Background: Individuals with developmental dysarthria typically demonstrate reduced functioning of one or more of the speech subsystems, which negatively impacts speech intelligibility and communication within social contexts. A few treatment approaches are available for improving speech production and intelligibility among individuals with…

Background: Intelligibility measurement is influenced by the characteristics of a speaker, listener and contextual factors. This study addresses the clinical problem of measuring speech intelligibility in children with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) in real-world conditions. Aims: The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of…

The original Spectral Correlation Index (SCI[underscore o]) is a measure of amplitude envelope distortion that has been used in several studies to predict behavioral results. Because the original SCI[underscore o] did not account for the differential contribution of particular frequency bands to speech intelligibility (i.e., band importance) or…

Comprehensibility has emerged as a useful and intuitive means of globally evaluating second language (L2) speakers in many research and instructional contexts. In most cases, L2 speakers' comprehensibility is assessed by external listeners who do not engage in extensive communication with the speakers, even though the degree to which a speaker is…

Whereas many scholars have emphasized the relative importance of "comprehensibility" as an ecologically valid goal for L2 speech training, testing, and development, eliciting listeners' judgments is time-consuming. Following calls for research on more efficient L2 speech rating methods in applied linguistics, and growing attention toward…

This study examines the effect of native "vs." non-native prosody instruction on developing interpreter trainees' speech comprehensibility in English as a foreign language (EFL) using a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design. Twenty-three groups of 28 interpreter trainees at a University in Iran (six different branches) took part in…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of electrolaryngeal (EL) speech among untrained speakers to aid in its effective introduction and to identify syllables and words that are easy or difficult to pronounce. Method: A total of 21 healthy individuals who had never used an EL were included. The participants were…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to characterize the acoustic profile and to evaluate the intelligibility of vowel productions in prelingually deafened, Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Twenty-five children with CIs and 20 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH) were recorded producing a list of Mandarin…

This study investigated the extent to which racialisation shapes EFL learners' conceptualizations of the 'native speaker' construct through an experimental design. Three hundred and fourteen university students studying at English-medium universities in Turkey were invited to take an online matched guise test. They were assigned to either the…

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are faced with the challenge of quickly and accurately identifying children who present with speech sound disorders (SSD) compared to typically developing (TD) children. The goal of this study was to compare the clinical relevance of two speech sampling methods (single-word vs. connected speech samples)…

While listeners tend to downgrade speakers' accent and comprehensibility when they perceive them to be from a different language community--a process known as reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS)--research has generally relied solely on quantitative data such as Likert scale ratings. The current study sought to extend the analysis further by…

This study considers the performance of tone pronunciation and morpheme intelligibility by L2 Polish Mandarin learners. A mixed-effects ordinal regression model and Tukey's HSD multiple test were used to examine the start-point, end-point, of syllables as a means of assessing their intelligibility by L2 Polish learners regarding the tones with the…

Many studies evidence the flexibility of speech perception in the first language (L1), which allows rapid adaptation to unfamiliar foreign accents. Two influential studies by Bradlow and Bent (2008) and a follow-up study by Baese-Berk et al. (2013) found that increased variability as a function of the number of talkers and accents facilitated the…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to quantify changes in speech intelligibility in two cohorts of people with Parkinson's disease (PD; those with and without deep brain stimulation [DBS]) across a broad range of self-selected speech rate alterations in: (1) read sentences; and (2) extemporaneous speech (monologues). Method: Four speaker groups…

Issues of intelligibility may arise amongst English learners when acquiring new words and phrases in North American academic settings, perhaps in part due to limited linguistic data available to the learner for understanding language use patterns. To this end, this paper examines the effects of Data-Driven Learning for Pronunciation (DDLfP) on…