This paper investigates suprasegmental features in the prelexical speech of congenitally hearing impaired children who received a Nucleus-24 multichannel cochlear implant between 5 and 20 months of age. Bi-syllabic spontaneous babbling productions were analyzed acoustically at different stages in the babbling period. Fundamental frequency, pitch change in terms of direction and degree, and dura...

In an attempt to illuminate some of the underlying causes of phonological deficit in dyslexia we investigated the influences of processing suprasegmental acoustic features on children’s phonological awareness and reading and spelling abilities. In the English cohort tested (N=65) the processing of duration but not of intensity in 9-year old dyslexic children was significantly poorer than in age...

Rhythm patterns play an important role in the perception of second-language (L2) speech. This paper presents a novel approach to evaluating L2 speech rhythm using low-frequency spectral features inspired by the rhythmogram auditory model. In this paper we investigate several new feature sets for use in training rhythm-centric acoustic models. By capturing information over suprasegmental linguis...

When listening to speech in a second language, bilinguals' perception of acoustic-phonetic properties is often influenced by the features that are important in the native language of the bilingual. Furthermore, changes in the perception of segmental contrasts due to L1 experience can influence L2 lexical access during comprehension. The present study investigates whether the effect of L1 experi...