| absolute pitch | Rare ability to identify or to vocally produce any note on the musical scale, without reference to another, heard tone.
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| amusia | Inability to recognize musical tones or to reproduce them. The condition may either be congenital (present at birth) or acquired later in life consequent to brain damage.
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| disfluency | Brief, unpredictable disruptions in otherwise fluent speech, characterized by hesitations and self-corrections.
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| LLI | Language-based learning impairment.
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| McGurk effect | Auditory misperception of a spoken phoneme that occurs when the speaker's mouth appears to be uttering a different phoneme.
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| melody contour | The rise and fall of successive notes in a musical passage.
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| meter | A musical concept related to the repetitive sequences of strong and weak beats in a musical passage. In written musical notation, these beat patterns are represented in the measures, or bars, of the notation.
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| neurogram | A graph depicting variations over time in the neural activity within a large number of frequency-selective neurons in response to a complex sound.
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| paralinguistic information | Sound qualities of speech that specify the speaker's sex, age, mood, and/or identity, independently of the linguistic content of the speaker's utterances.
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| phonagnosia | The inability to identify speakers by means of their voices.
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| phoneme | A sound difference that affects the meaning of an utterance; widely regarded as the fundamental unit of speech.
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| pitch chroma | The dimension of pitch associated with a given musical note's unique tonal character, independently of its absolute position on the musical scale. Thus middle C on the piano has the same pitch chroma as the note C one octave higher on the keyboard. See pitch height.
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| pitch constancy | Ability to perceive the same pitch from tones with differing spectral content, such as the note C played by a violin and by a trumpet.
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| pitch height | The dimension of pitch associated with a musical tone's position within the octave structure of music. Middle C on the piano is lower in pitch height than the C one octave higher, even though both are readily identified as the same note. See pitch chroma.
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| prosody | Patterns of stress and intonation in speech sounds, regularly used by speakers to distinguish declarative from interrogative utterances and to indicate the approaching end to an utterance. Important sources of acoustic information for guiding dialogue.
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| relative pitch | The comparatively common ability to identify a tonal interval without necessarily knowing the particular tones that make up that interval.
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| rhythm | Variation in the temporal pattern of sound, most notably in music. Quality of music associated with beat.
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| unvoiced laughter | Noisy and atonal laughter sounds, with grunt-like or snort-like qualities. Produced without regular (periodic) vocal-fold vibrations. See voiced laughter.
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| vocal folds | Membrane within the base of the larynx the vibrations of which produce speech utterances. These structures, components of the vocal tract, are slightly longer in males than in females, thus giving the male voice a somewhat lower voice pitch. Commonly called vocal cords. See vocal tract.
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| vocal tract | A complex of structures which together produce vocal sounds; these structures include the lungs, diaphragm, larynx, oral cavity and nose. See vocal folds.
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| voiced laughter | Regular, tonal-like laughter sounds, produced by regular vocal-fold vibrations that give the laughter a song-like quality with a fundamental frequency. See unvoiced laughter.
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| Wernicke's area | Region within the left hemisphere of the brain's temporal lobe that is involved in the recognition of speech.
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