This study assessed perception of suprasegmental features of speech by 30 prelingual children with sensorineural hearing loss. Ten children had cochlear implants (CIs), and 20 children wore hearing aids (HA): 10 with severe hearing loss and 10 with profound hearing loss. Perception of intonation, syllable stress, word emphasis, and word pattern was assessed. Results revealed that the two HA gro...

This study considers the pronunciation of Japanese learners of English. Its first intent is to offer a brief overview of Japanese phonological and prosodic features to highlight anticipated L1 transfer issues in spoken English output. It then explores the segmental and suprasegmental aspects of a short recorded performance by two intermediate Japanese learners of English against a sample of Rec...

This paper presents a new version of the pronunciation software program WinPitch LTL. This completely redesigned version is much more easier to use by the teacher and learner alike, and contains the regular function of prosodic real time display, variable speed playback, prosodic morphing, on screen teacher comment display, etc. New features include video capabilities (the program can process m...

Considerable progress has been made in our understanding of the remarkable fidelity with which the human auditory brainstem represents key acoustic features of the speech signal. The brainstem response to speech can be assessed noninvasively by examining scalp-recorded evoked potentials. Morphologically, two main components of the scalp-recorded brainstem response can be differentiated, a trans...

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech ...

During language acquisition in infancy and when learning a foreign language, the segmentation of the auditory stream into words and phrases is a complex process. Intuitively, learners use "anchors" to segment the acoustic speech stream into meaningful units like words and phrases. Regularities on a segmental (e.g., phonological) or suprasegmental (e.g., prosodic) level can provide such anchors....

While many children who are born severely or profoundly deaf, or become deaf in infancy achieve intelligible speech, the vast majority do not. Speech intelligibility is fairly well correlated with residual hearing (Boothroyd, 1970; Smith, 1972) at least until 90dB, and overall intelligibility is well correlated with the percent of segmental errors, and to a lesser extent with suprasegmental dev...

This study aims at investigating the impact of cochlear implant (CI) use for phonological development. The main participants were a group of 14 deaf children who had received their CIs in the second year of life, and who had been wearing them for 24 months. A group of normally hearing (NH) children aged 24 months old was also evaluated. Data was obtained from a non-word repetition (NWR) task. V...

The goal of the work presented here is to automatically predict the type of an utterance in spoken dialogue by using automatically extracted suprasegmental information. For this task, we present and compare three stochastic algorithms: hidden Markov models, artificial neural nets, and classification and regression trees. These models are easily trainable, reasonably robust and fit into the prob...