Down syndrome is a genetic disorder which is represented by a variety of deficits in all linguistic domains including phonology. Previous research, mainly conducted in the English language, has documented phonological deficits in early childhood in Down syndrome. Given the paucity of research in the area of phonology in the Greek language, the aim…

Background: A promising way to obtain vocal economy and efficiency is by semi-occluding the vocal tract while phonating. Current knowledge about the immediate effects of semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) phonation on the laryngeal function and configuration is based mainly on computer modelling or excised larynges studies. In in vivo SOVT studies,…

Purpose: Measures of grammatical accuracy are effective measures of children's language skills. However, many measures, such as percent grammatical utterances, were developed for children who speak General American English (GAE) and, therefore, may not be appropriate for students who speak other dialects. This study examines different scoring…

Background: Publicly available speech corpora facilitate reproducible research by providing open-access data for participants who have consented/assented to data sharing among different research teams. Such corpora can also support clinical education, including perceptual training and training in the use of speech analysis tools. Purpose: In this…

Purpose: Rhythm is one procedural mechanism that underlies language and motor skill acquisition and has been implicated in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). The purpose of this study is to investigate manual rhythmic sequencing skills in children with a history of or current CAS (hx/CAS) compared to children with typical development…

Purpose: People who stutter (PWS) have more unstable speech motor systems than people who are typically fluent (PWTF). Here, we used real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the vocal tract to assess variability and duration of movements of different articulators in PWS and PWTF during fluent speech production. Method: The vocal tracts of 28…

Purpose: Children progress from making grapheme-phoneme connections to making grapho-syllabic connections before whole-word connections during reading development (Ehri, 2005a). More is known about the development of grapheme--phoneme connections than is known about grapho-syllabic connections. Therefore, we explored the trajectory of syllable use…

Background: Previous studies on language production in normal ageing have primarily focused on distinct dimensions of older adults' spoken language performance, such as fluency and complexity. However, little attention has been paid to the complex, interconnected relations between these dimensions. Additionally, older adults have been treated as a…

Infants born after fetal growth restriction (FGR)--an obstetric condition defined as the failure to achieve the genetic growth potential--are prone to neurodevelopmental delays, with language being one of the major affected areas. Yet, while verbal comprehension and expressive language impairments have been observed in FGR infants, children and…

To examine the effects of task repetition with different schedules, English-as-a-foreign-language classroom learners performed the same oral narrative task six times under three different schedules. They narrated the same six-frame cartoon story (a) six times consecutively in one class (massed practice), (b) three times at the beginning and at the…

This investigation explored the voice onset time (VOT) values of word-initial bilabial stops /p/ and /b/ as realized by Arabic-speaking male and female Saudi ESL learners. It sought to identify the differences, if any, between these two groups with regard to this acoustic measure (i.e., VOT). The VOT measurements were then compared with those of…

Purpose: The human voice is a powerful and evolved social tool, with hundreds of studies showing that nonverbal vocal parameters robustly influence listeners' perceptions of socially meaningful speaker traits, ranging from perceived gender and age to attractiveness and trustworthiness. However, these studies have utilized a wide variety of voice…

Purpose: Armed with the theory of embodied cognition proposing tight interactions between perception, motor, and cognition, this study aimed to test the hypothesis that speech rate-altered Mandarin lexical tone perception in quiet and noisy environments could be affected by the bodily dynamic cross-modal information. Method: Fifty-three adult…

Background: Diadochokinetic rates tasks are frequently used for the assessment of diadochokinesia (DKK) in young and elderly adults. However, there is scarce research on healthy elderly adults over 65 years old, and little is known about the effect of different types of stimuli (non-words/real words) in this specific population. Furthermore, the…

Until at least the end of adolescence, children articulate speech differently than adults. While this discrepancy is often attributed to the maturation of the speech motor system, we sought to demonstrate that the development of spoken language fluency is shaped by complex interactions across motor and cognitive domains. In this study, we…