Current accounts of spoken language assume the existence of a lexicon where wordforms are stored and interact during spoken language perception, understanding and production. Despite the theoretical importance of the wordform lexicon, the exact localization and function of the lexicon in the broader context of language use is not well understood.…

The precise structure of speech sound representations is still a matter of debate. In the present neurobiological study, we compared predictions about differential sensitivity to speech contrasts between models that assume full specification of all phonological information in the mental lexicon with those assuming sparse representations (only…

The influence of coarticulation cues on spoken word recognition is not yet well understood. This acoustic/phonetic variation may be processed early and recognized as sensory noise to be stripped away, or it may influence processing at a later prelexical stage. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) in a picture/spoken word matching…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) accomplish voluntary reductions in speech rate. A group of talkers with no history of neurological disease was included for comparison. This study was motivated by the idea that knowledge of how speakers with dysarthria…

This study investigates the acquisition of word-initial Korean obstruents (i.e. stops, affricates and fricatives). Korean obstruents are characterized by a three-way contrast among stops and affricates (i.e. fortis, aspirated and lenis) and a two-way fricative contrast (i.e. fortis and lenis). All these obstruents are voiceless word-initially.…

The aim of the present study was to provide more insight in the relative difficulty of four tasks testing phonemic awareness: (a) blending, (b) isolation, (c) segmentation, and (d) deletion. At the same time the roles of phoneme position and phoneme class were taken into account in a fully balanced way. To this purpose, 141 kindergartners were…

Purpose: The author presents a view of research in speech motor control over the past 5 decades, as observed from within Ken Stevens's Speech Communication Group (SCG) in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Method: The author presents a limited overview of some important developments and discoveries. The perspective is based…

This study investigated the English phonological processes and speech articulation of adult Cantonese-English speakers residing in Hong Kong. The "Phonology Test for Cantonese Speakers of English (PTCSE)" was developed to assess English articulation and phonological processes of native speakers of Cantonese. Data from 37 adult…

Suprasegmental elements such as "stress," "pitch," "juncture" and "linkers" are language universals that are uttered naturally in the mother tongue without prior training but need to be learned systematically in the target language. Among other techniques of "sentential pronunciation teaching" to…

Clinical Question: Would preschool children with SSD demonstrate similar or greater improvement in speech sound production during interventions including phonemic awareness goals and procedures than during speech sound interventions without those elements? Method: EBP Intervention Comparison Review. Sources: Google Scholar, ASHA publications.…

Links between perception and production were investigated for two adult native speakers of Korean who participated in electropalatographic (EPG) treatment designed to teach phonological and articulatory contrasts between English /s/ - /[esh]/, /z/ - /[voiced palato-alveolar affricate]/, and /l/ - /[alveolar approximant]/. Participants were…

Corley, Brocklehurst, and Moat (2011) recently demonstrated a phonemic similarity effect for phonological errors in inner speech, claiming that it contradicted Oppenheim and Dell's (2008) characterization of inner speech as lacking subphonemic detail (e.g., features). However, finding "an effect" in both inner and overt speech is not the same as…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of four types of utterances in preschool children who stutter: perceptually fluent, containing normal disfluencies (OD utterance), containing stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD utterance), and containing both normal and stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD+OD utterance).…

Our purpose in the following was to investigate the start-up rhetoric employed by U.S. President Barack Obama in his speeches. The initial 5 min from eight of his speeches from May to September of 2009 were selected for their variety of setting, audience, theme, and purpose. It was generally hypothesized that Barack Obama, widely recognized for…

This paper presents a study on implementing the ASR-based CALL (computer-assisted language learning based upon automatic speech recognition) system embedded with both formative and summative feedback approaches and using implicit and explicit strategies to enhance adult and young learners' English pronunciation. Two groups of learners including 18…