Purpose: One of the central questions in speech production research is to what degree certain structures have an inherent difficulty and to what degree repeated encounter and practice make them easier to process. The goal of this article was to determine the extent to which frequency and sonority distance of consonant clusters predict production…

The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best, 1995) claims listeners directly perceive articulatory gestures of the vocal tract rather than acoustic/auditory signals. Accordingly, the articulatory similarities and discrepancies between native and non-native sounds determine the perceptual assimilation patterns of non-native sounds. This study…

This article investigates the production of the emphatic consonants /?, ?, ?/ by typically developing Jordanian children. Sixty typically developing monolingual Ammani Arabic-speaking children (30 boys and 30 girls) with ages ranging from 2 to 7;11 years were recruited in a production experiment. In the experiment, they were asked to produce 18…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate children's processing of dysphonic speech in a realistic classroom setting, under the influence of added classroom noise. Method: Typically developing 6-year-old primary school children performed two listening tasks in their regular classrooms--a phoneme discrimination task to assess speech…

Phonetic imitation is a ubiquitous process in speech production. Speakers have a strong tendency to imitate their interlocutors both in a native and a non-native language. It is especially important in acquiring non-native speech, because it allows forming new sound categories. In the current study we investigated whether and to what extent Polish…

Covert contrast is the statistically reliable distinction between target language phonemes produced in the process of language acquisition that is nevertheless not perceived by a native speaker of that language. This paper examines the acquisition of contrasts in four Najdi Arabic fricatives, /s/, /[voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/,…

This study examined how Korean EFL learners in different proficiency levels attest contrasts of L2 phonology. To this end, twenty Korean EFL learners in high and low levels of English proficiency produced words with word-final contrasts of /[esh]/ vs. /[esh]i/, /t[esh]/ vs. /t[esh]i/, and /d[ezh]/ vs. /d[ezh]i/. Acoustic analyses of lexical vs.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to quantify changes in acoustic distinctiveness in two groups of talkers with Parkinson's disease as they modify across a wide range of speaking rates. Method: People with Parkinson's disease with and without deep brain stimulation and older healthy controls read 24 carrier phrases at different speech rates.…

Background noise challenges auditory recognition of speech and may reveal the underlying deficits in auditory word recognition skills. Previous studies have reported an association between children's auditory skills and various linguistic skills, including phonology, although in some languages only. However, language-specific features influence…

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the 'voiced' dorsal plosive /g/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch-German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6-6;0…

Purpose: Children with hearing loss (HL), including those with hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs), often have difficulties contrasting words like "beach" versus "peach" and "dog" versus "dock" due to challenges producing systematic voicing contrasts. Even when acoustic contrasts are present,…

This study investigates the acoustic realizations of English phonemic contrasts by Korean EFL learners, comparing their productions with those of native English speakers. Focusing on the segmentally correct production, the research aims to determine if Korean learners' acoustic properties align with those of native speakers, influenced by second…

Classic typologies within prosody tend to treat 'tone' languages as being diametrically opposed to 'stress' languages. However, Hyman (2006) highlights several languages that can have both, including Seneca, Fasu, and Copala Trique. As language documentation advances and our acoustic methodologies in the field are further refined, we have seen…

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised…

Purpose: There is a lack of standardized Mandarin reading text material that could potentially elicit significant variations in fundamental frequency (F0) and in vocal intensity for clinical voice evaluation. In this study, a phonetically balanced "Three Bears Passage" was developed based on the classical "Goldilocks" story for…