Purpose: To determine if speech error patterns in preschoolers with speech sound disorders (SSDs) predict articulation and phonological awareness (PA) outcomes almost 4 years later. Method: Twenty-five children with histories of preschool SSDs (and normal receptive language) were tested at an average age of 4;6 (years;months) and were followed up…

Motivated by predictions of the theory of Input Processing, this study adds to previous research on second language (L2) Spanish pronunciation learning by investigating the impact of two distinct types of pronunciation assignments on first language (L1) English L2 Spanish students' improvement in pronunciation of the vowels /e, o/. Two sections of…

The primary focus of this research study was to examine the benefit of a using a multimodal approach to speech sound correction with preschool children. The approach uses the auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic modalities and includes a unique, interactive visual focus that attempts to provide a visual representation of a phonemic category. The…

Many adolescents and adults with Down syndrome have reduced speech intelligibility. Reasons for this reduction may relate to differences in anatomy and physiology, both of which are important for creating an intelligible speech signal. The purpose of this study was to document acoustic vowel space and articulatory working space for two adult…

The purpose of this work is to investigate the role of three articulatory parameters (tongue position, jaw position and tongue grooving) in the production of /s/. Six normal speakers' speech was perturbed by a palatal prosthesis. The fricative was recorded acoustically and through electromagnetic articulography in four conditions: (1) unperturbed,…

Combining information from the visual and auditory senses can greatly enhance intelligibility of natural speech. Integration of audiovisual speech signals is robust even when temporal offsets are present between the component signals. In the present study, we characterized the temporal integration window for speech and nonspeech stimuli with…

This study presents EPG (electro-palatographic) data on (alveo-)palatal consonants from two Australian languages, Arrernte and Warlpiri. (Alveo-)palatal consonants are phonemic for stop, lateral and nasal manners of articulation in both languages, and are laminal articulations. However, in Arrernte, these lamino-(alveo-)palatals contrast with…

This study aims to explore how the markedness effect shapes Mandarin slips of the tongue with respect to nasals in syllable-final positions. Data were collected via natural speech and elicitation tasks from 35 participants' reading of 346 test items. Three hundred and eight slips in Mandarin from natural data and 360 slips from elicited data were…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between articulation rate, frequency and duration of disfluencies of different types, and temperament in preschool children who stutter (CWS). In spontaneous speech samples from 19 CWS (mean age = 3:9; years:months), we measured articulation rate, the frequency and duration of (a) sound…

This paper is devoted to finding adequate answers to the following queries: (A) what are the segmental and syllabic pattern errors made by Kurdish students in their pronunciation? (B) Can the problematic areas in pronunciation be predicted by a systematic comparison of the sound systems of both native and target languages? (C) Can there be any…

Purpose: In this investigation, the authors determined the strength of association between tongue kinematic and speech acoustics changes in response to speaking rate and loudness manipulations. Performance changes in the kinematic and acoustic domains were measured using two aspects of speech production presumably affecting speech clarity:…

Debuccalization is a weakening phenomenon whereby various consonants reduce to laryngeals. Examples include Spanish s-aspiration (s becomes h word-finally) and English t-glottalization (t becomes glottal stop syllable-finally). Previous analyses of debuccalization view it as a lenition process that deletes or manipulates formal phonological…

Despite the importance of speech naturalness to treatment outcomes, little research has been done on what constitutes speech naturalness and how to best maximize naturalness in relationship to other treatment goals like intelligibility. In addition, previous literature alludes to the relationship between prosodic aspects of speech and speech…

Phonation is a fundamental feature of human communication. Control of phonation in the context of speech-language disturbances has traditionally been considered a characteristic of lesions to subcortical structures and pathways. Evidence suggests however, that cortical lesions may also implicate phonation. We carried out acoustic and perceptual…

This study investigated the effect of dialectal difference on identification and rating of severity of speech impairment in children from Indigenous Australian backgrounds. The speech of 15 Indigenous Australian children identified by their parents/caregivers and teachers as having "difficulty talking and making speech sounds" was…