Purpose: One of the strategies that can be used to support speech communication in deaf children is cued speech, a visual code in which manual gestures are used as additional phonological information to supplement the acoustic and labial speech information. Cued speech has been shown to improve speech perception and phonological skills. This…

The study aimed to analyse the production of plosive sounds by trilingual speakers of L1 Polish - L2 English - L3 Norwegian. The main objective was to trace any changes in the VOT production of fortis and lenis stops in all three languages (Polish, English and Norwegian) produced by novice L3 learners with a focus on possible cross-linguistic…

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…

Purpose: This study aims at investigating the phonological development of the six guttural consonants of Jordanian Arabic, /[chi]/, /[voiced uvular fricative]/, /[voiceless pharyngeal fricative]/, /[voiced pharyngeal fricative]/, /[glottal stop]/, and /h/. Method: An articulation test is designed to involve two tasks: picture naming and…

This investigation explored the voice onset time (VOT) values of word-initial bilabial stops /p/ and /b/ as realized by Arabic-speaking male and female Saudi ESL learners. It sought to identify the differences, if any, between these two groups with regard to this acoustic measure (i.e., VOT). The VOT measurements were then compared with those of…

This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while…

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…

While phonetic training in laboratory settings has been shown to be helpful for second language (L2) sounds learning in prior studies , it is still open to debate whether a perception- or a production-based approach can better help adults learn L2 sounds in classroom settings. This study aimed to fill this knowledge gap. The participants were…

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 Korean learners' production of intervocalic English biconsonantal clusters consisting of /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, or /[eng] / followed by /l/ or /[voiced alveolar approximant]/. The results of the production experiment showed several factors influencing Korean learners' production. First, Korean learners' production was…

The extent of quantitative and qualitative differences in phonological development between bilingual children and their monolingual counterparts remains unresolved, especially with regard to typologically-related languages. The current study used a comparative research design to examine the phonological skills of preschool children speaking Polish…

At the babbling stage, the syllable does not have the temporal characteristics of adult syllables because of the infant's limited oro-motor skills. This research aims to further our knowledge of syllable duration and temporal variability and their evolution with age as an indicator of the development of articulatory skills. The possible impact of…

The study aims to investigate guttural and emphatic sounds and the phenomenon of emphasis spread in Fallaahi Jordanian Arabic (FJA), a rural Jordanian dialect spoken in the north of Jordan. The study uses a non-linear approach, namely, the feature geometry approach to represent guttural and emphatic sounds and the phenomenon of emphasis spread.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of two different speech therapy approaches, a traditional motor-phonetic approach and a linguistic-phonological approach, on the speech and health-related quality of life in Dutch-speaking children with a cleft palate with or without a cleft lip (CP ± L) between 4 and 12 years old.…