A parametric conversion of speech individuality is proposed based on STRAIGHT speech representation. STRAIGHT speech analysis-synthesis can produce high quality speech for various kinds of transformations by using 1) pitch synchronous windowing, 2) time-frequency spectrum interpolating and 3) randomized all-pass filtering for shaping phase spectrum. In order to utilize the smoothness of STRAIGH...

We have developed a novel structure-based evaluation for missense variants that explicitly models protein structure and amino acid properties to predict the likelihood that a variant disrupts protein function. A structural disruption score (SDS) is introduced as a measure to depict the likelihood that a case variant is functional. The score is constructed using characteristics that distinguish ...

PAST RESEARCH HAS SHOWN THAT MUSIC and language skills are related in normal-reading children as well as in children with dyslexia. In both an ongoing longitudinal study with normal-reading children and a pilot study with children with dyslexia, we found a strong relationship between musical discrimination abilities and language-related skills. In normal-reading children, musical discrimination...

Practice effects were examined in a masked letter discrimination task and a masked brightness discrimination task for college-age and 60- to 75-year-old subjects. The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) was fit to the response time and accuracy data and used to extract estimates of components of processing from the data. Relative to young subjects, the older subjects began the experiments with slo...

This study was aimed at determining the effects of a chronic modafinil intraperitoneal administration on the rate of learning in a series of five serial spatial discrimination reversals (SSDR) in a T-maze. Results showed that a daily modafinil administration at 64 mg/kg but not at 32 mg/kg induced a faster learning rate as compared to controls. This learning improvement in experimental mice was...

After several years of exposure to musical instrument practice, musicians acquire a great expertise in processing auditory features like tonal pitch or timbre. Here we compared the performance of musicians and non-musicians in two timbre discrimination tasks: one using instrumental timbres, the other using voices. Both accuracy (d-prime) and reaction time measures were obtained. The results ind...

The present study examined the effect of caregivers' experiences of racial discrimination on their adolescent children's psychological functioning among a sample of 264 African American dyads. Potential relations between caregiver discrimination experiences and a number of indicators of adolescents' (aged 12-17) psychological functioning over time were examined. It was found that caregiver disc...

Rodents can robustly distinguish fine differences in texture using their whiskers, a capacity that depends on neuronal activity in primary somatosensory "barrel" cortex. Here we explore how texture was collectively encoded by populations of three to seven neuronal clusters simultaneously recorded from barrel cortex while a rat performed a discrimination task. Each cluster corresponded to the si...

The present investigation explored the relation between the amount of language input and neural responses in English monolingual (N=18) and Spanish-English bilingual (N=19) infants. We examined the mismatch negativity (MMN); both the positive mismatch response (pMMR) and the negative mismatch response (nMMR), and identify a relationship between amount of language input and brain measures of spe...

Groups of 4-day-old neonates were tested for dichotic discrimination and ear differences with the High-Amplitude-Sucking procedure. In the first experiment, dichotic speech discrimination was attested by comparison with a control group. Furthermore, among those subjects who showed a substantial recovery of sucking response at least after one of the two syllable changes, it was observed that sig...