Eugene Buder

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Memphis

Tone of voice has been characterized as a cue to sarcasm. However, researchers have found conflicting evidence regarding the acoustic properties of the sarcastic tone of voice and what social factors may affect their prevalence. The current project was designed to assess whether there is a sarcastic tone of voice employed in naturalistic conversati...

We investigated how neural oscillations code the hierarchical nature of stress rhythms in speech and how stress processing varies with language experience. By measuring phase synchrony of multilevel EEG-acoustic tracking and intra-brain cross-frequency coupling, we show the encoding of stress involves different neural signatures (delta rhythms = st...

Considerable work suggests the dominant syllable rhythm of the acoustic envelope is remarkably similar across languages (∼4–5 Hz) and that oscillatory brain activity tracks these quasi-periodic rhythms to facilitate speech processing. However, whether this fundamental periodicity represents a common organizing principle in both auditory and motor s...

Surrounding context influences speech listening, resulting in dynamic shifts to category percepts. To examine its neural basis, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during vowel identification with continua presented in random, forward, and backward orders to induce perceptual warping. Behaviorally, sequential order shifted individual list...

Surrounding context influences speech listening, resulting in dynamic shifts to category percepts. To examine its neural basis, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during vowel identification with continua presented in random, forward, and backward orders to induce perceptual nonlinearities. Behaviorally, sequential order shifted listener...

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to assess the effect of Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT®LOUD) on selected spectral/cepstral measures of voice in connected speech. Spectral/cepstral analyses also were used to descriptively compare changes in connected speech to those previously reported in sustained vowels. An additional goal was...

Stressful conversation is a frequently occurring stressor in our daily life. Stressors not only adversely affect our physical and mental health but also our relationships with family, friends, and coworkers. In this paper, we present a model to automatically detect stressful conversations using wearable physiological and inertial sensors. We conduc...

Purpose This study measures the experience of spontaneous speech in everyday speaking situations. Spontaneity of speech is a novel concept developed to account for the subjective experience of speaking. Spontaneous speech is characterized by little premeditation and effortless production, and it is enjoyable and meaningful. Attention is not directe...

How did vocal language originate? Before trying to determine how referential vocabulary or syntax may have arisen, it is critical to explain how ancient hominins began to produce vocalization flexibly, without binding to emotions or functions. A crucial factor in the vocal communicative split of hominins from the ape background may thus have been c...

Prior research has not evaluated acoustic features contributing to perception of human infant vocal distress or lack thereof on a continuum. The present research evaluates perception of infant vocalizations along a continuum ranging from the most prototypical intensely distressful cry sounds ("wails") to the most prototypical of infant sounds that...

Purpose: This article examines cepstral/spectral analyses of sustained /α/ vowels produced by speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria secondary to idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) before and after Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT®LOUD) and the relationship of these measures with overall voice intensity. Methodology: Nine speakers with PD were...

An unsettled debate: Key empirical and theoretical questions are still open – CORRIGENDUM - Volume 41 - Stefano Vincini, Yuna Jhang, Eugene H. Buder, Shaun Gallagher

The primary vocal registers of modal, falsetto, and fry have been studied in adults but not per se in infancy. The vocal ligament is thought to play a critical role in the modal-falsetto contrast but is still developing during infancy (Tateya and Tateya, 2015). Cover tissues are also implicated in the modal-fry contrast, but the low fundamental fre...

Monitoring of in-person conversations has largely been done using acoustic sensors. In this paper, we propose a new method to detect moment-by-moment conversation episodes by analyzing breathing patterns captured by a mobile respiration sensor. Since breathing is affected by physical and cognitive activities, we develop a comprehensive method for c...

Debates about neonatal imitation remain more open than Keven & Akins (K&A) imply. K&A do not recognize the primacy of the question concerning differential imitation and the links between experimental designs and more or less plausible theoretical assumptions. Moreover, they do not acknowledge previous theorizing on spontaneous behavior, the explana...

Neonatal imitation has rich implications for neuroscience, developmental psychology, and social cognition, but there is little consensus about this phenomenon. The primary empirical question, whether or not neonatal imitation exists, is not settled. Is it possible to give a balanced evaluation of the theories and methodologies at stake so as to fac...

This study seeks to determine how human listeners discriminate cry vs. non-cry sounds by investigating acoustic factors that may contribute to the perception of negativity in infant vocalizations (e.g., cry, whine, and vowel-like sounds). The assumption is that identification of cry is self-evident; therefore, there has been no attempt to systemati...

Poster presented at the 2016 ASHA convention. Follow up to Edrington et al.

