Valter Ciocca’s research while affiliated with University of British Columbia and other places

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Publications (87)


Illusory continuity and masking: Evidence for an illusory tone percept through a notched noise
  • Article

April 2011

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7 Reads

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2 Citations

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Valter Ciocca

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Two experiments measured the illusory continuity of a frequency glide through a noise burst. Expt. 1 used a 2I‐2AFC procedure to measure detection of the (target) portion of the frequency glide that overlapped in time with the noise, as a function of noise level. The noise had a frequency notch around the frequency range of the target. The portions of the glide preceding and following the noise (flankers) could be present or absent. Performance at low‐ and intermediate‐noise levels was poorer with present than with absent flankers (at high noise levels, performance was at chance for both conditions). This suggests that listeners either perceptually restored the missing target or that the presence of the flankers resulted in some informational masking of the target. In Exp. 2 listeners rated directly their perception of continuity of the frequency glide for the same flanker conditions of Exp. 1. When the target was absent, continuity ratings increased as noise level increased, and did not differ between intermediate‐ and high‐noise levels. These results suggest that illusory continuity occurred when the noise level was not high enough to mask the target entirely.


The effects of tongue loading and auditory feedback on vowel production

February 2011

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41 Reads

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5 Citations

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

This study investigated the role of sensory feedback during the production of front vowels. A temporary aftereffect induced by tongue loading was employed to modify the somatosensory-based perception of tongue height. Following the removal of tongue loading, tongue height during vowel production was estimated by measuring the frequency of the first formant (F1) from the acoustic signal. In experiment 1, the production of front vowels following tongue loading was investigated either in the presence or absence of auditory feedback. With auditory feedback available, the tongue height of front vowels was not modified by the aftereffect of tongue loading. By contrast, speakers did not compensate for the aftereffect of tongue loading when they produced vowels in the absence of auditory feedback. In experiment 2, the characteristics of the masking noise were manipulated such that it masked energy either in the F1 region or in the region of the second and higher formants. The results showed that the adjustment of tongue height during the production of front vowels depended on information about F1 in the auditory feedback. These findings support the idea that speech goals include both auditory and somatosensory targets and that speakers are able to make use of information from both sensory modalities to maximize the accuracy of speech production.


The perception of intonation questions and statements in Cantonese

February 2011

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142 Reads

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27 Citations

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

In tone languages there are potential conflicts in the perception of lexical tone and intonation, as both depend mainly on the differences in fundamental frequency (F0) patterns. The present study investigated the acoustic cues associated with the perception of sentences as questions or statements in Cantonese, as a function of the lexical tone in sentence final position. Cantonese listeners performed intonation identification tasks involving complete sentences, isolated final syllables, and sentences without the final syllable (carriers). Sensitivity (d' scores) were similar for complete sentences and final syllables but were significantly lower for carriers. Sensitivity was also affected by tone identity. These findings show that the perception of questions and statements relies primarily on the F0 characteristics of the final syllables (local F0 cues). A measure of response bias (c) provided evidence for a general bias toward the perception of statements. Logistic regression analyses showed that utterances were accurately classified as questions or statements by using average F0 and F0 interval. Average F0 of carriers (global F0 cue) was also found to be a reliable secondary cue. These findings suggest that the use of F0 cues for the perception of intonation question in tonal languages is likely to be language-specific.


Are tones phones?

November 2010

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43 Reads

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28 Citations

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Jeesun Kim

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Chris Davis

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[...]

