The "Woodcock-Camarata Articulation Battery" (WCAB) is an empirically-based instrument intended to test the speech skills of children and adults age two up to ninety plus years. Its administration requires the examinee to look at pictures of predetermined common objects and repeat English words that are associated to the pictures.…

The present study explored perceptual and articulatory techniques addressing the pronunciation of Spanish rhotics by means of a week-long computerized training. Through a quasi-experimental design approach, the study tested the utility of the online training and its effects on the phonetic production of taps [voiced alveolar tap or flap] and…

This dissertation investigates language-specific acoustic and aerodynamic phenomena in language contact situations. Whereas most work on second language and bilingual phonology has focused on individual consonants and vowels, this project examines patterns of coarticulation in the two languages of Spanish-English and French-English bilingual…

This dissertation investigates Voice Onset Time (VOT), which serves as an essential property for differentiating plosive consonants in L1 and L2 Mandarin Chinese. It surveys VOT variations and demonstrates that they are affected by several phonetic and phonological properties, e.g., lexical tone, place of articulation (POA), speech rate,…

In phonetics research, language alternation--including code switching (speaker-initiated) and cued switching (researcher-prompted)--can be used as a tool to investigate various aspects of speech production and perception in bilingual or multilingual speakers (Bullock & Toribio, 2009a). Studies on the production of voice onset time (VOT) during…

Recent research reveals that pronunciation converges in verbal interaction (Babel, 2012), but this varies between speakers (Pardo, 2006). Based on dynamical principles I predict differences in bilinguals' accommodation towards English voice-onset-time (VOT). VOT is a phase relation between two articulatory gestures measuring the time between oral…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

In Spanish, the phoneme /s/ has two variants: [z] occurs in the coda when preceding a voiced consonant, and [s] occurs elsewhere. However, recent research has revealed irregular voicing patterns with regards to this phone. This dissertation examines two of these allophonic variations. It first investigates how speech rate and speech formality…

Debuccalization is a weakening phenomenon whereby various consonants reduce to laryngeals. Examples include Spanish s-aspiration (s becomes h word-finally) and English t-glottalization (t becomes glottal stop syllable-finally). Previous analyses of debuccalization view it as a lenition process that deletes or manipulates formal phonological…