Differential privacy concepts have been successfully used to protect anonymity of individuals in population-scale analysis. Sharing of mobile sensor data, especially physiological data, raise different privacy challenges, that of protecting private behaviors that can be revealed from time series of sensor data. Existing privacy mechanisms rely on n...

We report on the emergence of functional flexibility in vocalizations of human infants. This vastly underappreciated capability becomes apparent when prelinguistic vocalizations express a full range of emotional content—positive, neutral, and negative. The data show that at least three types of infant vocalizations (squeals, vowel-like sounds, and...

a b s t r a c t Vocal motor development in infancy provides a crucial foundation for language development. Some significant early accomplishments include learning to control the process of phonation (the production of sound at the larynx) and learning to produce the sounds of one's language. Previous work has shown that social reinforcement shapes...

Purpose The prelinguistic infant’s babbling repertoire of syllables—the phonological categories that form the basis for early word learning—is noticed by caregivers who interact with infants around them. Prior research on babbling has not explored the caregiver’s role in recognition of early vocal categories as foundations for word learning. In the...

Purpose This study explored whether breathing behaviors of infants within the 2nd year of life differ between tidal breathing and breathing supporting single unarticulated syllables and canonical/articulated syllables. Method Vocalizations and breathing kinematics of 9 infants between 53 and 90 weeks of age were recorded. A strict selection protoc...

Acoustic analysis of infant vocalizations has typically employed traditional acoustic measures drawn from adult speech acoustics, such as f(0), duration, formant frequencies, amplitude, and pitch perturbation. Here an alternative and complementary method is proposed in which data-derived spectrographic features are central. 1-s-long spectrograms of...

This report introduces tools designed to detect and quantify ways in which caregivers and infants coordinate their face-to-face communicative interactions. The tools analyze this coordination at multiple levels, linking prosodic patterns to illocutionary aspects of prelinguistic discourse. Data include fundamental voice frequency and sound pressure...

Acoustic analysis of infant vocalizations has typically employed traditional acoustic measures drawn from adult speech acoustics, such as f 0 , duration, formant frequencies, amplitude, and pitch perturbation. Here an alternative and complementary method is proposed in which data-derived spectrographic features are central. 1-s-long spectrograms of...

Background: Investigations of prosodic tempos during conversations between non‐disordered persons have revealed changes in tempo during conversational repairs. The present study investigates fluctuations in prosodic parameters of speakers with aphasia during conversational repairs to study how changes in prosodic tempo are associated with the speak...

Hesitations have been considered to serve both cognitive and linguistic functions. This study presents analyses of children's hesitations while producing English derived words with the suffix -ity. Two questions were considered: Do children's linguistic skills influence their use and frequency of hesitations when producing derived words, and do chi...

Infant phonation is highly variable in many respects, including the basic vibratory patterns by which the vocal tissues create acoustic signals. Previous studies have identified the regular occurrence of nonmodal phonation types in normal infant phonation. The glottis is like many oscillating systems that, because of nonlinear relationships among t...

Background: Few investigations have focused on the vocal quality used by children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) during the prelinguistic stage of communication development. Previous research, using a limited range of vocal categories and not based on acoustic inspection, found that children with ASD produced significantly more syllables with...

The purpose of this study is to document prosodic interactivity, and its preservation in a woman with non-fluent aphasia. Fundamental frequency and sound pressure level records are examined for sinusoidal models. In-phase and anti-phase partner relationships in these models may represent synchrony. These measurements demonstrate that prosodic manag...

Aphasiology Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: P. (2008) 'Rhythmic patterns during conversational repairs in speakers with aphasia ', Aphasiology,terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,...

This study examined third grade children's use of hesitations in elicited productions of derived words containing a stress-changing suffix (-ity). Eight derived words produced by 20 typically developing third-grade children were phonetically analyzed for five different hesitation types. The number of hesitations used differed significantly as a fun...

Spectral amplitude measures are sensitive to varying degrees of vocal fold adduction in normal speakers. This study examined the applicability of harmonic amplitude differences to adductor spasmodic dysphonia (ADSD) in comparison with normal controls. Amplitudes of the first and second harmonics (H1, H2) and of harmonics affiliated with the first,...

Voice clinicians require an objective, reliable, and relatively auto-matic method to assess voice change after medical, surgical, or behavioral intervention. This measure must be sensitive to a variety of voice qualities and severities, and preferably should reflect voice in continuous speech. The long-term average spectrum (LTAS) is a fast Fourier...

Voice tremor, like spasmodic dysphonia and other tremor disorders, may respond to botulinum toxin type A injections. To evaluate the safety and efficacy of botulinum toxin type A injections as treatment for voice tremor. A randomized study of 3 doses of botulinum toxin type A with 6 weeks of follow-up. A single-site tertiary care center. Participan...

