Purpose: The abilities of 5-year-old children with and without language impairment (LI) to detect anomalies involving lexical items and grammatical morphemes in stories were compared. The influence of sentence versus discourse context on lexical anomaly detection rates was explored. Method: The participants were read 3 story scripts and asked to…

Purpose: Following recent attempts to quantify articulatory impairment in speech, the present study evaluates the usefulness of a novel measure of motor stability to characterize dysarthria. Method: The study included 8 speakers with ataxic dysarthria (AD), 16 speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria (HD) as a result of Parkinson's disease, and…

Purpose: This study examined the effects of lexical tone contour on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences in quiet and in noise. Method: A text-to-speech synthesis engine was used to synthesize Mandarin sentences with each word carrying the original lexical tone, flat tone, or a tone randomly selected from the 4 Mandarin lexical tones. The…

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: 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: The aim of this study was to evaluate the understanding of English sentences produced by native (English) and nonnative (Spanish) talkers by listeners with normal hearing (NH) and listeners with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Sentence recognition in noise was measured in adult subjects with CIs and subjects with NH, all of whom were…

Purpose: The role of vision in speech representation was investigated in congenitally blind speakers and sighted speakers by studying the correlates of contrastive focus, a prosodic condition in which phonemic contrasts are enhanced. It has been reported that the lips (visible articulators) are less involved in implementing the rounding feature…

Purpose: The perceptual consequences of rate reduction, increased vocal intensity, and clear speech were studied in speakers with multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson's disease (PD), and healthy controls. Method: Seventy-eight speakers read sentences in habitual, clear, loud, and slow conditions. Sentences were equated for peak amplitude and…

Purpose: One possible source of tense and agreement limitations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a weakness in appreciating structural dependencies that occur in many sentences in the input. This possibility was tested in the present study. Method: Children with a history of SLI (H-SLI; n = 12; M = 9;7 [years;months]) and…

Purpose: The authors examined sentence imitation as a potential clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in Czech and its use to identify grammatical markers of SLI. Method: Children with SLI and the age-and language-matched control groups (total N = 57) were presented with a sentence imitation task, a receptive vocabulary task, and…

Purpose: The authors examine how adults use linguistic information from verbs, direct objects, and particles to interpret an event description as encoding a logical endpoint to the event described (in which case, it is telic) or not (in which case, it is atelic). Current models of aspectual composition predict that quantity-sensitive verbs…

Purpose: The authors of this study investigated the validity of tense and agreement productivity (TAP) scoring in diverse sentence frames obtained during conversational language sampling as an alternative measure of finiteness for use with young children. Method: Longitudinal language samples were used to model TAP growth from 21 to 30 months of…

Purpose: The effect of phonetic context on relative fundamental frequency (RFF) was examined, in order to develop stimuli sets with minimal within-speaker variability that can be implemented in future clinical protocols. Method: Sixteen speakers with healthy voices produced RFF stimuli. Uniform utterances consisted of 3 repetitions of the same…

Purpose: To examine whether improved speech recognition during linguistically mismatched target-masker experiments is due to linguistic unfamiliarity of the masker speech or linguistic dissimilarity between the target and masker speech. Method: Monolingual English speakers (n = 20) and English-Greek simultaneous bilinguals (n = 20) listened to…

Purpose: A speech analysis-resynthesis paradigm was used to investigate segmental and suprasegmental acoustic variables explaining intelligibility variation for 2 speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Sentences were read in conversational and clear styles. Acoustic characteristics from clear sentences were extracted and applied to…