Network analysis has demonstrated that systems ranging from social networks to electric power grids often involve a small world structure-with local clustering but global ac cess. Critically, small world structure has also been shown to characterize adult human semantic networks. Moreover, the connectivity pattern of these mature networks is consistent with lexical growth processes in which chi...

Maternal speech styles to children between 20 and 34 months of age who were slow to acquire expressive language were compared to those of mothers with normally speaking toddlers. Aspects of the mothers' speech examined included use of various sentence types (declaratives, negative, questions, etc.); the mother's lexical contingency with regard to the child's utterance; mother's use of pragmatic...

Speech perception is made much harder by variability between talkers. As a result, listeners need to adapt to each different talker’s particular acoustic cue distributions. Thinking of this adaptation as a form of statistical inference, we explore the role that listeners’ prior expectations play in adapting to an unfamiliar talker. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that listeners will have a...

The view “the earlier the better” (e.g., [10]) may be a myth in a foreign language instructional setting (e.g., [1]). To identify successful late learners, this study compares early and late learners studying English as a foreign language in the situation of classroom minimal exposure to English, focusing on the perception of English consonants ([l, r]) produced by different talkers with and wi...

Although many of the acoustic cues used for speaker identification change systematically with the voice level of the talker, little is known about the influence that vocal effort has on the identification of individual talkers by human listeners. In this experiment, listeners were trained to identify four different same-sex talkers speaking at one of three different levels of vocal effort (whis...

Normal-hearing observers typically have some ability to "lipread," or understand visual-only speech without an accompanying auditory signal. However, talkers vary in how easy they are to lipread. Such variability could arise from differences in the visual information available in talkers' speech, human perceptual strategies that are better suited to some talkers than others, or some combination...