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…

Motivated by predictions of the theory of Input Processing, this study adds to previous research on second language (L2) Spanish pronunciation learning by investigating the impact of two distinct types of pronunciation assignments on first language (L1) English L2 Spanish students' improvement in pronunciation of the vowels /e, o/. Two sections of…

The primary focus of this research study was to examine the benefit of a using a multimodal approach to speech sound correction with preschool children. The approach uses the auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic modalities and includes a unique, interactive visual focus that attempts to provide a visual representation of a phonemic category. The…

The precise structure of speech sound representations is still a matter of debate. In the present neurobiological study, we compared predictions about differential sensitivity to speech contrasts between models that assume full specification of all phonological information in the mental lexicon with those assuming sparse representations (only…

Debuccalization is a weakening phenomenon whereby various consonants reduce to laryngeals. Examples include Spanish s-aspiration (s becomes h word-finally) and English t-glottalization (t becomes glottal stop syllable-finally). Previous analyses of debuccalization view it as a lenition process that deletes or manipulates formal phonological…

This study investigated the effect of dialectal difference on identification and rating of severity of speech impairment in children from Indigenous Australian backgrounds. The speech of 15 Indigenous Australian children identified by their parents/caregivers and teachers as having "difficulty talking and making speech sounds" was…

The phonological processes known as "lenition" have traditionally been explained as articulatory effort reduction. However, such a motivation for lenition has never been directly demonstrated; in addition, there are reasons to doubt the articulatory explanation.This paper focuses on a particular type of lenition (intervocalic…

The present study examines the production outcomes of late second language (L2) learners in order to determine if the mechanisms that allow the creation of phonetic categories remains available during the lifespan, as the Speech Language Model (SLM) claims. In addition, the study focuses on the type of interaction that exists between the first…

The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) is a screening questionnaire that focuses on parents' perceptions of children's speech in different contexts. Originally developed in English, it has been translated into 60 languages and the validity and clinical utility of the scale has been documented in a range of countries. In South Africa, there are…

This article offers a fine-grained investigation of how first-language (L1) phonetics involving English rhotics affect Spanish rhotic production by second-language (L2) learners. Specifically, this study investigates how different L1 English rhotic articulatory routines (retroflex-like and bunched-like) and the phonetic context that produces…

This study focuses on a trilingual toddler's ability to differentiate her Tagalog, Spanish and English productions on phonological/phonetic grounds. Working within the articulatory phonology framework, the word-initial segments produced by the child in Tagalog, Spanish and English words at age 1;10 were narrowly transcribed by two researchers and…

South Africa, as a multilingual country, offers the opportunity for examining the interaction between aphasic symptomatology and the parameters of language. Effective intervention techniques depend on an understanding of clinical linguistics. This article describes an intervention study with two Sesotho-speaking individuals with anomia. Sesotho as…

Dichotic listening experiments show a right-ear advantage (REA), reflecting a left-hemisphere (LH) dominance. However, we found a decrease in REA when the initial stop consonants of two simultaneous French CVC words differed in voicing rather than place of articulation (Experiment 1). This result suggests that the right hemisphere (RH) is more…

In this study, it was postulated that typically developing (i.e., normally developing without incidence of a speech or language delay or disorder) Spanish/Englishspeaking children ages 4 to 5 years old would show different articulation productions and phonological patterns in both languages. Sixteen participants from Florida were tested with…

This dissertation investigates whether people possess knowledge of fine-grained distinctions among the sonority levels that are unattested in their language. Specifically, I investigate the whether people encode the putatively universal distinction between the sonority levels of fricatives and stops. Across languages, fricatives and stops differ…