Elizabeth A. Wieland

Michigan State University | MSU · Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders

Rhythm perception deficits have been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders affecting speech and language. Children who stutter have shown poorer rhythm discrimination and attenuated functional connectivity in rhythm-related brain areas, which may negatively impact timing control required for speech. It is unclear whether adults who stutter (AWS),...

Purpose Differences across language environments of prelingually deaf children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) may affect language acquisition; yet, whether mothers show individual differences in how they modify infant-directed (ID) compared with adult-directed (AD) speech has seldom been studied. This study assessed individual differences in h...

Caregivers speaking to children often adjust segmental and suprasegmental qualities of their speech relative to adult-directed (AD) speech. The quality and quantity of infant-directed (ID) speech has been shown to support word learning and word segmentation by normal-hearing infants, but the extent to which children with cochlear implants (CIs) ben...

Infant-direct (ID) and adult-directed (AD) speech are distinguished via multiple acoustic-prosodic characteristics, but it is unclear how these differences map onto linguistic constructs, including pitch accents, prominences, and phrasal boundaries, or how a child’s hearing impairment affects caregiver prosody. In two studies, trained analysts code...

Sensitivity to timing between speech events is crucial for understanding language. Recently, we demonstrated that listeners track speech rate statistics over an extended timescale (~1 hour), where this influences perceptions of words and word boundaries in reduced speech (e.g., or spoken as "errr" in leisure or time) (Baese-Berk, Heffner, et al., 2...

Previous studies have shown that adults who stutter produce smaller corrective motor responses to compensate for unexpected auditory perturbations in comparison to adults who do not stutter, suggesting that stuttering may be associated with deficits in integration of auditory feedback for online speech monitoring. In this study, we examined whether...

Supplementary figures.

Our ability to perceive and produce rhythmic patterns in the environment supports fundamental human capacities ranging from music and language processing to the coordination of action. This article considers whether spontaneous correlated brain activity within a basal ganglia-thalamocortical (rhythm) network is associated with individual difference...

A large body of literature has indicated vowel space area expansion in infant-directed (ID) speech compared with adult-directed (AD) speech, which may promote language acquisition. The current study tested whether this expansion occurs in storybook speech read to infants at various points during their first two years of life. In two studies, mother...

This study examined vowel characteristics in adult-directed (AD) and infant-directed (ID) speech to children with hearing impairment who received cochlear implants or hearing aids compared with children with normal hearing. Mothers' AD and ID speech to children with cochlear implants (Study 1, n = 20) or hearing aids (Study 2, n = 11) was compared...

This study considered a relation between rhythm perception skills and individual differences in phonological awareness and grammar abilities, which are two language skills crucial for academic achievement. Twenty‐five typically developing 6‐year‐old children were given standardized assessments of rhythm perception, phonological awareness, morpho‐sy...

Purpose: As children mature, changes in voice spectral characteristics co-vary with changes in speech, language, and behavior. In this study, spectral characteristics were manipulated to alter the perceived ages of talkers' voices while leaving critical acoustic-prosodic correlates intact, to determine whether perceived age differences were associ...

Discourse prosody in school-aged children's narratives was investigated to test for developmental changes in transitional prosody and to characterize the acquisition of key contrastive features for marking continuation versus completion. Spontaneous narratives were obtained from 42 children (5 to 7 years old) and 14 adult caregivers. The narratives...

Speakers' ability to effectively use prosody (e.g., pitch and timing) to convey information improves over developmental time. This research investigated effects of perceived talker age on subjective prosody judgments, which are often central to developmental prosody research. Speech was subjected to modification in which formants and fundamental fr...