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The psycholinguistic status of lexical tones and phones is indexed via phonological and tonological awareness (PA and TA, respectively) using Thai speech. In Experiment 1 (Thai participants, alphabetic script and orthographically explicit phones/tones), PA was better than TA in children and primary school-educated adults, and TA improved to PA levels only in tertiary-educated adults. In Experiment 2 (Cantonese participants, logographic script and no orthographically explicit phones/tones), children and primary-educated adults had better PA than TA, and PA and TA were equivalent in tertiary-educated adults, but were nevertheless still below the level of their Thai counterparts. Experiment 3 (English-language participants, alphabetic script and nontonal) showed better PA than TA. Regression analyses showed that both TA and PA are predicted by reading ability for Thai children but by general nonorthographic age-related variables for Cantonese children, whereas for English children reading ability predicts PA but not TA. The results show a phone>tone perceptual advantage over both age and languages that is affected by availability of orthographically relevant information and metalinguistic maturity. More generally, both the perception and the psycholinguistic representation of phones and tones differ.


Enhanced pure-tone pitch discrimination among persons with autism but not Asperger syndrome

April 2010

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372 Reads

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224 Citations

Neuropsychologia

Persons with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) display atypical perceptual processing in visual and auditory tasks. In vision, Bertone, Mottron, Jelenic, and Faubert (2005) found that enhanced and diminished visual processing is linked to the level of neural complexity required to process stimuli, as proposed in the neural complexity hypothesis. Based on these findings, Samson, Mottron, Jemel, Belin, and Ciocca (2006) proposed to extend the neural complexity hypothesis to the auditory modality. They hypothesized that persons with ASD should display enhanced performance for simple tones that are processed in primary auditory cortical regions, but diminished performance for complex tones that require additional processing in associative auditory regions, in comparison to typically developing individuals. To assess this hypothesis, we designed four auditory discrimination experiments targeting pitch, non-vocal and vocal timbre, and loudness. Stimuli consisted of spectro-temporally simple and complex tones. The participants were adolescents and young adults with autism, Asperger syndrome, and typical developmental histories, all with IQs in the normal range. Consistent with the neural complexity hypothesis and enhanced perceptual functioning model of ASD (Mottron, Dawson, Soulières, Hubert, & Burack, 2006), the participants with autism, but not with Asperger syndrome, displayed enhanced pitch discrimination for simple tones. However, no discrimination-thresholds differences were found between the participants with ASD and the typically developing persons across spectrally and temporally complex conditions. These findings indicate that enhanced pure-tone pitch discrimination may be a cognitive correlate of speech-delay among persons with ASD. However, auditory discrimination among this group does not appear to be directly contingent on the spectro-temporal complexity of the stimuli.


Table 1 . The age, RDLS-R, RDLS-E, CMMS, CRVT scores and MLU (words) for the SLI, age-matched (AM) and vocabulary-matched (VM) groups. 
Fundamental frequency (f0) patterns of the voiced portions of the speech stimuli used for each of the eight tonal contrasts employed in this study. Stimulus duration differed among contrasts; the duration of the time window is indicated (in seconds) in the lower left portion of each panel for each contrast.
Table 2 . Fundamental frequency values for members of each pair of tonal contrasts, measured at the beginning, middle, and end-point of the voiced portion of each word (duration shown in parentheses). The end-point value corresponds to the last voice cycle 
Amplitude waveform and f0 tracks of the speech stimuli (/hai23/–/hai21/; Part A) and of the corresponding nonspeech stimuli (Part B) for the LF-LR contrast. Amplitude waveforms are displayed in the top and the f0 track at the bottom of each panel.
Mean identification scores (percentage correct) by age-matched (AM), specific language impairment (SLI), and vocabulary-matched (VM) children for each tonal contrast.

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The Perception of Lexical Tone Contrasts in Cantonese Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
  • Article
  • Full-text available

