Matching Items (8)
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- All Subjects: Acoustics
- All Subjects: Hearing
- Creators: Zhou, Yi
- Creators: Department of Speech and Hearing Science
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Status: Published
Description
This thesis investigated the impact of word complexity as measured through the Proportion of Whole Word Proximity (PWP; Ingram 2002) on consonant correctness as measured by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC; Shriberg & Kwiatkowski 1980) on the spoken words of monolingual Spanish-speaking children. The effect of word complexity on consonant correctness has previously been studied on English-speaking children (Knodel 2012); the present study extends this line of research to determine if it can be appropriately applied to Spanish. Language samples from a previous study were used (Hase, 2010) in which Spanish-speaking children were given two articulation assessments: Evaluación fonológica del habla infantil (FON; Bosch Galceran, 2004), and the Spanish Test of Articulation for Children Under Three Years of Age (STAR; Bunta, 2002). It was hypothesized that word complexity would affect a Spanish-speaking child’s productions of correct consonants as was seen for the English- speaking children studied. This hypothesis was supported for 10 out of the 14 children. The pattern of word complexity found for Spanish was as follows: CVCV > CVCVC, Tri-syllables no clusters > Disyllable words with clusters.
ContributorsPurinton, Kaitlyn Lisa (Author) / Ingram, David (Thesis director) / Dixon, Dixon (Committee member) / Barlow, Jessica (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
In this study, the Bark transform and Lobanov method were used to normalize vowel formants in speech produced by persons with dysarthria. The computer classification accuracy of these normalized data were then compared to the results of human perceptual classification accuracy of the actual vowels. These results were then analyzed to determine if these techniques correlated with the human data.
ContributorsJones, Hanna Vanessa (Author) / Liss, Julie (Thesis director) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Borrie, Stephanie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Hearing and vision are two senses that most individuals use on a daily basis. The simultaneous presentation of competing visual and auditory stimuli often affects our sensory perception. It is often believed that vision is the more dominant sense over audition in spatial localization tasks. Recent work suggests that visual information can influence auditory localization when the sound is emanating from a physical location or from a phantom location generated through stereophony (the so-called "summing localization"). The present study investigates the role of cross-modal fusion in an auditory localization task. The focuses of the experiments are two-fold: (1) reveal the extent of fusion between auditory and visual stimuli and (2) investigate how fusion is correlated with the amount of visual bias a subject experiences. We found that fusion often occurs when light flash and "summing localization" stimuli were presented from the same hemifield. However, little correlation was observed between the magnitude of visual bias and the extent of perceived fusion between light and sound stimuli. In some cases, subjects reported distinctive locations for light and sound and still experienced visual capture.
ContributorsBalderas, Leslie Ann (Author) / Zhou, Yi (Thesis director) / Yost, William (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Pitch and timbre perception are two important dimensions of auditory perception. These aspects of sound aid the understanding of our environment, and contribute to normal everyday functioning. It is therefore important to determine the nature of perceptual interaction between these two dimensions of sound. This study tested the interactions between pitch perception associated with the fundamental frequency (F0) and sharpness perception associated with the spectral slope of harmonic complex tones in normal hearing (NH) listeners and cochlear implant (CI) users. Pitch and sharpness ranking was measured without changes in the non-target dimension (Experiment 1), with different amounts of unrelated changes in the non-target dimension (Experiment 2), and with congruent/incongruent changes of similar perceptual salience in the non-target dimension (Experiment 3). The results showed that CI users had significantly worse pitch and sharpness ranking thresholds than NH listeners. Pitch and sharpness perception had symmetric interactions in NH listeners. However, for CI users, spectral slope changes significantly affected pitch ranking, while F0 changes had no significant effect on sharpness ranking. CI users' pitch ranking sensitivity was significantly better with congruent than with incongruent spectral slope changes. These results have important implications for CI processing strategies to better transmit pitch and timbre cues to CI users.
