This paper describes a fascinating connection between the physics of music and the famous chord in the dissonant rhythmic section of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (1913). The analysis of Stravinsky's chord will draw from the physics of harmonics, musical intervals, mathematics, and cognitive psychology. This highly interdisciplinary…

Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody--the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud--predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades…

Purpose: Vocal roughness is often present in many voice disorders but the assessment of roughness mainly depends on the subjective auditory-perceptual evaluation and lacks acoustic correlates. This study aimed to apply the concept of roughness in general sound quality perception to vocal roughness assessment and to characterize the relationship…

School noise is a serious, inevitable problem that teachers experience as stress or strain. Coping styles have a huge impact on teachers' mental health and therefore might influence this daily stress experience. Based on the stress-strain model and the transactional stress model, we examined in an online study how 99 teachers with different coping…

Background: With respect to the clinical criteria for diagnosing "childhood apraxia of speech" (commonly defined as a disorder of speech motor planning and/or programming), research has made important progress in recent years. Three segmental and suprasegmental speech characteristics--error inconsistency, lengthened and disrupted…

Background: According to sociolinguistic frameworks such as Communication Accommodation Theory, English native speakers modify their speech to meet the communicative needs of non-native speakers (Beebe & Giles, 1984). However, when foreigner-directed speech is used inappropriately, it may lead to overaccommodation, which in turn can act…

Purpose: The purpose of this work was to study how voice use in daily life is impacted by Parkinson's disease (PD), specifically if there is a difference in voice sound level and phonation ratio during everyday activities for individuals with PD and matched healthy controls. A further aim was to study how variations in environmental noise impact…

In first- and second-year algebra classrooms, the all-too-familiar whine of "when are we ever going to use this in real life?" challenges mathematics teachers to find new, engaging ways to present mathematical concepts. The introduction of quadratic equations is typically modeled by describing the motion of a moving object with respect…

The Deaf have often been overlooked when designing informal STEM education and public outreach activities. Astronomers at UC Riverside and teachers at the California School for the Deaf, Riverside (CSDR), have designed an astronomy workshop aimed specifically for the Deaf using the school's on-site sound lab. We have used astronomy for this…

Interactive models of language production predict that it should be possible to observe long-distance interactions; effects that arise at one level of processing influence multiple subsequent stages of representation and processing. We examine the hypothesis that disruptions arising in nonform-based levels of planning--specifically, lexical…

Purpose: A group of 10 prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants (CIs) formed a choir and received 21 months of formal music training. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the singing proficiency of these children. Method: The participants included all choir members (7 girls and 3 boys, mean age of 9.5 years old) who were…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to investigate vowel detection and identification in noise and provide baseline data regarding how vowel perception changed with signal-to-noise ratios. Psychometric functions of vowel detection and identification for 12 American English isolated vowels in long-term speech-shaped noise were examined for young…

Subjective impressions of speech delivery in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as monotonic or over-precise are widespread but still lack robust acoustic evidence. This study provides a detailed acoustic characterization of the specificities of speech in individuals with ASD using an extensive sample of speech data, from the production of narratives…

Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants' use of two…

This article explores the library space needs and wants of graduate and undergraduate students at a medium-size state University in Southwest Florida. The researcher conducted a sequential explanatory mixed methods study in which they administered a survey to all currently enrolled graduate and undergraduate students at the university and followed…