Benjamin Glenn Schultz

University of Melbourne | MSD · Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology

During multisensory speech perception, slow delta oscillations (∼1 - 3 Hz) in the listener's brain synchronize with the speech signal, likely engaging in speech signal decomposition. Notable fluctuations in the speech amplitude envelope, resounding speaker prosody, temporally align with articulatory and body gestures and both provide complementary...

Providing natural opportunities that scaffold interpersonal engagement is important for supporting social interactions for young children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Musical activities are often motivating, familiar, and predictable, and may support both children and their interaction partners by providing opportunities for shared social e...

Providing natural opportunities that scaffold interpersonal engagement is important for supporting social interactions for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Musical activities are often motivating, familiar, and predictable, and may support both children and their interaction partners by providing opportunities for shared social e...

Neurodegenerative diseases often affect speech. Speech acoustics can be used as objective clinical markers of pathology. Previous investigations of pathological speech have primarily compared controls with one specific condition and excluded comorbidities. We broaden the utility of speech markers by examining how multiple acoustic features can deli...

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) could potentially improve communication by providing transcriptions of speech in real time. ASR is particularly useful for people with progressive disorders that lead to reduced speech intelligibility or difficulties performing motor tasks. ASR services are usually trained on healthy speech and may not be optimize...

Purpose: The human voice qualitatively changes across the lifespan. Although some of these vocal changes may be pathologic, other changes likely reflect natural physiological aging. Normative data for voice characteristics in healthy aging is limited and disparate studies have used a range of different acoustic features, some of which are implicat...

Machine learning approaches are increasingly used in health research. Applications range from the identification of disease onset, classification of disease severity, to predicting epileptic seizures. Although machine learning can be a powerful tool, there is potential for misuse; model performance can be inflated through overfitting and, consequen...

There is growing evidence that mutations in non-coding cis-regulatory elements (CREs) disrupt proper development. However, little is known about human CREs that are crucial for cardiovascular development. To address this, we bioinformatically identified cardiovascular CREs based on the occupancy of the CRE by the homeodomain protein NKX2-5 and card...

The main goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that disorders in entrainment to the beat of music originate from motor deficits. To this aim, we adapted the Beat Alignment Test and tested a large pool of control subjects, as well as nine individuals who had previously showed deficits in synchronization to the beat of music. The tasks consis...

Wearing face masks (alongside physical distancing) provides some protection against infection from COVID-19. Face masks can also change how people communicate and subsequently affect speech signal quality. This study investigated how three common face mask types (N95, surgical, and cloth) affected acoustic analysis of speech and perceived intelligi...

During multimodal speech perception, slow delta oscillations (~1 - 3 Hz) in the listener’s brain synchronize with speech signal, likely reflecting signal decomposition at the service of comprehension. In particular, fluctuations imposed onto the speech amplitude envelope by a speaker’s prosody seem to temporally align with articulatory and body ges...

Audio-motor integration is currently viewed as a predictive process in which the brain simulates upcoming sounds based on voluntary actions. This perspective does not consider how our auditory environment may trigger involuntary action in the absence of prediction. We address this issue by examining the relationship between acoustic salience and in...

Wearing face masks (alongside physical distancing) provides some protection against infection from COVID-19. Face masks can also change how we communicate and subsequently affect speech signal quality. Here we investigated how three face mask types (N95, surgical and cloth) affect acoustic analysis of speech and perceived intelligibility in healthy...

Background Researchers rely on the specified capabilities of their hardware and software even though, in reality, these capabilities are often not achieved. Considering that the number of experiments examining neural oscillations has increased steadily, easy-to-implement tools for testing the capabilities of hardware and software are necessary. Ne...

Background The medial geniculate body (MGB) of the thalamus plays a central role in tinnitus pathophysiology. Breakdown of sensory gating in this part of the auditory thalamus is a potential mechanism underlying tinnitus. The alleviation of tinnitus-like behavior by high-frequency stimulation (HFS) of the MGB might mitigate dysfunctional sensory ga...

