Evaluation of 10 stutterers and 10 nonstutterers (all adults) on masking level differences (MLD) and synthetic sentence identification tasks indicated that stutterers produced significantly poorer MLDs than nonstutterers. There were no significant differences on the synthetic sentence identification task. (Author/DB)

Nasometry, pressure-flow, and fundamental frequency data were obtained from 30 normal male and female adult speakers with mid-Atlantic dialects. Nasalance scores and nasal cross-sectional areas of the two groups did not differ. Nasalance scores were not highly correlated with nasal cross-sectional area or voice fundamental frequency. (Author/JDD)

Synthetic speech-like articulations were presented to normal hearing adult subjects (N=13) via the visual modality with computer generated animations. Results indicated that most subjects categorically labeled the animations of speech articulations with sharp transitions between phonemic categories. Results have implications for speechreading.…

The study examined the sensitivity of young children (3-7 years old) and adults to the acoustic variations resulting from a speaker's coarticulation (or coproduction) of phonetic segments. Results indicated perceptual sensitivity to certain coarticulatory effects present as early as three years of age. (Author/DB)

Electrodermal activity, peripheral blood flow, and heart rate were recorded from 19 adult stutterers and 19 normal speakers during performance of jaw movements. There were no differences between the two groups of speakers, suggesting that the stutterers did not have abnormally high levels of autonomic activation in speech. (Author/DB)

The study was conducted to obtain information on test-retest differences in Articulation Indices (AI) when a clinical threshold-based method is used to calculate AI. Standard deviations were greatest when the AI was near 50 percent and were also dependent on the relationship of the hearing thresholds and speech spectrum. (Author/DB)

The ability to alter speaking rate was studied in nine adult subjects with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and nine control subjects. Results suggest that the relationship between speaking rate, articulation rate, pause duration, and pause frequency remained largely intact for the dysarthric speakers. Data showed greater dependence on pausing by the…

Analysis of data from eight adult cochlear implant users found that improvements in their production and perception of a given vowel contrast and normally hearing listeners' identification of that contrast tended to occur together. Results support the view that restoring self-hearing allows a speaker to adjust articulatory routines to ensure…

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…

Changes in upper/lower lip integrated electromyographic (IEMG) amplitude and temporal measures related to linguistic factors known for their influence on stuttering were investigated in 12 male Dutch nonstutterers. Findings indicated that production of stressed, vowel-rounding gestures of words in initial position, longer words, and words in…

Short-term changes in vowel fundamental frequency immediately preceding and following voiceless obstruents were examined in 30 4-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and 21-year-olds. Results suggest that fundamental frequency offset is simply an acoustic consequence of producing a voiceless obstruent preceded by a vowel since there were minimal age-related…

Examined the effects of rounded and unrounded vowels on the perception of the voiceless fricatives "s" and "sh" by adults and by young children who could and could not produce both sounds. Concluded that productive mastery is not critically responsible for perception of the distinction between the two phonemes or the…

Investigation into age-related differences in production of fricative-vowel syllables with 10 adults and 30 children (ages 3, 5, and 7) found that age-related differences in vocal-tract geometry didn't explain age-related differences in vowel effects on fricative noise; children master intersyllabic gestural organization prior to intrasyllabic…

Speech samples of 79 dysarthric patients were judged for voice quality, articulation, nasality, and prosody as well as overall intelligibility. Application of a multiple regression model found that intelligibility can be expressed as a linear combination of weighted perceptual dimensions with articulation as the strongest contributor to…

This study examined effects of familiarity with a speech target on coarticulation magnitude in 30 young children and 10 adults. Children exhibited a greater effect of a following vowel on the preceding fricative than did adults. Nonmeaningful production items exhibited greater effects of the vowel on the preceding fricative than did meaningful…