ContributorsSoslowsky, Samara Miranda (Author) / Luo, Xin (Thesis director) / Yost, William (Committee member) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Spatial awareness (i.e., the sense of the space that we are in) involves the integration of auditory, visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive sensory information of environmental events. Hearing impairment has negative effects on spatial awareness and can result in deficits in communication and the overall aesthetic experience of life, especially in noisy or reverberant environments. This deficit occurs as hearing impairment reduces the signal strength needed for auditory spatial processing and changes how auditory information is combined with other sensory inputs (e.g., vision). The influence of multisensory processing on spatial awareness in listeners with normal, and impaired hearing is not assessed in clinical evaluations, and patients’ everyday sensory experiences are currently not directly measurable. This dissertation investigated the role of vision in auditory localization in listeners with normal, and impaired hearing in a naturalistic stimulus setting, using natural gaze orienting responses. Experiments examined two behavioral outcomes—response accuracy and response time—based on eye movement in response to simultaneously presented auditory and visual stimuli. The first set of experiments examined the effects of stimulus spatial saliency on response accuracy and response time and the extent of visual dominance in both metrics in auditory localization. The results indicate that vision can significantly influence both the speed and accuracy of auditory localization, especially when auditory stimuli are more ambiguous. The influence of vision is shown for both normal hearing- and hearing-impaired listeners. The second set of experiments examined the effect of frontal visual stimulation on localizing an auditory target presented from in front of or behind a listener. The results show domain-specific effects of visual capture on both response time and response accuracy. These results support previous findings that auditory-visual interactions are not limited by the spatial rule of proximity. These results further suggest the strong influence of vision on both the processing and the decision-making stages of sound source localization for both listeners with normal, and impaired hearing.
ContributorsClayton, Colton (Author) / Zhou, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Daliri, Ayoub (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Sound localization can be difficult in a reverberant environment. Fortunately listeners can utilize various perceptual compensatory mechanisms to increase the reliability of sound localization when provided with ambiguous physical evidence. For example, the directional information of echoes can be perceptually suppressed by the direct sound to achieve a single, fused auditory event in a process called the precedence effect (Litovsky et al., 1999). Visual cues also influence sound localization through a phenomenon known as the ventriloquist effect. It is classically demonstrated by a puppeteer who speaks without visible lip movements while moving the mouth of a puppet synchronously with his/her speech (Gelder and Bertelson, 2003). If the ventriloquist is successful, sound will be “captured” by vision and be perceived to be originating at the location of the puppet. This thesis investigates the influence of vision on the spatial localization of audio-visual stimuli. Participants seated in a sound-attenuated room indicated their perceived locations of either ISI or level-difference stimuli in free field conditions. Two types of stereophonic phantom sound sources, created by modulating the inter-stimulus time interval (ISI) or level difference between two loudspeakers, were used as auditory stimuli. The results showed that the light cues influenced auditory spatial perception to a greater extent for the ISI stimuli than the level difference stimuli. A binaural signal analysis further revealed that the greater visual bias for the ISI phantom sound sources was correlated with the increasingly ambiguous binaural cues of the ISI signals. This finding suggests that when sound localization cues are unreliable, perceptual decisions become increasingly biased towards vision for finding a sound source. These results support the cue saliency theory underlying cross-modal bias and extend this theory to include stereophonic phantom sound sources.
ContributorsMontagne, Christopher (Author) / Zhou, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Buneo, Christopher A (Thesis advisor) / Yost, William A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Head movement is known to have the benefit of improving the accuracy of sound localization for humans and animals. Marmoset is a small bodied New World monkey species and it has become an emerging model for studying the auditory functions. This thesis aims to detect the horizontal and vertical rotation of head movement in marmoset monkeys.
