Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues by 10 college age adults in the speech of 9 children with profound hearing loss and 9 children with normal hearing. Overall, listeners were able to identify vowels in productions by both groups though the patterning of vowel identification differed for the two speaker groups in…

This study of 14 school-age children who stuttered found that the average duration of stuttering was approximately three-quarters of a second and was not correlated with age, length of post-onset interval, or frequency of speech disfluency. Stuttering duration may be related to amount of sound prolongations as well as articulatory rate during…

The ability of 10 normal-speaking 5-year-olds and 10-normal-speaking 7-year-olds to categorize consonants as "dripping" (stop), "flowing" (fricative), "tongue" (lingual place of articulation), "or "lip" (labial place of articulation) was evaluated. Children's ability to categorize was evaluated as an indicator of their awareness of feature…

This study analyzed spontaneous speech samples of 10 children (ages 10-14) who stuttered, with no history of treatment based on prolonged speech. Acoustic measures showed no significant posttreatment increases in durations of acoustic segments. However, for acoustic measures of vowel duration and articulation rate, posttreatment speech samples…

This study compared the retention patterns obtained for children diagnosed with phonological disorders, 10 with developmental apraxia of speech and 10 with phonologically based speech areas. In both groups, in cases of sound substitutions, voicing was retained most frequently and place of articulation least frequently. An inverse relationship…

Tests of rapid serial naming, reading, spelling, general intelligence, articulation speed, and word fluency were administered to nine children with reading disabilities and rapid serial naming difficulties. Follow up 9 years later showed that difficulties in rapid naming, reading, and spelling persisted. The development of naming speed is…

Short-term changes in vowel fundamental frequency immediately preceding and following voiceless obstruents were examined in 30 4-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and 21-year-olds. Results suggest that fundamental frequency offset is simply an acoustic consequence of producing a voiceless obstruent preceded by a vowel since there were minimal age-related…

Five profoundly hearing-impaired children were taught to speak seven consonant sounds using palatometry which allows learners to see tongue-to-palate contact patterns used in sound production. Results demonstrated that visual articulatory modeling and feedback of linguapalatal contact patterns is an effective means of teaching consonants and…

This study investigated the effectiveness of articulation training (daily sessions for 8 weeks) on the production of phonemes by 12 hearing impaired children (ages 5-10). Results suggest that phonemes with an intermediate error rate (trained at a phonological level) are easier to train than phonemes with a high error rate (trained at a phonetic…

This paper reports on increases in the phonetic inventories of nine children in the fifth and sixth years of experience with cochlear implants. Thirty-six of 44 phones in Australian English reached criterion levels, resulting in intelligible, but not completely natural, speech. The rate of improvement in the sixth year was slow, indicating a…

Two studies with nine children with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) were conducted. Study 1, focusing on longitudinal changes in speaking rate, found markedly slower speaking rates for five subjects. Study 2, examining possible causes of slowed speaking rate, found that both reduced articulatory speed and increased pausing may contribute…

This study found that 5 7-year-old and 4 10-year-old prelingually hearing-impaired children displayed evidence of anticipatory coarticulation based on temporal and spectral cues, but they did so to a lesser degree than normally hearing children. (Author/JDD)

Comparison of disfluent conversational utterances of 14 children who stutter and 14 children (mean age of both groups 52 months) who do not stutter found that for both groups, disfluency clusters were typically produced at clause onset and within the most complex linguistic contexts and that they reflect the effects of producing multiple syntactic…

This study compared the speech of 20 children with prelinguistic deafness who wore cochlear implants when the device was on and when the device had been off for several hours. On average, no differences in speaking conditions were found on such parameters as indices of vowel height, vowel place, initial consonant voicing, or final consonant…

Measures of both temporal and spectral parameters were computed to determine the extent of perseveratory coarticulation in the vowel-consonant syllables produced by 7- and 10-year-old children (n=9). Profoundly hearing-impaired speakers exhibited measurable but smaller effects of perseveratory coarticulation relative to the normally hearing…