Vowel identification in noise using consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) logatomes was used to investigate a possible interplay of speech information from different frequency regions. It was hypothesized that the periodicity conveyed by the temporal envelope of a high frequency stimulus can enhance the use of the information carried by auditory channels in the low-frequency region that share the sam...

The German vowel system shows a complex structure based on the interaction between vowel duration and formant structures between short and long cognates. This leads to the question how vowel duration is processed. The perception of vowel duration in German native speakers was tested by an identification test, a goodness rating and an adaptive discrimination test. The test results show a sharp b...

This thesis studies and interprets the -entory of acoustic events associated with the changing vocal-tract configurations .:at characterize fricatives preceding vowels. Theoretical considerations of the articulatory, aerodynamic and acoustic aspects of the production of fricatives provide the foundation for interpreting the acoustic data. Fricative characteristics are considered with respect to...

Cochlear implant (CI) users are unable to receive masking release and the reasons are unclear. The present study examines the hypothesis that when listening to speech in fluctuating maskers, CI users cannot fuse the pieces of the message over temporal gaps because they are not able to perceive reliably the information carried by obstruent consonants (e.g., stops). To test this hypothesis, CI us...

Older adults are often reported in the literature to have greater difficulty than younger adults understanding speech in noise [Helfer and Wilber (1988). J. Acoust. Soc. Am, 859-893]. The poorer performance of older adults has been attributed to a general deterioration of cognitive processing, deterioration of cochlear anatomy, and/or greater difficulty segregating speech from noise. The curren...

This study assessed the acoustic and perceptual effect of noise on vowel and stop-consonant spectra. Multi-talker babble and speech-shaped noise were added to vowel and stop stimuli at -5 to +10 dB S/N, and the effect of noise was quantified in terms of (a) spectral envelope differences between the noisy and clean spectra in three frequency bands, (b) presence of reliable F1 and F2 information ...

We investigate whether the neural correlates of the continuity illusion, as measured using fMRI, are modulated by attention. As we have shown previously, when two formants of a synthetic vowel are presented in an alternating pattern, the vowel can be identified if the gaps in each formant are filled with bursts of plausible masking noise, causing the illusory percept of a continuous vowel ("Ill...