This investigation is a comprehensive acoustic study of 4 voiceless fricatives (/f [theta] s [esh]/) in English produced by adults and pre-and postpubescent children aged 6-14 years. Vowel duration, amplitude, and several different spectral measures (including spectral tilt and spectral moments) were examined. Of specific interest was the pattern…

Reports the results of a feasibility study exploring the use of visual information for vowel production training in a foreign language. After 10 minutes of visual articulatory modeling and shaping, a native Spanish speaker improved her ability to produce a tongue position difference between English and Spanish vowels. (57 references) (Author/CB)

Examines the relationship between phonetic substitution patterns in child speech and sound change patterns in dialects of adult language, basing an explanation of these phenomena on acoustic data and language universals. (AM)

The present paper comprises an overview of techniques using ultrasound in speech (re)habilitation. Ultrasound treatment techniques have been developed for English lingual stops, vowels, sibilants, and liquids. These techniques come from a series of small "n" studies with adolescents and adults with severe hearing impairment, residual…

Comparison of normal-speaking (N=20) and misarticulating (N=20) four- to six-year-olds and adults (N=16) revealed that adults were significantly more accurate in detecting mispronunciations than either group of children, while performance between the two groups of children was similar. Words that children found most difficult were also those on…

Investigates the effects of morphological boundaries and the voicing characteristics of the following consonant on the duration of stressed vowels produced by hearing impaired adults. They do not vary the duration of stressed vowels in accordance with the durational recording observed in normal speech; however, this deviance is systematic. (PMJ)

This paper describes the approach to speech training used with a young congenitally deaf adult. Two tactile aids (Tactaid VII and Tactaid 2000+) were used to provide feedback on speech production. Following a one-year training period, listeners with normal hearing were able to understand about 90 percent of the subject's words in an…

Two studies of adult aphasia, focusing on phonological disturbances, are presented. In the first study, subjects were 15 adults wit moderate aphasia and five age-matched controls. A variety of speech production and speech perception tests were administered, including tests of syllable discrimination, auditive word-picture matching, articulation,…

One of a series of quarterly reports, this publication contains 14 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles in the publication are: "Some Assumptions about Speech and How They Changed" (Alvin M. Liberman); "On the…

The speech production of a prelingually deafened adult male was examined at 4 intervals: 1 week and again at 9 months postimplant with a single-channel cochlear implant, 14 months later with a nonfunctioning device, and 1 year following implantation with a multichannel device. Consonant accuracy and vowel accuracy changed little across conditions.…

Lip and jaw movements were studied longitudinally in 19-month-old children as they acquired the voicing contrast for /p/ and /b/. A movement tracking system obtained lip and jaw kinematics as participants produced the target utterances /papa/ and /baba/. Laryngeal adjustments were also tracked through acoustically recorded voice onset time (VOT)…

This textbook has been designed for courses in practical phonetics for beginning students. The point of view is that general phonetics is a primary skill of great importance to language students who want to acquire a fluent and accurate spoken mastery of a language in adulthood, as well as to linguists who need it as a basic tool of their…

One of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications, this report covers the period of January 1-June 30, 1984. The 14 studies summarized in the report deal with the following topics: (1) sources of variability in early speech development, (2)…

Consonant harmony, a complex phonological assimilation in which segments (usually consonants, but sometimes even vowels) become identical, which occurs in the speech of young children and adult aphasics, is analyzed, particularly as it occurs in Finnish-speakers. Consonant harmony has an articulatory basis: it is a trend toward repetition of the…

An experiment was conducted with twenty native French speakers using a set of four reading passages, each followed by five multiple choice comprehension questions. Each subject was tested twice when reading aloud and twice when reading silently. Other test materials included a pre-test designed to check whether certain lexical items from the…