Articulatory kinematics were investigated using electromagnetic articulography (EMA) in four dysarthric speakers with Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA). Specifically, tongue-tip and tongue-back movements were recorded by the AG-200 EMA system during production of the consonants t and k as produced within a sentence utterance and during a rapid syllable…

This study investigated adult cochlear implant users' (n == 39) vowel recognition and confusions by an open-set syllable test during 4 years of implant use, in a prospective repeated-measures design. Subjects' responses were coded for phoneme errors and estimated by the generalized mixed model. Improvement in overall vowel recognition was highest…

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…

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"…

Ultrasound imaging was used to investigate the articulation of the voiceless velar stop [k] in five speakers with compensatory articulation related to cleft palate. The perceptual evaluation of the acoustic realization and the visual assessment of the tongue movement for the target sound were made by three examiners. The analysis revealed a…

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) rely on knowledge of tongue placement to assess and provide intervention. A total of 175 SLPs who worked with children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) drew coronal diagrams of tongue/palate contact for 24 English consonants. Comparisons were made between their responses and typical English-speaking adults'…

Recent research has shown that adults can implicitly learn artificial phonotactics constraints from experience producing syllables that contain those constraints, and that this learning is reflected in their speech errors. However, second-order constraints in which the placement of a consonant depends on another characteristic of the syllable…

Previous studies using Electropalatography (EPG) have shown that individuals with speech disorders sometimes produce articulation errors that affect bilabial targets, but currently there is limited normative data available. In this study, EPG and acoustic data were recorded during complex word final sps clusters spoken by 20 normal adults. A total…

Purpose: To compare the effectiveness of 3 self-administered strategies for auditory training that might improve speech perception by adult users of cochlear implants. The strategies are based, respectively, on discriminating isolated words, words in sentences, and phonemes in nonsense syllables. Method: Participants were 18 normal-hearing adults…

Purpose: Investigate training-related changes in acoustic-phonetic representation of consonants produced by a text-to-speech (TTS) computer speech synthesizer. Method: Forty-eight adult listeners were trained to better recognize words produced by a TTS system. Nine additional untrained participants served as controls. Before and after training,…