Purpose: To examine how language production interacts with speech motor and gross and fine motor skill in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Eleven children with SLI and 12 age-matched peers (4-6 years) produced structurally primed sentences containing particles and prepositions. Utterances were analyzed for errors and for…

Purpose: To improve our understanding about the underlying factors of aging-related speaking rate decline, the authors sought to determine if lip and jaw speeds are physiologically constrained in older adults. Method: Thirty-six female--10 young adults (ages 22-27 years), 9 middle-aged adults (ages 45-55 years), 10 young-old adults (65-74 years),…

Purpose: Previous work has shown that monolingual French and English speakers use distinct articulatory settings, the underlying articulatory posture of a language. In the present article, the authors report on an experiment in which they investigated articulatory settings in bilingual speakers. The authors first tested the hypothesis that in…

Purpose: In this study, the authors compared coarticulation and lingual kinematics in preadolescents and adults in order to establish whether preadolescents had a greater degree of random variability in tongue posture and whether their patterns of lingual coarticulation differed from those of adults. Method: High-speed ultrasound tongue contour…

Purpose: The aim of this article was to introduce an important tool, cross-recurrence analysis, to speech production applications by showing how it can be adapted to evaluate the similarity of multivariate patterns of articulatory motion. The method differs from classical applications of cross-recurrence analysis because no phase space…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the typical pattern for inspiration during speech breathing in healthy adults, as well as the factors that might influence it. Method: Ten healthy adults, 18-45 years of age, performed a variety of speaking tasks while nasal ram pressure, audio, and video recordings were obtained. Inspirations…

Purpose: The present study aimed at comparing the effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and the caudal zona incerta (cZi) on the proficiency in achieving oral closure and release during plosive production of people with Parkinson's disease. Method: Nineteen patients participated preoperatively and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the contribution of a contralateral hearing aid to the perception of consonants, in terms of voicing, manner, and place-of-articulation cues in reverberation and noise by adult cochlear implantees aided by bimodal fittings. Method: Eight postlingually deafened adult cochlear implant (CI) listeners…

Purpose: Chronic deep brain stimulation of the nucleus ventralis intermedius is an effective treatment for individuals with medication-resistant essential tremor. However, these individuals report that stimulation has a deleterious effect on their speech. The present study investigates one important factor leading to these effects: the…

Purpose: To quantitatively examine the effects of body position on the positioning of the epiglottis, tongue, and velum at rest and during speech. Method: Videofluoroscopic data were obtained from 12 healthy adults in the supine and upright positions at rest and during speech while the participants produced 12 VCV sequences. The effects of body…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine listeners' ability to learn talker identity from speech produced with an electrolarynx, explore source and filter differentiation in talker identification, and describe acoustic-phonetic changes associated with electrolarynx use. Method: Healthy adult control listeners learned to identify…

Purpose: Speech acoustic characteristics of children with cerebral palsy (CP) were examined with a multiple speech subsystems approach; speech intelligibility was evaluated using a prediction model in which acoustic measures were selected to represent three speech subsystems. Method: Nine acoustic variables reflecting different subsystems, and…

Purpose: The authors sought to investigate interactions among intelligibility-enhancing speech cues (i.e., semantic context, clearly produced speech, and visual information) across a range of masking conditions. Method: Sentence recognition in noise was assessed for 29 normal-hearing listeners. Testing included semantically normal and anomalous…

Purpose: The capacity of 6-month-old infants to discriminate a voicing contrast (/aba/--/apa/) on the basis of "amplitude modulation (AM) cues" and "frequency modulation (FM) cues" was evaluated. Method: Several vocoded speech conditions were designed to either degrade FM cues in 4 or 32 bands or degrade AM in 32 bands. Infants…

Purpose: To explore the effect of modeling and explicit elicitation of slow and accurately produced speech in typically developing preschool children. Optional phonological reductions (e.g., deleted final stops) and changes in speech rate were examined in response to an adult conversational speaker's speech style. Method: Forty 3-and…