Several studies have shown enhancement of auditory evoked sustained responses for periodic over non-periodic sounds and for vowels over non-vowels. Here, we directly compared pitch and vowels using synthesized speech with a "damped" amplitude modulation. These stimuli were parametrically varied to yield four classes of matched stimuli: (1) periodic vowels (2) non-periodic vowels, (3) periodic n...

The resonating properties of many objects provide acoustical correlates which can be used to gain information about the objects. The acoustic signal provides not only shape information (what the sound means) but also size information (how small/big the object is relative to the population). A signal processing algorithm able to isolate both shape and size information is the Mellin transform. It...

We can recognize vowel sounds regardless of whether a man, woman or child pronounces them. Such vowel normalization has proved to be a difficult task for computer models to simulate. Motivated by observations of the auditory system Irino and Patterson have discussed the stabilized wavelet Mellin transform as a candidate method for vowel normalization. The aim of this paper is to quantify and ex...

Objectives: This study investigated the efficacy of working memory training for improving working memory capacity and related auditory stream segregation in auditory processing disorders children. Methods: Fifteen subjects (9-11 years), clinically diagnosed with auditory processing disorder participated in this non-randomized case-controlled trial. Working memory abilities and auditory strea...

A combination of lexical bias and altered auditory feedback was used to investigate the influence of higher-order linguistic knowledge on the perceptual aspects of speech motor control. Subjects produced monosyllabic real words or pseudo-words containing the vowel [ε] (as in "head") under conditions of altered auditory feedback involving a decrease in vowel first formant (F1) frequency. This ma...

To investigate the neural substrates of the perception of audiovisual speech, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study with 28 normal volunteers. We hypothesized that the constraint provided by visually-presented articulatory speech (mouth movements) would lessen the workload for speech identification if the two were concordant, but would increase the workload if the two were ...

Current understanding of disability and impairment has led to new approaches in Rehabilitation. In this issue of Iranian Rehabilitation Journal, a variety of articles introduces a new trend in rehabilitation. "Emotion pitch" of each vowel sound and Percentage of vowel correct is the subject which Talie Zarifian and her colleagues discussed in their article. Persian speaking children can get ben...

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of the addition of binary vibrotactile stimulation to continuous auditory feedback (vowel synthesis) for human-machine interface (HMI) control. Sixteen healthy participants controlled facial surface electromyography to achieve 2-D targets (vowels). Eight participants used only real-time auditory feedback to locate targets whereas the other e...

Talkers vary in the phonetic realization of their vowels. One influential hypothesis holds that listeners overcome this inter-talker variability through pre-linguistic auditory mechanisms normalize acoustic or cues form input to speech recognition. Dozens competing normalization accounts exist—including both specific vowel perception and general purpose can be applied any type cue. We add cross...