Garnett's greater bushbaby infants vocalize in apparent response to their mother's contact calls. However, it remains unclear whether specific vocal or behavioral patterns by a mother elicit this vocal response. We video-recorded the behaviors and vocalizations of 4 individual mother-infant groups (mother with twins), analyzed vocalizations via spe...

The primary goal of this study was to characterize a performer's singing and speaking voice. One woman was not admitted to a premier choral group, but her sister, who was comparable in physical characteristics and background, was admitted and provided a valuable control subject. The perceptual judgment of a vocal coach who conducted the group's aud...

To advance knowledge of the vocal communication associated with close proximity social interactions in Garnett's greater bush baby (Otolemur garnettii), we measured acoustic and temporal properties of vocalizations from videotaped recordings of captives in two main social contexts: mother-infant interactions and adult male-female pair introductions...

Previous investigations comparing Swedish dental versus American English alveolar /t/ production found many acoustic differences in both adults and 30-month-old children [C. Stoel-Gammon, K. Williams, and E. H. Buder, ``Cross-language differences in phonological acquisition: Swedish and American /t/,'' Phonetica 51, 146-158 (1994)]. The primary dif...

A method is presented for analyzing phonatory instabilities that occur as modulations of fundamental frequency (f0) and sound pressure level (SPL) on the order of 0.2 to 20 cycles per second. Such long-term phonatory instabilities, including but not limited to traditional notions of tremor, are distinct from cycle-to-cycle perturbation such as jitt...

Vowel durations typically vary according to both intrinsic (segment-specific) and extrinsic (contextual) specifications. It can be argued that such variations are due to both predisposition and cognitive learning. The present report utilizes acoustic phonetic measurements from Swedish and American children aged 24 and 30 months to investigate the h...

Vowel durations typically vary according to both intrinsic ͑segment-specific͒ and extrinsic ͑contextual͒ specifications. It can be argued that such variations are due to both predisposition and cognitive learning. The present report utilizes acoustic phonetic measurements from Swedish and American children aged 24 and 30 months to investigate the h...

This paper will provide a review of aspects of vocal aging within the context of general body aging and describe two data sets related to the aging voice. Data will be presented which document pre- to posttreatment improvement in select voice characteristics (sound pressure level, subglottal air pressure, thyroarytenoid laryngeal muscle activity an...

Connected speech samples from 17 women with adductor spasmodic dysphonia before and one month after unilateral botulinum toxin (BOTOX) injection of the thyroarytenoid muscle were analyzed using long?term averaged spectra (LTAS). Respiratory noises were removed prior to analysis but consonants were not. Prior LTAS research on this disorder before an...

The present study examines speech timing in the productions of 20 normally developing two-year-olds acquiring American English. Monosyllabic CVC forms were elicited in a naturalistic procedure, providing 927 tokens that were digitized and subjected to acoustic and perceptual analysis. The main measures included (a) extrinsic and intrinsic vowel dur...

The notion that conversational speech is rhythmically organized has been explored in a variety of disciplinary frameworks, but the acoustic phonetic basis for this notion has been problematic. Intensive analysis of a one-minute fragment of dialogue between two American men utilizing segmental and prosodic analysis reveals a hierarchy of units that...

In most languages of the world, a vowel preceding a voiced obstruent is longer than the same vowel preceding a voiceless obstruent. Although the effect of postvocalic voicing on vowel duration is often considered to be phonetically driven, the extent of influence differs considerably across languages. In English, for example, vowels preceding voice...

By 30 months of age, children learning American English (AE) or Swedish (S) have begun to acquire language specific aspects of word‐initial /t/s [Stoel‐Gammon et al., Phonetica 51, 146–158 (1994)]. The coronal stop is ostensibly alveolar in AE and dental in S, suggesting a place mechanism for the distinctive acoustic measures obtained from both adu...

This paper uses a new approach to describe and quantify the long-term phonatory instability of speakers with MS. Sustained vowel phonations of 20 individuals with a definite diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) and 20 age- and gendermatched individuals with normal speech were recorded. The phonations were f0 and intensity analyzed and subjected to...

The paper addresses the question of rhythmic structuring of conversational interaction. Conversational speech requires active co-operation and co-ordination of the behavior of two or more speakers. Previous research indicates that one of the mechanisms used by speakers to regulate conversational interaction, is close monitoring and adaptation to rh...

Consonant-vowel productions at two distinct stages of language development were studied in a single female child. At 12 months canonical babbling syllables (N = 144) identified by a panel of listeners as comprising [bV], [dV], and [gv] tokens were acoustically analyzed by measuring F2 transition onset and F2 midvowel frequencies and plotting their...

