A high-amplitude sucking procedure, with synthesized female speech, was used to ascertain the effects of fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration on discrimination of polysyllabic sequences. Results suggest that the exaggerated suprasegmentals of infant-directed speech may function as a perceptual catalyst, focusing the infant's attention on…

The study examined the relationship between 28 segmental and suprasegmental acoustic parameters of speech production and measures of speech intelligibility for 40 severely to profoundly hearing-impaired persons (mean age 21 years). Findings support the tractability of employing selected acoustic variables for the estimation of speech…

Features associated with the production of linguistic prosody were investigated in seven young speech-disordered children and seven young children with age-appropriate speech abilities. The primary differences between groups were in time characteristics of imitated responses. Results are discussed in terms of physiologic and/or linguistic…

This case study examined prosodic use in a normally developing child between the ages of 20 and 46 months. Conversational repairs were elicited to examine prosodic stress. Fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration of syllables were measured. Although the subject could repair stress errors, a clear pattern of the development of acoustic cues…

This study compared the speech and prosody-voice profiles for 30 male speakers with either high-functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS), and 53 typically developing male speakers. Both HFA and AS groups had more residual articulation distortion errors and utterances coded as inappropriate for phrasing, stress, and resonance. AS speakers…

A multiple baseline across behaviors single-subject experimental design was used to determine if selected parameters of speech prosody were modified by an intensive training program administered over nine days to a six-year-old language impaired child. The training yielded positive results indicating that prosodic skills are modifiable. (Author/DB)

Acoustic analyses, along with perceptual ratings, measured the extent to which preschoolers imitated three modeled intonation contours (declarative, interrogative, and monotone). Results indicated that five-year-old children imitated modeled contours more frequently than did three-year-old children, with between-group differences largely because…

Two tracheoesophageal speakers experienced in use of the tracheostoma valve (TSV) produced speech samples varying with location of contrastive stress, sentence intonation, and use of TSV. Listeners (n=34) found that TSV-use reduced speaker ability to signal suprasegmentals; however, locus of the suprasegmentals, particularly stress placement,…

Analysis of speech samples of 40 noninstitutionalized persons (ages 20-50) with mental retardation found that speech and prosody status were not statistically associated with gender or gross level of mental retardation but were associated with estimated probability of independent living. The existence of a cognitive capacity constraint and a…

Suggests that inner speech is a manifestation of the need to prestructure oral utterances. Among the results, inner speech was found to be acquired by normally developing readers between the ages of 8 and 11, and children comprehended text better when certain prosodic features were made visible on the text. (Author/CB)

Papers on French linguistics, most in French, address the following topics: micro structural treatment of regionalisms in three French dictionaries; effects of the use of Quebec French on the intelligibility of synthesized speech; reading comprehension as a constructive process; acoustic markers of the utterance in Quebec French; constraints and…