Background: Traditional semi-occluded vocal tract exercises (SOVTEs) are restricted to single-phoneme tasks due to the semi-occlusion at the mouth, which hinders full articulation, continuous speech, and singing. Innovative SOVTEs should overcome this limitation by creating the semi-occlusion outside the oral cavity. Purpose: The purpose of this…

Background: With respect to the clinical criteria for diagnosing "childhood apraxia of speech" (commonly defined as a disorder of speech motor planning and/or programming), research has made important progress in recent years. Three segmental and suprasegmental speech characteristics--error inconsistency, lengthened and disrupted…

Interactive models of language production predict that it should be possible to observe long-distance interactions; effects that arise at one level of processing influence multiple subsequent stages of representation and processing. We examine the hypothesis that disruptions arising in nonform-based levels of planning--specifically, lexical…

Subjective impressions of speech delivery in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as monotonic or over-precise are widespread but still lack robust acoustic evidence. This study provides a detailed acoustic characterization of the specificities of speech in individuals with ASD using an extensive sample of speech data, from the production of narratives…

Purpose: Prior work has demonstrated that competing tasks impact habitual speech production. The purpose of this investigation was to quantify the extent to which clear and loud speech are affected by concurrent performance of an attention-demanding task. Method: Speech kinematics and acoustics were collected while participants spoke using…

Purpose: We examined how consonant perception is affected by a preceding speech carrier simulated in the same or a different room, for different classes of consonants. Carrier room, carrier length, and carrier length/target room uncertainty were manipulated. A phonetic feature analysis tested which phonetic categories are influenced by the…

Purpose: This proof-of-concept study examined the effectiveness of an ultrasound visual biofeedback (UVB) training within the Participatory Adult Teaching Strategy framework for instructing speech-language pathologists (SLPs) on the assessment of sonographic tongue configuration for remediation of speech sound errors. Method: This research…

Vowel nasalization usually occurs through a two-step process whereby a vowel is nasalized via coarticulation with a nearby nasal segment; when the language later drops the nasal segment, a nasal vowel remains. Spontaneous vowel nasalization is a rare, peculiar form of nasalization that emerges in contexts that lack an historical etymological nasal…

Purpose: Auditory perceptual judgments are commonly used to diagnose dysarthria and assess treatment progress. The purpose of the study was to examine the acoustic underpinnings of perceptual speech abnormalities in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Auditory perceptual judgments were obtained from sentences produced by 13 speakers…

This article provides a review of previous studies that have examined the effects of orthography on establishing contrastive phonological representations in second language acquisition and presents results from an original study on Mandarin speakers' production of English stops investigating how the presence of orthography affects the production…

Purpose: We evaluated whether naive listeners' ratings of the gender typicality of the speech of children assigned male at birth (AMAB) and children assigned female at birth (AFAB) were different at two time points: one at which children were 2.5-3.5 years old and one when they were 4.5-5.5 years old. We also examined whether measures of speech,…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of speech intensity on acoustic and kinematic vowel space measures and conduct a preliminary examination of the relationship between kinematic and acoustic vowel space metrics calculated from continuously sampled lingual marker and formant traces. Method: Young adult speakers produced 3…

Objective: We aimed to investigate the production of contrastive emphasis in French-speaking 4-year-olds and adults. Based on previous work, we predicted that, due to their immature motor control abilities, preschool-aged children would produce smaller articulatory differences between emphasized and neutral syllables than adults. Method: Ten…

Purpose: Recently, efforts have been made to investigate the vocal tract using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Due to technical limitations, teeth were omitted in many previous studies on vocal tract acoustics. However, the knowledge of how teeth influence vocal tract acoustics might be important in order to estimate the necessity of…