicitly imitate/accommodate the phonetic properties of recently heard speech [1, 2]. However, it has also been shown that this phonetic imitation effect is not an automatic process [3, 4]: in [3], the artificially lengthened VOT on /p/ was imitated in a non-shadowing task, while shortened VOT (which could jeopardize phonemic contrast) was not imitated, ...

This paper presents the first description of vowel devoicing in Quechua. The characteristics of the process as well as the environments most conducive to its occurrence are reported based on an analysis of 4062 vowels extracted from interviews with 16 speakers of the Cusco Collao dialect. Patterns of Quechua vowel devoicing appear to be generally consistent with the gestural overlap model that ...

This study aimed to evaluate neuroendocrine responses and changes in perceptual asymmetry following an induced negative affect. Cortisol increasing in response to negative affect has been reported, while current brain models of emotion processing link negative affect to the right hemisphere. In this study, the Velten Mood Induction Procedure was used to generate neutral or negative affect in 44...

Synopsis Sensorineural hearing loss, is associated with increased forward and backward masking of weak acoustic sub-segments by strong ones, thereby degrading the reception of important cues for identification of consonants. Employment of inter-aural switching, by splitting the speech temporally and presenting alternate segments to the two ears may help in reducing the effect of temporal maskin...

BACKGROUND When presented with different sounds in each ear (dichotic listening), healthy subjects typically show a preference for stimuli heard in the right ear, an effect termed "right ear advantage". Previous studies examining right ear advantage in schizophrenia have been inconsistent, showing either decreased or increased advantage relative to comparison subjects. Given evidence for enhanc...