Nigel G. Ward, Yaffa Al Bayyari University of Texas at El Paso, 79968 USA Abstract Languages differ in the way that speakers coordinate their interaction moment-by-moment, and this can cause intercultural misunderstandings. We explore this in the domain of listening behavior. One way that listeners show interest and attention is by producing backchannel feedback (short utterances such as okay a...

Listening to music often drives people to move along to the beat of that music. Past research has suggested that motor resources are recruited not just to produce a beat, but also to perceive a beat. The present study extends this correlational work and examines whether the motor system plays a functional role in beat perception using a dual-task behavioral paradigm. Wßhile performance on a bea...

The perception of the pitch of harmonic complex sounds is a crucial function of human audition, especially in music and speech processing. Whether the underlying mechanisms of pitch perception are unique to humans, however, is unknown. Based on estimates of frequency resolution at the level of the auditory periphery, psychoacoustic studies in humans have revealed several primary features of cen...

Twenty-five school aged children with normal hearing were tested on their perception of prosody using the receptive prosody subtests of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C) and Child Paralanguage subtest of Diagnostic Analysis of Non Verbal Accuracy 2 (DANVA 2). Performance of four children with hearing loss on the two prosody measures was compared with performance...

This study investigated the auditory-visual integration of talker gender in the perception of tone variances. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate how listeners use the information of talker gender to adjust their expectation towards speakers’ pitch range and uncover intended tonal targets in Cantonese tone perception. Results from an audio-only tone identification task showed that tone c...

Congenital amusics, or "tone-deaf" individuals, show difficulty in perceiving and producing small pitch differences. While amusia has marked effects on music perception, its impact on speech perception is less clear. Here we test the hypothesis that individual differences in pitch perception affect judgment of emotion in speech, by applying low-pass filters to spoken statements of emotional spe...

Children often have difficulty understanding speech in challenging listening environments. In the absence of peripheral hearing loss, these speech perception difficulties may arise from dysfunction at more central levels in the auditory system, including subcortical structures. We examined brainstem encoding of pitch in a speech syllable in 38 school-age children. In children with poor speech-i...

Here we present evidence that native speakers of a tone language, in which pitch contributes to word meaning, are impaired in the discrimination of falling pitches in tone sequences, as compared to speakers of a non-tone language. Both groups were presented with monotonic and isochronous sequences of five tones (i.e., constant pitch and intertone interval). They were required to detect when the...

TO WHAT EXTENT DO MUSIC and language share neural mechanisms for processing pitch patterns? Musical tone-deafness (amusia) provides important evidence on this question. Amusics have problems with musical melody perception, yet early work suggested that they had no problems with the perception of speech intonation (Ayotte, Peretz, & Hyde, 2002). However, here we show that about 30% of amusics fr...

Pitch is important for speech and music perception, and may also play a crucial role in our ability to segregate sounds that arrive from different sources. This article reviews some basic aspects of pitch coding in the normal auditory system and explores the implications for pitch perception in people with hearing impairments and cochlear implants. Data from normal-hearing listeners suggest tha...