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.…

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues by 10 college age adults in the speech of 9 children with profound hearing loss and 9 children with normal hearing. Overall, listeners were able to identify vowels in productions by both groups though the patterning of vowel identification differed for the two speaker groups in…

This study of 14 school-age children who stuttered found that the average duration of stuttering was approximately three-quarters of a second and was not correlated with age, length of post-onset interval, or frequency of speech disfluency. Stuttering duration may be related to amount of sound prolongations as well as articulatory rate during…

This paper argues against definitions of stuttering which imply that all within-word disfluencies are stuttering and no between-word disfluencies are stuttering. The paper calls for a definition of stuttering that is not contradicted by available empirical information or clinical experience and is logically consistent. (JDD)

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)

The study found that stutterers (N=10) were significantly more variable than nonstutterers in their ability to achieve stable fundamental frequency diminution patterns in vowels immediately following stop consonants. Stutterers were not significantly different from the nonstutterers in their ability to achieve a stable fundamental frequency over…

Comparison of acoustic correlates of phonatory control in the fluent utterances of 10 preschool-aged boys who were stutterers and in nonstuttering control subjects found significant differences between the two groups for shimmer measures. (Author/DB)

The study investigated effects of contrastive stress and phonetic context on misarticulations of consonantal /r/ with nine young children who misarticulated the consonant. Significant main effects were obtained for context and stress. Results are discussed in terms of possible effects of production and perceptual variables on listener judgments.…

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 application of the Articulation Index (AI) model to the fitting of linear amplification was evaluated for 12 subjects with sensorineural hearing loss. For all subjects, the relationship between percent-correct scores on a nonsense syllable test and AIs was monotonic, indicating that AI was effective for comparing conditions typical of those…

The study examined the speech production strategies used by 4 young children (30- to 32-months-old) with cleft palate and velopharyngeal inadequacy during the early stages of phonological learning. All the children had had primary palatal surgery and were producing primarily single word utterances with a few 2- and 3-word phrases. Analysis of each…

This study investigated effect of production time on the perception of disordered nasalization in 20 children (ages 6-18) with cleft palate. Ten judges used direct magnitude estimates to rate severity of disordered nasalization. Results indicated that reducing the production time did not change perceptible nasalization. (Author/DB)