Browsing by Subject "speech"

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    Cortical Processing of Phonetic and Emotional Information in Speech: A Cross-Modal Priming Study
    (2015-05) Diamond, Erin
    The present study utilized a cross-modal priming paradigm to investigate dimensional information processing in speech. Primes were facial expressions that varied in two dimensions: affect (happy, neutral, or angry) and mouth shape (corresponding to either /a/ or /i/ vowels). Targets were CVC words that varied by prosody and vowel identity. In both the phonetic and prosodic conditions, adult participants responded to congruence or incongruence of the visual-auditory stimuli. Behavioral results showed a congruency effect in percent correct and reaction time measures. Two ERP responses, the N400 and late positive response, were identified for the effect with systematic between-condition differences. Localization and time-frequency analyses indicated different cortical networks for selective processing of phonetic and emotional information in the words. Overall, the results suggest that cortical processing of phonetic and emotional information involves distinct neural systems, which has important implications for further investigation of language processing deficits in clinical populations.
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    The Emergence of Gendered Phonetic Variation in Preschool Children: Findings from a Longitudinal Study
    (2021-06) Koeppe, Kiana
    Gendered speech variation has been found in adults and children. In adults, sexual dimorphism is an important component of this variation, but prepubertal children lack this anatomical differentiation. Research has shown that adults also use learned behaviors to perform their gender, and a growing body of research has suggested that gendered speech variation in children is also due to learning. One of those learned sociophonetic variations is seen in the production of /s/. In this study, the development and variation of /s/ and /ʃ/ production between 55 children assigned male at birth (AMAB) and 55 children assigned female at birth (AFAB) was analyzed. A systematic comparison of /s/ and /ʃ/ accuracy and spectral properties at 28-39 months old and at 53-66 months old suggested that /s/ variation is a possible gender marker that is learned early in life.