Purpose: The acquisition of literacy skills influences the perception and production of spoken language. We examined if orthography influences implicit processing in speech production in child readers and in adult readers with low and high reading proficiency. Method: Children (n = 17), adults with typical reading skills (n = 17), and adults…

The purpose of this study was to compare traditional oral reading fluency (ORF) measures to a computerized oral reading evaluation (CORE) system that uses speech recognition software. We applied a mixed model approach with two within-subject variables to test the mean WCPM score differences and the error rates between: passage length (25, 50, 85,…

Despite prevalent use and practical application, the current and standard assessment of oral reading fluency (ORF) presents considerable limitations which reduces its validity in estimating growth and monitoring student progress, including: (a) high cost of implementation; (b) tenuous passage equivalence; and (c) bias, large standard error, and…

Purpose: To relate changes in four variables previously defined as characteristic of normally fluent speech to changes in phonatory behavior during oral reading by persons who stutter (PWS) and normally fluent controls under multiple fluency-inducing (FI) conditions. Method: Twelve PWS and 12 controls each completed 4 ABA experiments. During A…

Purpose: This study examined the effect of speech rate on phonated intervals (PIs), in order to test whether a reduction in the frequency of short PIs is an important part of the fluency-inducing mechanism of chorus reading. The influence of speech rate on stuttering frequency, speaker-judged speech effort, and listener-judged naturalness was also…

The potential role of orthographic representations on spoken word production was investigated with speakers of Chinese, a non-alphabetic and orthographically non-transparent language. Using the response generation procedure, we obtained the well-known facilitation from word-initial phonological overlap, but this effect was unaffected by whether or…

Background: Text reading prosody has been associated with reading comprehension. However, text reading prosody is a reading-dependent measure that relies heavily on decoding skills. Investigation of the contribution of speech prosody--which is independent from reading skills--in addition to text reading prosody, to reading comprehension could…

In 4 naming experiments we investigated how Italian readers assign stress to pseudowords. We assessed whether participants assign stress following distributional information such as stress neighborhood (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern) and whether such distributional information affects…

Free-form spoken input would be the easiest and most natural way for young children to communicate to an intelligent tutoring system. However, achieving such a capability poses a challenge both to instruction design and to automatic speech recognition. To address the difficulties of accepting such input, we adopt the framework of predictable…

Various recent studies attest that reading involves creating an implicit prosodic representation of the written text which may systematically affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in sentence comprehension. Research up to now suggests that implicit prosody itself depends on a partial syntactic analysis of the text, raising the question of…

This preliminary study investigated how cognitive-linguistic status in multiple sclerosis (MS) is reflected in two speech tasks (i.e. oral reading, narrative) that differ in cognitive-linguistic demand. Twenty individuals with MS were selected to comprise High and Low performance groups based on clinical tests of executive function and information…

A debate centers on whether the native accent is acquired early in life or whether it can be acquired at any time. This study investigated factors that may affect native accent acquisition in a second language. Participants in this study were 50 Russians who immigrated to Israel, 17 males and 33 females. Their age on arrival was 5 to 25 years.…

Purpose: To investigate the effects of 4 fluency-inducing (FI) conditions on self-rated speech effort and other variables in adults who stutter and in normally fluent controls. Method: Twelve adults with persistent stuttering and 12 adults who had never stuttered each completed 4 ABA-format experiments. During A phases, participants read aloud…

This preliminary study explored changes in prosodic variability during choral reading and investigated whether these changes are affected by the method of eliciting choral reading. Ten typical adult talkers recorded three reading materials (poetry, fiction and textbook) in three reading conditions: solo (reading aloud alone), track (reading aloud…

Acoustic analysis of the oral reading of 36 10- to 12-year-olds was performed to examine the relationship between selected acoustic characteristics and listener judgements of the Ss' vocal effectiveness. Results revealed variability of speaking time, pause time, and phonation-time ratio among Ss and between two trials. (Author/CL)