This study explored the interaction between semantic predictability and regional dialect variation in an analysis of speech produced by college-aged female talkers from the Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects of American English. Previous research on the effects of semantic predictability has shown that vowels in high semantic predictability contexts are temporally and spectrally reduced c...

Talkers differ greatly in the acoustic realization of speech sounds, a source of signal variation that must be overcome by human and machine listeners. The present study examined talker variability in voice onset time (VOT) across the six word-initial stop consonant categories (/ptkbdg/) of American English. Employing a large corpus of productions from more than 100 speakers, we replicated prev...

People with high-functioning Autism (HFA) can accurately identify social categories from speech, but they have more difficulty connecting linguistic variation in the speech signal to social stereotypes associated with those categories. In the current study, the perception and evaluation of talker age by young adults with HFA was examined. The participants with HFA performed similarly to a typic...

Audiovisual integration ability for word-level stimuli was assessed using two talkers, one easy to lipread and the other hard to lipread. No significant effect for integration ability was found for the two talkers. copyright by Stephanie Shapiro Wieczorek 2013

There is a lack of stability in language difficulties across early childhood: most late talkers (LTs) resolve their difficulties by pre-school; and a significant number of children who were not LTs subsequently manifest language difficulties. Greater reliability in predicting individual outcomes is needed, which might be achieved by waiting until later in development when language is more stabl...

Late-talking and normally speaking toddlers with and without histories of middle ear involvement were followed for 2 years to assess speech and expressive language outcomes. Results revealed no differences in expressive language outcome that could be attributed to history of middle ear involvement in either group. There did seem to be differences in outcome on measures of articulation that were...

OBJECTIVES To document the attainment of developmental milestones in children with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy (DMD) and to determine whether early delays are associated with later performance on measures of cognition. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective parental report was utilized to document the acquisition of 10 common developmental milestones in children with DMD (n = 130) and their unaffected ...

A large number of non-native English speakers may be found in American classrooms, both as listeners and talkers. Little is known about how this population comprehends speech in realistic adverse acoustical conditions. A study was conducted to investigate the effects of background noise level (BNL), reverberation time (RT), and talker foreign accent on native and non-native listeners' speech co...

Linguistic experience has been shown to affect the perception of regional dialect variation. This pilot study examined the effect of familiarity on the perceived similarity of regional dialects. Native speakers of American English completed a paired comparison perceptual similarity rating task with a group of unfamiliar regional dialects. Speakers of American English were asked to make explicit...