Even though pediatric hearing aid (HA) users listen most often to female talkers, clinicallyused speech tests primarily consist of adult male talkers' speech. Potential effects of age and/or gender of the talker on speech perception of pediatric HA users were examined using two speech tests, hVdvowel identification and CNC word recognition, and using speech materials spoken by four talker types...

This project compares the accuracy of two automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems–Bing Speech and YouTube’s automatic captions–across gender, race and four dialects of American English. The dialects included were chosen for their acoustic dissimilarity. Bing Speech had differences in word error rate (WER) between dialects and ethnicities, but they were not statistically reliable. YouTube’s a...

Three experiments examined normal-hearing and cochlear-implant listeners’ abilities to perceive and use talker-specific information in the speech signal. In Experiment 1 voice similarity judgments were gathered from normal-hearing listeners to maximize variability across talkers used in Experiment 2. These judgments were submitted to a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis; this solution was ...

This study examined early vocal production to assess whether it is possible to identify predictors of vocabulary development prior to the age point at which lexical delay is usually identified. Characteristics of babbling and first words in 12 Italian children with slow expressive development (late talkers; LT) were compared with those of 12 typically developing (TD) peers. Syllable structure a...

Recent studies have found that naïve listeners perform poorly in forced-choice dialect categorization tasks. However, the listeners' error patterns in these tasks reveal systematic confusions between phonologically similar dialects. In the present study, a free classification procedure was used to measure the perceptual similarity structure of regional dialect variation in the United States. In...

We explored the possibility of a unique cross-modal signature in maternal speech and singing that enables adults and infants to link unfamiliar speaking or singing voices with subsequently viewed silent videos of the talkers or singers. In Experiment 1, adults listened to 30-s excerpts of speech followed by successively presented 7-s silent video clips, one from the previously heard speaker (di...

Although many researchers have examined the role that binaural cues play in the perception of spatially separated speech signals, relatively little is known about the cues that listeners use to segregate competing speech messages in a monaural or diotic stimulus. This series of experiments examined how variations in the relative levels and voice characteristics of the target and masking talkers...

Broadening our understanding of the components and processes of speech sensorimotor learning is crucial to furthering methods of speech neurorehabilitation. Recent research in limb sensorimotor control has used virtual environments to study learning in novel sensorimotor working spaces. Comparable experimental paradigms have yet to be undertaken to study speech learning. We present acoustic and...