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 present study examined cochlear implant (CI) users' perception of vowels presented concurrently (i.e., "double vowels") to further our understanding of auditory grouping in electric hearing. Method: Identification of double vowels and single vowels was measured with 10 CI subjects. Fundamental frequencies (F0s) of…

Purpose: The objective of the study was to investigate the influence of noise (energetic) and speech (energetic plus informational) maskers on the head shadow (HS), squelch (SQ), and binaural summation (SU) effect in bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant (CI) users. Method: Speech recognition was measured in the presence of either a competing…

Purpose: This study adds to the Lidcombe Program evidence base by comparing individual and group treatment of preschoolers who stutter. Method: A randomized controlled trial of 54 preschoolers was designed to establish whether group delivery outcomes were not inferior to the individual model. The group arm used a rolling group model, in which a…

Purpose: Wideband acoustic immittance (WAI) is a new technique for assessing middle ear transfer function. It includes energy absorbance (EA) measures and can be acquired with the ear canal pressure varied, known as "wideband tympanometry" (WBTymp). The authors of this study aimed to investigate effects of consecutive WBTymp testing on…

Purpose: The effects of animation on naming and identification of graphic symbols for verbs and prepositions were studied in 2 graphic symbol sets in preschoolers. Method: Using a 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 completely randomized block design, preschoolers across three age groups were randomly assigned to combinations of symbol set (Autism Language Program…

Purpose: Conventional resource-intensive methods for child phonetic development studies are often impractical for sampling and analyzing child vocalizations in sufficient quantity. The purpose of this study was to provide new information on early language development by an automated analysis of child phonetic production using naturalistic…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify whether differences in dynamic range (DR) are evident across the spoken languages of Korean, English, and Mandarin. Method: Recorded sentence-level speech materials were used as stimuli. DR was quantified using different definitions of DR (defined as the range in decibels from the highest to the…

Purpose: The authors investigated the effects of acoustic cues (i.e., pitch height, pitch contour, and pitch onset and offset) and phonetic context cues (i.e., syllable onsets and rimes) on lexical tone perception in Cantonese-speaking children. Method: Eight minimum pairs of tonal contrasts were presented in either an identical phonetic context…

Purpose: Computational modeling was used to examine the consequences of 5 different laryngeal asymmetries on acoustic and perceptual measures of vocal function. Method: A kinematic vocal fold model was used to impose 5 laryngeal asymmetries: adduction, edge bulging, nodal point ratio, amplitude of vibration, and starting phase. Thirty /a/ and /?/…

Purpose: The factors affecting frequency discrimination in school-age children are poorly understood. The goal of the present study was to evaluate developmental effects related to memory for pitch and the utilization of temporal fine structure. Method: Listeners were 5.1- to 13.6-year-olds and adults, all with normal hearing. A subgroup of…

Purpose: Frequency fluctuations in human voices can usually be described as coherent frequency modulation (FM). As listeners with hearing impairment (HI listeners) are typically less sensitive to FM than listeners with normal hearing (NH listeners), this study investigated whether hearing loss affects the perception of a sung vowel based on FM…

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: In this study, the authors examined the effects of the Teach-Model-Coach-Review instructional approach on caregivers' use of four enhanced milieu teaching (EMT) language support strategies and on their children's use of expressive language. Method: Four caregiver-child dyads participated in a single-subject, multiple-baseline…

Purpose: Shi and Sánchez (2010) developed models to predict the optimal test language for evaluating Spanish/English (S/E) bilinguals' word recognition. The current study intended to validate their conclusions in a separate bilingual listener sample. Method: Seventy normal-hearing S/E bilinguals varying in language profile were included.…