The present study examines the production outcomes of late second language (L2) learners in order to determine if the mechanisms that allow the creation of phonetic categories remains available during the lifespan, as the Speech Language Model (SLM) claims. In addition, the study focuses on the type of interaction that exists between the first…

Background: In Portugal, the routine clinical practice of speech and language therapists (SLTs) in treating children with all types of speech sound disorder (SSD) continues to be articulation therapy (AT). There is limited use of phonological therapy (PT) or phonological awareness training in Portugal. Additionally, at an international level there…

Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate the relation of formant transitions to place-of-articulation for stop consonants. A speech production model was used to generate simulated utterances containing voiced stop consonants, and a perceptual experiment was performed to test their identification by listeners. Method: Based on a model…

This study aimed to investigate the capacity of coordinating comprehension and production processes and the role of phonological working memory in simultaneous interpreting. To this end we evaluated the Articulatory Suppression (AS) effect in three groups of participants, monolingual controls, students of interpreting and professional…

In a noisy environment, visual perception of articulatory movements improves natural speech intelligibility. Parallel to phonemic processing based on auditory signal, visemic processing constitutes a counterpart based on "visemes", the distinctive visual units of speech. Aiming at investigating the neural substrates of visemic processing in a…

Vowels with extreme articulatory-acoustic properties act as natural referents. Infant perceptual asymmetries point to an underlying bias favoring these referent vowels. However, as language experience is gathered, distributional frequency of speech sounds could modify this initial bias. The perception of the /i/-/e/ contrast was explored in 144…

This study tested the hypothesis that children with speech sound disorder have generalized slowed motor speeds. It evaluated associations among oral and hand motor speeds and measures of speech (articulation and phonology) and language (receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence imitation), in 11 children with moderate to severe SSD…

Audiovisual speech perception was studied in adults with Asperger syndrome (AS), by utilizing the McGurk effect, in which conflicting visual articulation alters the perception of heard speech. The AS group perceived the audiovisual stimuli differently from age, sex and IQ matched controls. When a voice saying /p/ was presented with a face…

A recurring difficulty for researchers using electropalatography (EPG) is the wide variation in spatial patterns that occurs between speakers. High inter-speaker variability, combined with small numbers of participants, makes it problematic (1) to identify differences in tongue-palate contact across groups of speakers and (2) to define "normal"…

The current experiments examined how native Parisian French and native Swiss French listeners use vowel duration in perceiving the /[openo]/-/o/ contrast. In both Parisian and Swiss French /o/ is longer than /[openo]/, but the difference is relatively large in Swiss French and quite small in Parisian French. In Experiment 1 we found a parallel…

Background: Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) form a heterogeneous group who differ in terms of the severity of their condition, underlying cause, speech errors, involvement of other aspects of the linguistic system and treatment response. To date there is no universal and agreed-upon classification system. Instead, a number of…

The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) is a screening questionnaire that focuses on parents' perceptions of children's speech in different contexts. Originally developed in English, it has been translated into 60 languages and the validity and clinical utility of the scale has been documented in a range of countries. In South Africa, there are…

Background: Altered auditory feedback can facilitate speech fluency in adults who stutter. However, other findings suggest that adults who stutter show anomalies in "audiovocal integration", such as longer phonation reaction times to auditory stimuli and less effective pitch tracking. Aims: To study audiovocal integration in adults who stutter…

Several authors mentioned the occurrence of articulation problems in the neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) population. However, few studies have undertaken a detailed analysis of the articulation skills of NF1 patients, especially in schoolchildren and adults. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine in depth the articulation skills of…

Recent investigations have supported the suggestion that phonological speech errors may reflect the simultaneous activation of more than one phonemic representation. This presents a challenge for speech error evidence which is based on the assumption of well-formedness, because we may continue to perceive well-formed errors, even when they are not…