December 2009

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254 Reads

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29 Citations

Purpose This study examined the perception of fundamental frequency (f0) patterns by Cantonese children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method Participants were 14 five-year-old children with SLI, and 14 age-matched (AM) and 13 four-year-old vocabulary-matched (VM) controls. The children identified a word from familiar word pairs that illustrated the 8 minimally contrastive pairs of the 6 lexical tones. They discriminated the f0 patterns within contrastive tonal pairs in speech and nonspeech stimuli. Results In tone identification, the SLI group performed worse than the AM group but not the VM group. In tone discrimination, the SLI group did worse than the AM group on 2 contrasts and showed a nonsignificant trend of poorer performance on all contrasts combined. The VM group generally did worse than the AM group. There were no group differences in discrimination performance between speech and nonspeech stimuli. No correlation was found between identification and discrimination performance. Only the normal controls showed a moderate correlation between vocabulary scores and performance in the 2 perception tasks. Conclusion The SLI group’s poor tone identification cannot be accounted for by vocabulary knowledge alone. The group’s tone discrimination performance suggests that some children with SLI have a deficit in f0 processing.

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Effect of listener training on perceptual judgement of hypernasality

May 2009

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73 Reads

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57 Citations

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

Reliable perceptual judgement is important for documenting the severity of hypernasality, but high reliability can be difficult to obtain. This study investigated the effect of practice and feedback on intra-judge and inter-judge reliability of hypernasality judgements. The judges were 36 speech-language therapy students, who were randomly assigned to three groups for training: (1) Exposure (simple exposure to hypernasal speech samples), (2) Practice-only (practice with hypernasality judgements without feedback), and (3) Practice-Feedback (practice with hypernasality judgements with feedback). After training, the judges rated hypernasality in non-nasal sentences produced by 20 speakers with hypernasality and two normal speakers, using direct magnitude estimation. Both practice groups showed fair-to-good inter-judge reliability for rating the female samples: had more listeners who showed significant intra-judge reliability, and had significantly larger range of hypernasality ratings than the exposure group. To conclude, practice (with or without feedback) is useful for improving the reliability of hypernasality ratings.



Acoustic cues for the perception of intonation in Cantonese

September 2008

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20 Reads

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3 Citations

This study aimed at identifying acoustic cues in intonation perception in Cantonese. Carriers and final syllables contrasting in intonation were selected from a previous study in which listeners identified the stimuli as either questions or statements. Acoustic analyses were used to determine the F0, duration and intensity variation of the carriers and the F0 and duration contrasts of the final syllables. Results showed that carriers consistently identified as questions or statements contrasted in F0 patterns but not in duration or intensity variations. Carriers perceived as questions with above-chance-level accuracy had a higher average F0 level than the other stimuli. At the final position of an utterance, differences were found in both F0 contour and level. The final syllables of questions showed a rising F0 contour, regardless of the original tone and a higher F0 level than their counterparts in statements. These findings are discussed in the context of 'biological codes'.


New cochlear implant coding strategy for tonal language speakers

July 2008

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57 Reads

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16 Citations

Accurate pitch perception on the basis of fundamental frequency patterns is essential for the processing of lexical tones in tonal languages such as Cantonese. Speech intelligibility in Cantonese-speaking CI recipients was compared using current signal processing strategies, which typically result in poor pitch perception, and a new strategy, known as the multi-channel envelope modulation (MEM) strategy, was designed to enhance temporal periodicity cues to the fundamental frequency. Performance of nine postlingually hearing-impaired adult cochlear implant users was measured twice using each strategy, initially after a four week trial, and again after two weeks of use with each strategy. Speech intelligibility in speech-spectrum shaped noise was measured using the Cantonese hearing in noise test. A fixed noise level of 65 dB A was used and the signal-to-noise ratios were fixed at either +10, +15, or +20 dB, depending on the baseline performance of individual subjects using the clinical processor. Self-reported benefit in 18 listening situations and overall preference for strategies were obtained at the end of these trial periods. Results showed poorer speech intelligibility with CIS while results obtained using ACE and MEM were comparable. Unfamiliar place coding might have contributed to poorer performance using CIS. Self-reported benefit across strategies did not differ in most listening situations. Participants preferred ACE for listening overall in daily situations, and a few preferred MEM in noise. Whilst the results did not demonstrate any advantages for speech recognition in noise when using MEM compared to ACE, no degradation in performance was observed. This implies that the form of processing employed by MEM retains similar segmental information to that provided by ACE and that potentially, future variations/optimizations of MEM may lead to some improvement in tone perception.


