Twenty-one normally developing 3-year-old children were tested on two approximate consonant contrasts, "rake-lake" and "wake-rake," and a control contrast, "wake-bake." The children showed very accurate perceptions of minimal pairs. Children who did not yet articulate "r" or "l" appropriately showed somewhat less consistent perception than…

Results suggested that normally developing children learn to perceive approximant consonant contrasts prior to three years of age. However, some but not all articulation-delayed three-year-old children may still make errors in the perception of approximants. (Author/CL)

The study examined the functions served by consonant assimilation and reduplication in the speech of eight language disordered boys (ages 3 to 5). (Author)

The study found that stutterers (N=10) were significantly more variable than nonstutterers in their ability to achieve stable fundamental frequency diminution patterns in vowels immediately following stop consonants. Stutterers were not significantly different from the nonstutterers in their ability to achieve a stable fundamental frequency over…

Analysis of Sanskrit sentences as spoken by 10 Sanskrit speakers supports grammarians' theory on the duration of short, long, and prolated vowel sounds, but does not provide support for the theory that all consonants are of equal duration. (Author/JDD)

One English speaking child's phonological, semantic, and syntactical development from 15 to 21 months old is detailed in order to investigate the development of the mid vowel categories in English as reflected in spontaneous speech production. Prior research on this topic is summarized to reveal certain trends in the development of mid vowels.…

Reports on an experiment, conducted on ten children who misarticulated /s/, and designed to survey the effect of consonant context on misarticulation. Suggests that a context-sensitive model of phonetic performance is needed to account for variation in correct /s/ production. (Author/AM)

Articulation and two speechreading tests were administered to 42 hearing impaired adults before and after individualized speech therapy to study the effect of speech training on speechreading and relationships between consonant production and recognition. Analysis of pre/postscores revealed significant improvement in both production and…

Shows that vowel duration is a cue to voicing of syllable-final consonants. Notes that the effective duration of a vowel apparently extends over all parts of the acoustic signal, including the transitions reflecting the consequences of the coarticulation of vowel and consonant. (Author/RL)

Two possible explanations based on elementary facts of physics are suggested for the universal preference for place of articulation of implosives and ejectives. Languages show a preference for ejectives in the order: velar, alveolar, and labial while implosives occur most often in the opposite order. A language will only have velar implosives if…

Two experiments are reported in which the presence or absence of silence was found to be a relevant cue for the distinction between affricate and fricative when it occurred in sentence-medial position, but not when it occurred at a sentence boundary. (Author/AMH)

Thirty children (aged 4-10) and 10 adults repeated 2 target syllables, which were analyzed acoustically to evaluate development of identification and discrimination in children for the vowel duration cue to final consonant voicing. Results showed that category boundary, category separation, response consistency, and perceptual consistency…

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…

Identification of place of articulation in synthesized syllables was examined with eight normal hearing adults listening in quiet or noise and three adults with high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss. Stimuli with an appropriate second formant (F2) transition were compared with stimuli in which F2 was constant. (Author/DB)

The study examined whether children with normal linguistic skills demonstrate increasing developmental changes in their perception of place of articulation for stop consonants with short- and long-duration formant transitions. Children's improving discrimination abilities did not reach adult levels even at 10 years of age. (Author/DB)