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Description
Language and music are fundamentally entwined within human culture. The two domains share similar properties including rhythm, acoustic complexity, and hierarchical structure. Although language and music have commonalities, abilities in these two domains have been found to dissociate after brain damage, leaving unanswered questions about their interconnectedness, including can one

Language and music are fundamentally entwined within human culture. The two domains share similar properties including rhythm, acoustic complexity, and hierarchical structure. Although language and music have commonalities, abilities in these two domains have been found to dissociate after brain damage, leaving unanswered questions about their interconnectedness, including can one domain support the other when damage occurs? Evidence supporting this question exists for speech production. Musical pitch and rhythm are employed in Melodic Intonation Therapy to improve expressive language recovery, but little is known about the effects of music on the recovery of speech perception and receptive language. This research is one of the first to address the effects of music on speech perception. Two groups of participants, an older adult group (n=24; M = 71.63 yrs) and a younger adult group (n=50; M = 21.88 yrs) took part in the study. A native female speaker of Standard American English created four different types of stimuli including pseudoword sentences of normal speech, simultaneous music-speech, rhythmic speech, and music-primed speech. The stimuli were presented binaurally and participants were instructed to repeat what they heard following a 15 second time delay. Results were analyzed using standard parametric techniques. It was found that musical priming of speech, but not simultaneous synchronized music and speech, facilitated speech perception in both the younger adult and older adult groups. This effect may be driven by rhythmic information. The younger adults outperformed the older adults in all conditions. The speech perception task relied heavily on working memory, and there is a known working memory decline associated with aging. Thus, participants completed a working memory task to be used as a covariate in analyses of differences across stimulus types and age groups. Working memory ability was found to correlate with speech perception performance, but that the age-related performance differences are still significant once working memory differences are taken into account. These results provide new avenues for facilitating speech perception in stroke patients and sheds light upon the underlying mechanisms of Melodic Intonation Therapy for speech production.
ContributorsLaCroix, Arianna (Author) / Rogalsky, Corianne (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Shelley (Committee member) / Liss, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
This dissertation builds a clear understanding of the role of information in wireless networks, and devises adaptive strategies to optimize the overall performance. The meaning of information ranges from channel
etwork states to the structure of the signal itself. Under the common thread of characterizing the role of information, this dissertation

This dissertation builds a clear understanding of the role of information in wireless networks, and devises adaptive strategies to optimize the overall performance. The meaning of information ranges from channel
etwork states to the structure of the signal itself. Under the common thread of characterizing the role of information, this dissertation investigates opportunistic scheduling, relaying and multicast in wireless networks. To assess the role of channel state information, the problem of opportunistic distributed opportunistic scheduling (DOS) with incomplete information is considered for ad-hoc networks in which many links contend for the same channel using random access. The objective is to maximize the system throughput. In practice, link state information is noisy, and may result in throughput degradation. Therefore, refining the state information by additional probing can improve the throughput, but at the cost of further probing. Capitalizing on optimal stopping theory, the optimal scheduling policy is shown to be threshold-based and is characterized by either one or two thresholds, depending on network settings. To understand the benefits of side information in cooperative relaying scenarios, a basic model is explored for two-hop transmissions of two information flows which interfere with each other. While the first hop is a classical interference channel, the second hop can be treated as an interference channel with transmitter side information. Various cooperative relaying strategies are developed to enhance the achievable rate. In another context, a simple sensor network is considered, where a sensor node acts as a relay, and aids fusion center in detecting an event. Two relaying schemes are considered: analog relaying and digital relaying. Sufficient conditions are provided for the optimality of analog relaying over digital relaying in this network. To illustrate the role of information about the signal structure in joint source-channel coding, multicast of compressible signals over lossy channels is studied. The focus is on the network outage from the perspective of signal distortion across all receivers. Based on extreme value theory, the network outage is characterized in terms of key parameters. A new method using subblock network coding is devised, which prioritizes resource allocation based on the signal information structure.
ContributorsPaataguppe Suryanarayan Bhat, Chandrashekhar Thejaswi (Author) / Zhang, Junshan (Thesis advisor) / Cochran, Douglas (Committee member) / Duman, Tolga (Committee member) / Hui, Yu (Committee member) / Taylor, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011