Most human communication is carried by modulations of the voice. However, a wide range of cultures has developed alternative forms of communication that make use of a whistled sound source. For example, whistling is used as a highly salient signal for capturing attention, and can have iconic cultural meanings such as the catcall, enact a formal cod...

Forming temporal expectancies plays a crucial role in our survival as it allows us to identify the occurrence of temporal deviants that might signal potential dangers. The dynamic attending theory suggests that temporal expectancies are formed more readily for rhythms that imply a beat (i.e., metrical rhythms) compared to those that do not (i.e., n...

Auditory feedback of actions provides additional information about the timing of one’s own actions and those of others. However, little is known about how musicians and nonmusicians integrate auditory feedback from multiple sources to regulate their own timing or to (intentionally or unintentionally) coordinate with a partner. We examined how music...

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) was readily adopted for auditory sensorimotor synchronization experiments. These experiments typically use MIDI percussion pads to collect responses, a MIDI–USB converter (or MIDI–PCI interface) to record responses on a PC and manipulate feedback, and an external MIDI sound module to generate auditory...

Philosophers have proposed that when people coordinate their actions with others they may experience a sense of joint agency, or shared control over actions and their effects. However, little empirical work has investigated the sense of joint agency. In the current study, pairs coordinated their actions to produce tone sequences and then rated thei...

Background Ecstasy use has been associated with short-term and long-term memory deficits on a standard Word Learning Task (WLT). The clinical relevance of this has been debated and is currently unknown. The present study aimed at evaluating the clinical relevance of verbal memory impairment in Ecstasy users. To that end, clinical memory impairment...

When speakers engage in conversation, acoustic features of their utterances sometimes converge. We examined how the speech rate of participants changed when a confederate spoke at fast or slow rates during readings of scripted dialogues. A beat-tracking algorithm extracted the periodic relations between stressed syllables (beats) from acoustic reco...

Timing abilities are often measured by having participants tap their finger along with a metronome and presenting tap-triggered auditory feedback. These experiments predominantly use electronic percussion pads combined with software (e.g., FTAP or Max/MSP) that records responses and delivers auditory feedback. However, these setups involve unknown...

Interpersonal coordination during musical joint action (e.g., ensemble performance) requires individuals to anticipate and adapt to each other's action timing. Individuals differ in their ability to both anticipate and adapt, however, little is known about the relationship between these skills. The present study used paced finger tapping tasks to e...

We investigated temporal synchronization and joint action in improvised, groove-based jazz performance. Expressive timing has been studied extensively in areas of music psychology and performance science (see Honing, 2013 for a review). Additionally, several models of expressive timing have been offered that propose single-factor conceptions of exp...

Implicit learning (IL) occurs unconsciously and without intention. Perceptual fluency is the ease of processing elicited by previous exposure to a stimulus. It has been assumed that perceptual fluency is associated with IL. However, the role of perceptual fluency following IL has not been investigated in temporal pattern learning. Two experiments b...

Implicit learning (IL) occurs unintentionally. IL of temporal patterns has received minimal attention, and results are mixed regarding whether IL of temporal patterns occurs in the absence of a concurrent ordinal pattern. Two experiments examined the IL of temporal patterns and the conditions under which IL is exhibited. Experiment 1 examined wheth...

Using Brightness and Motion mode ultrasound, Derrick and Gick (2011, CJL) identified four categorical variations of flap (rapid "d"-like) tongue movements produced in North American English (that is, up-flaps, down-flaps, alveolar taps, and postalveolar taps). These variants can be used to test hypotheses about constraints on speech articulation, s...

The "take the best" model of decision making proposes that people make decisions by sequentially searching amongst cues for one that best discriminates between the options being as-sessed. The search process starts with the best cue and pro-ceeds in descending order of cue validity until one is found that differentiates between the options. It foll...

We introduce a tractable family of Bayesian generalization functions. The family extends the basic model proposed by Tenenbaum and Griffiths (2001), allowing richer variation in sampling assumptions and prior beliefs. We derive analytic expressions for these generalization functions, and provide an explicit model for experimental data. We then pres...