Citations (69)


... The primary component of K-SLP involves verbal shaping or progressive approximation, aiming to simplify production initially and gradually increase speech complexity toward adult forms. Therefore, an appropriate measure aligned with this concept would assess the percentage of words matching adult targets in terms of word/syllable structures, such as the Whole Word Match (WWM) measure (Bernhardt et al., 2020;Major & Bernhardt, 1998). We propose including this measure as a pivotal indicator of K-SLP effectiveness. ...

Reference:

Effectiveness of the Kaufman Speech to Language Protocol for Children With Childhood Apraxia of Speech and Comorbidities When Delivered in a Dyadic and Group Format
Identification of Protracted Phonological Development across Languages:: The Whole Word Match and Basic Mismatch Measures
  • Citing Chapter
  • June 2020

... As Cantonese has no consistent pattern of stress or emphasis on specific syllables to create a rhythmic pattern (ba-NA-na /bə′nɑːnə/), and the tone of each syllable exerts a significant impact on the meaning of a phrase or a sentence, the overall rhythm of Cantonese is difficult to predict and identify. Furthermore, Cantonese is a wh-in-situ language, meaning wh words (e.g.,/sɵy21/ who and /sɐm22 mɔ23/ what) are not relocated to the beginning of a question, but remain in their original position (Gu et al., 2006;Huang, 1982;Ma et al., 2006). In addition, Cantonese wh questions typically end with the final particle /nε:55/, which is marked by a rising contour (Yang et al., 2020). ...

Quantitative analysis of intonation patterns in statements and questions in Cantonese
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • May 2006

... Miller and Licklider (1950) published the first systematic report on speech perception with temporally interrupted speech stimuli (in this article, we refer to temporally interrupted speech as interrupted speech). To understand interrupted speech (e.g., Fogerty et al., 2022a;Kidd and Humes, 2012;Miller and Licklider, 1950;Powers and Speaks, 1973;Powers and Wilcox, 1977;Shafiro et al., 2018;Shafiro et al., 2016;Ueda and Ciocca, 2021;Ueda et al., 2023;Ueda et al., 2022;Verschuure and Brocaar, 1983), one has to connect the fragments of speech into a coherent stream (cf. Warren, 2008). ...

Phonemic restoration of interrupted locally time-reversed speech

Attention Perception & Psychophysics

... While such charts are potentially useful, on their own they do not necessarily elucidate influences of other aspects of the phonological system on segmental acquisition, i.e., sub-segmental content such as place, manner, or laryngeal features (e.g., Jakobson, 1941Jakobson, /1968 or suprasegmental context, such as syllable or word position for the segment (e.g., Ingram, 1974), word stress or word complexity (Mason, 2018). However, constraints-based nonlinear phonological frameworks (Bernhardt & Stemberger, 1998) facilitate analyses of sub-and suprasegmental factors, and have demonstrated the influence of such factors on segmental acquisition, in, for example, Arabic (Ayyad, Bernhardt & Stemberger, 2016), Bulgarian (Bernhardt, Ignatova, Amoako, Aspinall, Marinova-Todd, Stemberger & Yokota, 2019), English (Mason, 2018), European Portuguese (Ramalho & Freitas, 2018) and French (e.g., Bérubé et al., 2020). ...

Development of singleton consonants in French-speaking children with typical versus protracted phonological development: The influence of word length, word shape and stress
  • Citing Article
  • November 2020

... For this reason, formant frequencies and bandwidths were re-adjusted to provide the best possible match to the natural target voice in the context of each of the 3 new harmonic sources, so that any mismatches in overall quality between the synthetic and natural tokens could be unambiguously attributed to differences among source models. Levels for the noise-to-harmonics ratio were also reset, to compensate for changes in the perceptual prominence of spectral noise as a result of changes to the harmonic source spectrum (Kreiman and Gerratt, 2012;Labuschagne and Ciocca, 2020). All other model parameters remained unchanged from their values in experiment 1. ...

