Late talkers (LTs)—children who show a marked delay in vocabulary learning—are at risk for Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and much research has focused on identifying factors contributing to this phenomenon. We use a computational model of word learning to further shed light on these factors. In particular, we show that variations in the attentional abilities of the computational learner c...

Listeners were asked to judge talkers' sex from audio samples. Pictures of men, women, or a neutral visual stimulus were presented concurrent with, 150 ms before, or 150 ms after the spoken stimulus. Listeners' identification of sex for men's voices was most strongly affected by the visual stimulus when it was presented 150 ms after the stimulus. Voice-picture mismatches affected recognition of...

PURPOSE The goal of this study was to determine if talkers with ALS are limited in their ability to increase lower lip and jaw speed at an early stage of the disease when their speaking rate and intelligibility are only minimally or not affected. METHOD A novel metronome paced fixed-target task was used to assess movement speed capacities during lower lip and jaw oscillations in seven talkers...

The effects of age, sex, and vocal tract configuration on the glottal excitation signal in speech are only partially understood, yet understanding these effects is important for both recognition and synthesis of speech as well as for medical purposes. In this paper, three acoustic measures related to the voice source are analyzed for five vowels from 3145 CVC utterances spoken by 335 talkers (8...

Recent research shows that exposure to an unfamiliar language is sufficient in improving talker learning. Here, we further investigated the nature of this effect by exploring individual differences and methodological issues. Two groups of Englishmonolingual adults were recruited: one with regular exposure to French (Montréal), and the other without (Storrs). Both groups learned the voices of En...

UNLABELLED Variability inherently present between multiple talkers can prove beneficial in the context of learning. However, the performance during learning paradigms by children with specific language impairment (SLI) remains below typically developing peers, even when multiple talkers are used. Preschool children with typically developing language (n = 17) and SLI (n = 17) participated in a t...

Talkers differ in phonetic properties of speech. One such property is voice-onset-time (VOT), an important marker of the voicing contrast in English stop consonants. Research has shown that VOT is affected by speaking rate: for any given talker, VOT increases as rate slows. The current work examines whether this contextual influence varies across talkers. Many tokens of /ti/ (Experiment 1) or /...

This study used a multi-talker database containing intelligibility scores for 2000 sentences (20 talkers, 100 sentences), to identify talker-related correlates of speech intelligibility. We first investigated "global" talker characteristics (e.g., gender, F0 and speaking rate). Findings showed female talkers to be more intelligible as a group than male talkers. Additionally, we found a tendency...