Consonant-vowel productions at two distinct stages of language development were studied in a single female child. At 12 months canonical babbling syllables (N = 144) identified by a panel of listeners as comprising [bV], [dv], and [gv] tokens were acoustically analyzed by measuring F2 transition onset and F2 midvowel frequencies and plotting their...

A system for semi-automatic, multi-parameter acoustic analysis is described. The system, called FORMOFFA (For = FORmants, Mo = MOments, FF = Fundamental Frequency, A = Amplitude), operates on a PC microcomputer by adaptations of commercially available software. Data displays include a deterministic time record of instantaneous values, and an ergodi...

This study examined the acoustic correlates of stress in children’s productions of familiar words. Previous research has employed experimental words rather than familiar words to examine children’s phonetic marking of stress, or has not adequately controlled for phonetic environment. Subjects in this study included 22 children, aged 18–30 months, a...

Approximately 40% of all individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) present some degree of speech impairment. MS speakers with dysarthria are a heterogeneous group and the speech disorder is characterized by disturbances of the temporal patterning of speech as well as articulatory and phonatory symptoms. Previous research also indicates that the neur...

Patients with specific neural subsystem involvement are often reported to present with particular perceptual characteristics of voice. This has been true for diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive disease in which mixed neurologic signs are present. This article reports acoustic data on the phonatory performance of four...

Phrasing is a universal characteristic of human communication, and the present investigation explored its developmental roots in nonvegetative, prelinguistic vocalizations. Adult judges identified a hierarchical arrangement of syllables embedded within utterances and utterances embedded within prelinguistic phrases in the vocalizations of infants....

A system for semi-automatic, multi-parameter acoustic analysis is described. The system, called FORM OFF A (For= FORmants, Mo =MOments, FF =Fundamental Frequency, A = Amplitude), operates on a PC microcomputer by adaptations of commercially available software. Data displays include a deterministic time record of instantaneous values, and an ergodic...

Our understanding of phonological acquisition has benefited immensely from cross-linguistic investigations which allow researchers to separate biological and learned factors. To date, most cross-linguistic studies have focused either on differences in phonetic inventories or on differences in frequency of occurrence of particular phonetic and phono...

A subgroup of patients with dysarthria resulting from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents with voice problems characterized primarily by cycle?to?cycle and long?term phonatory instabilities. This paper reports acoustic analyses of the phonation of a 63?yr?old female 9 months post diagnosis of ALS. Perceptual characteristics of voice includ...

Performance characteristics are reviewed for seven systems marketed for acoustic speech analysis: CSpeech, CSRE, ILS-PC, Kay Elemetrics model 5500 Sona-Graph, MacSpeech Lab II, MSL, and Signalyze. The characteristics reviewed include system components, basic capabilities (signal acquisition, waveform operations, analysis, and other functions), docu...

This article presents a dynamic model of dyadic social interaction. It is shown that a set of simple deterministic arithmetic operations representing basic assumptions about social-involvement behavior can lead to a variety of complex outcomes, including asymptotically stable behavior, self-sustaining periodic behavior, and chaotic behavior. These...

Recently developed, relatively inexpensive systems make digital speech analysis available to many teachers, clinicians, and researchers who have not had access to previous systems. Addressing these prospective users, we survey five microcomputer programs and two dedicated devices for recording, editing, and analyzing speech. We review the capabilit...

Recently developed, relatively inexpensive systems make digital speech analysis available to many teachers, clinicians, and researchers who have not had access to previous systems. Addressing these prospective users, we survey five microcomputer programs and two dedicated devices for recording, editing, and analyzing speech. We review the capabilit...

This study examined third grade children's use of hesitations in elicited productions of derived word s containing a stress-changing suffix ( -ity ). Eight derived words produced by 20 typically developing third-grade children were phonetically analyzed for five different hesitation types. The number of hesitations used differed significantly as a...

The study of human infant vocal development has yielded new perspectives on how the capacity for speech is built, and has provided important suggestions about the paths that our hominid ancestors may have followed in evolution of speech. The research to be considered in this paper highlights a natural logic that characterizes the steps of vocal dev...

The development of prosodic capabilities in infants has been studied extensively. Yet generalizations about particular capabilities emerging across the first year of life are surprisingly hard to tie down. Results have often been contradictory, in part because approaches to the study have been divergent. A traditional approach with an innatist bias...

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Alberta, 1985. Includes bibliography.

Sheets in pocket. In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in Anthropology and Education, Department of Educational Foundations. Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Alberta, 1985.