The effect of vocal tract parameters on aspiration noise discrimination
  • Citing Article
  • February 2020

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

... To give an example of how a column is filled up in Table I, lets look at the voice quality of 'Breathiness'. [32]- [35] demonstrates that breathiness has a negative correlation with loudness, alphaRatio (the ratio of the summed energy from 50-1000 Hz and 1-5 kHz), hammerbergIndex (the ratio of the strongest energy peak in the 0-2 kHz region to the strongest peak in the 2-5 kHz region), a positive correlation with spectral flux (a measure of the change in the spectral content of a sound over time), has a positive correlation with F1, F2 and F3 bandwidth and [36] shows that breathiness has a negative correlation with F2 and F3 frequency. ...

The perception of breathiness: Acoustic correlates and the influence of methodological factors
  • Citing Article
  • September 2016

Acoustical Science and Technology

... Lower AIC values indicate a better model fit. Consistent with previous studies, pitch thresholds for the pitch detection, pitch direction, speech discrimination, and music discrimination tasks were logtransformed (Liu et al., 2016). Effect sizes for each predictor were estimated using partial eta-squared (η p 2 ) using the effectsize() function in the effectsize package (Ben-Shachar et al., 2020). ...

Pitch perception and production in congenital amusia: Evidence from Cantonese speakers
  • Citing Article
  • July 2016

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

... Some of the studies addressing the question of the integration time for residue pitch exploited the fact that shifting the frequency of a single harmonic in an otherwise harmonic complex tone can lead to a shift in the residue pitch of the complex even when the amount of the mistuning is so large that the mistuned harmonic is heard out as a separate tone ( Moore et al., 1985;Moore et al., 1986). The largest shifts in residue pitch have been found when the frequency of the mistuned harmonic is shifted by about 3% from its harmonic value ( Moore et al., 1985;Darwin et al., 1992). Ciocca and Darwin (1999) compared the size of the shifts in residue pitch obtained for a mistuned component presented simultaneously with the remainder of the complex with that obtained when the mistuned component was presented immediately after the remainder of the complex. ...

Pitch of Dichotic Complex Tones With a Mistuned Frequency Component
  • Citing Chapter
  • December 1992

... • • • overall quality of a person's speech output in relation to what is conceptualized as normal or natural (Klopfenstein, 2015;Yorkston et al., 1990). Studies have shown that naturalness of speech is rated significantly lower in adults with dysarthria when compared to nondysarthric speakers (Dagenais et al., 2006;Whitehill et al., 2004). In a study by Lehner and Ziegler (2021), for instance, naturalness ratings separated adults with dysarthria from neurologically healthy speakers with an accuracy of 0.94. ...

Perceptual and acoustic predictors of intelligibility and acceptability in Cantonese speakers with dysarthria
  • Citing Article
  • December 2004

Journal of Medical Speech-language Pathology

... Studies have found that even native Cantonese-speaking adults do not always perceive or produce all the Cantonese tones with perfect accuracy (Barry and Blamey, 2004;Ciocca and Lui, 2003;Wong and Leung, 2018). Various clinical populations such as speakers with neuromotor disorders (e.g., Parkinson's Disease, cerebral palsy, and dysarthria) (Whitehill et al., 2000;Wong et al., 2009), children with profound hearing impairment (Khouw and Ciocca, 2006;Lee et al., 2002a), and children with dyslexia (Cheung et al., 2009;Li and Ho, 2011) also have special difficulties with Cantonese tone processing and production. To date, few studies have systematically examined the acoustic properties of the Cantonese tones, particularly the entering tones. ...

Acoustic analysis of lexical tone contrasts in dysarthria
  • Citing Article
  • December 2000

Journal of Medical Speech-language Pathology