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…

Purpose: Generalizations can be made about the order in which speech sounds are added to a child's phonemic inventory and the ways that child speech deviates from adult targets in a given language. Developmental and disordered speech patterns are presumed to reflect differences in both phonological knowledge and skilled motor control, but the…

Purpose: This purpose of this study was to assess the frequency and types of phonological process errors in patients with velopharyngeal dysfunction (VPD) and the different types of palatal anomalies. Method: A total of 808 nonsyndromic patients with VPD, who underwent follow-up at the Center for Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Anomalies, from 2000…

Purpose: We proposed and tested a causal instantiation of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework, linking acoustics, intelligibility, and communicative participation in the context of dysarthria. Method: Speech samples and communicative participation scores were collected…

Purpose: Most acoustic and articulatory studies on /l/ have focused on either duration, formant frequencies, or tongue shape during the constriction interval. Only a limited set of data exists for the transition characteristics of /l/ to and from surrounding vowels. The aim of this study was to examine second formant (F2) transition…

Purpose: We aimed to develop normative growth curves for articulation rate during sentence repetition for typically developing children. Our primary goal was the development of quantile/percentile growth curves so that typical variation in articulation rate with age could be estimated. We also estimated when children became adultlike in their…

Purpose: Accurate measurement of speech intelligibility is essential for children with speech production deficits, but wide variability exists in the measures and protocols used. The current study sought to examine relationships among measures of speech intelligibility and the capacity of different measures to capture change over time. Method:…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to collect auditory-perceptual data on established symptom categories of dysarthria from typically developing children between 3 and 9 years of age, for the purpose of creating age norms for dysarthria assessment. Method: One hundred forty-four typically developing children (3;0-9;11 [years;months], 72 girls and…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate how deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the caudal zona incerta (cZi) affects speech intelligibility in persons with essential tremor. Method: Thirty-five participants were evaluated: off stimulation, on chronic stimulation optimized to alleviate tremor, and during unilateral stimulation at increasing…

Purpose: Although dysarthria affects the large majority of individuals with cerebral palsy (CP) and can substantially complicate everyday communication, previous research has provided an incomplete picture of its clinical features. We aimed to comprehensively describe characteristics of dysarthria in adults with CP and to elucidate the impact of…

Purpose: This study was designed to test two hypotheses about apraxia of speech (AOS) derived from the Directions Into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA) model (Guenther et al., 2006): the feedforward system deficit hypothesis and the feedback system deficit hypothesis. Method: The authors used noise masking to minimize auditory feedback during…

Purpose: To improve our understanding about the underlying factors of aging-related speaking rate decline, the authors sought to determine if lip and jaw speeds are physiologically constrained in older adults. Method: Thirty-six female--10 young adults (ages 22-27 years), 9 middle-aged adults (ages 45-55 years), 10 young-old adults (65-74 years),…

This study aimed to examine family history of functional articulation disorders (FAD) among Jordanian patients who present with FAD, as well as to investigate the relation of other factors related to the disorder (age, gender, genetic connection between parents, sounds affected, and type of disorder). A convenience sample of 45 patients (ages…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe normative and validation data on the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS; McLeod, Harrison, & McCormack, 2012c) for English-speaking children. Method: The ICS is a 7-item, parent-report measure of children's speech intelligibility with a range of communicative partners. Data were collected…

The Speech Fluency Profile of fluent adolescent speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, were examined with respect to gender and neurolinguistic variations. Speech samples of 130 male and female adolescents, aged between 12;0 and 17;11 years were gathered. They were analysed according to type of speech disruption; speech rate; and frequency of speech…