This thesis deals with the perception of pitch of speech signals and ways to measure this pitch. The term 'pitch' is used as a collective term for speech production (where it is used for the fundamental frequency of quasi-periodically vibrating vocal folds), for acoustic transmission (where it is used for the periodicity of signals), and for speech perception (where it is used for the perceived...

While everyone has experienced that seeing lip movements may improve speech perception, little is known about the neural mechanisms by which audiovisual speech information is combined. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while subjects performed an auditory recognition task among four different natural syllables randomly presented in the auditory (A), visual (V) or congruent bimodal (...

The Perceptual Loop Theory of speech monitoring assumes that speakers routinely inspect their inner speech. In contrast, Huettig and Hartsuiker (2010) observed that listening to one's own speech during language production drives eye-movements to phonologically related printed words with a similar time-course as listening to someone else's speech does in speech perception experiments. This sugge...

This 3-T fMRI study investigates brain regions similarly and differentially involved with listening and covert production of singing relative to speech. Given the greater use of auditory-motor self-monitoring and imagery with respect to consonance in singing, brain regions involved with these processes are predicted to be differentially active for singing more than for speech. The stimuli consi...

It is known from psychology and neuroscience that multimodal integration of sensory information enhances the perception of stimuli that are corrupted in one or more modalities. A prominent example of this is that auditory perception of speech is enhanced when speech is bimodal, i.e. when it also has a visual modality. The function of the cortical network processing speech in auditory and visual...

Objectives: Auditory perception or hearing ability is critical for children in acquisition of language and speech hence hearing loss has different effects on individuals’ linguistic perception, and also on their functions. It seems that deaf people suffer from language and speech impairments such as in perception of complex linguistic constructions. This research was aimed to study the pe...

Patients with severe and profoundly severe bilateral sensorineural prelingual deafness constitute a group of particular interest in the organization of the National Health Service; every patient must, in fact, follow a prosthetic-rehabilitative-educational programme lasting many years and organized under different areas to compensate for his/her communicative difficulties, especially with regar...

Classic research on the perception of speech sought to identify minimal acoustic correlates of each consonant and vowel. In explaining perception, this view designated momentary components of an acoustic spectrum as cues to the recognition of elementary phonemes. This conceptualization of speech perception is untenable given the findings of phonetic sensitivity to modulation independent of the ...

Children with specific language impairments (SLIs) show impaired perception and production of spoken language, and can also present with motor, auditory, and phonological difficulties. Recent auditory studies have shown impaired sensitivity to amplitude rise time (ART) in children with SLIs, along with non-speech rhythmic timing difficulties. Linguistically, these perceptual impairments should ...

This article introduces a set of interactive tools for studying fundamentals of speech production, perception and processing. In addition to this voice production simulator, it consists of interactive time-frequency representation, auditory representation visualizer and a vocal tract shape visualizer for introductory materials. It consists of compiled executables for Windows and Mac environment...