Experiments were conducted in a sound-attenuated acoustic chamber. Head movement of marmoset monkey was studied under various auditory and visual stimulation conditions. With increasing complexity, these conditions are (1) idle, (2) sound-alone, (3) sound and visual signals, and (4) alert signal by opening and closing of the chamber door. All of these conditions were tested with either house light on or off. Infra-red camera with a frame rate of 90 Hz was used to capture of the head movement of monkeys. To assist the signal detection, two circular markers were attached to the top of monkey head. The data analysis used an image-based marker detection scheme. Images were processed using the Computation Vision Toolbox in Matlab. The markers and their positions were detected using blob detection techniques. Based on the frame-by-frame information of marker positions, the angular position, velocity and acceleration were extracted in horizontal and vertical planes. Adaptive Otsu Thresholding, Kalman filtering and bound setting for marker properties were used to overcome a number of challenges encountered during this analysis, such as finding image segmentation threshold, continuously tracking markers during large head movement, and false alarm detection.
The results show that the blob detection method together with Kalman filtering yielded better performances than other image based techniques like optical flow and SURF features .The median of the maximal head turn in the horizontal plane was in the range of 20 to 70 degrees and the median of the maximal velocity in horizontal plane was in the range of a few hundreds of degrees per second. In comparison, the natural alert signal - door opening and closing - evoked the faster head turns than other stimulus conditions. These results suggest that behaviorally relevant stimulus such as alert signals evoke faster head-turn responses in marmoset monkeys.
Experiments were conducted in a sound-attenuated acoustic chamber. Head movement of marmoset monkey was studied under various auditory and visual stimulation conditions. With increasing complexity, these conditions are (1) idle, (2) sound-alone, (3) sound and visual signals, and (4) alert signal by opening and closing of the chamber door. All of these conditions were tested with either house light on or off. Infra-red camera with a frame rate of 90 Hz was used to capture of the head movement of monkeys. To assist the signal detection, two circular markers were attached to the top of monkey head. The data analysis used an image-based marker detection scheme. Images were processed using the Computation Vision Toolbox in Matlab. The markers and their positions were detected using blob detection techniques. Based on the frame-by-frame information of marker positions, the angular position, velocity and acceleration were extracted in horizontal and vertical planes. Adaptive Otsu Thresholding, Kalman filtering and bound setting for marker properties were used to overcome a number of challenges encountered during this analysis, such as finding image segmentation threshold, continuously tracking markers during large head movement, and false alarm detection.
The results show that the blob detection method together with Kalman filtering yielded better performances than other image based techniques like optical flow and SURF features .The median of the maximal head turn in the horizontal plane was in the range of 20 to 70 degrees and the median of the maximal velocity in horizontal plane was in the range of a few hundreds of degrees per second. In comparison, the natural alert signal - door opening and closing - evoked the faster head turns than other stimulus conditions. These results suggest that behaviorally relevant stimulus such as alert signals evoke faster head-turn responses in marmoset monkeys.
ContributorsSimhadri, Sravanthi (Author) / Zhou, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This study consisted of several related projects on dynamic spatial hearing by both human and robot listeners. The first experiment investigated the maximum number of sound sources that human listeners could localize at the same time. Speech stimuli were presented simultaneously from different loudspeakers at multiple time intervals. The maximum of perceived sound sources was close to four. The second experiment asked whether the amplitude modulation of multiple static sound sources could lead to the perception of auditory motion. On the horizontal and vertical planes, four independent noise sound sources with 60° spacing were amplitude modulated with consecutively larger phase delay. At lower modulation rates, motion could be perceived by human listeners in both cases. The third experiment asked whether several sources at static positions could serve as "acoustic landmarks" to improve the localization of other sources. Four continuous speech sound sources were placed on the horizontal plane with 90° spacing and served as the landmarks. The task was to localize a noise that was played for only three seconds when the listener was passively rotated in a chair in the middle of the loudspeaker array. The human listeners were better able to localize the sound sources with landmarks than without. The other experiments were with the aid of an acoustic manikin in an attempt to fuse binaural recording and motion data to localize sounds sources. A dummy head with recording devices was mounted on top of a rotating chair and motion data was collected. The fourth experiment showed that an Extended Kalman Filter could be used to localize sound sources in a recursive manner. The fifth experiment demonstrated the use of a fitting method for separating multiple sounds sources.
ContributorsZhong, Xuan (Author) / Yost, William (Thesis advisor) / Zhou, Yi (Committee member) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Helms Tillery, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015