This dissertation investigates the effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Phonological neighbors are defined as words that are different in one and only one phoneme by addition, deletion and substitution. Phonological neighborhood density refers to the number of neighbors a certain word has. …

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) rely on knowledge of tongue placement to assess and provide intervention. A total of 175 SLPs who worked with children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) drew coronal diagrams of tongue/palate contact for 24 English consonants. Comparisons were made between their responses and typical English-speaking adults'…

The etiology of developmental dyslexia remains widely debated. An appealing theory postulates that the reading and spelling problems in individuals with dyslexia originate from reduced sensitivity to slow-rate dynamic auditory cues. This low-level auditory deficit is thought to provoke a cascade of effects, including inaccurate speech perception…

Purpose: This study examined differences in voiced consonant-vowel (CV) perception in older listeners with normal hearing and in 2 groups of older listeners with matched hearing losses: those with good and those with poor word recognition scores. Method: Thirty-six participants identified CVs from an 8-item display from the natural voiced initial…

A companion paper describes three extensions to a classification system for paediatric speech sound disorders termed the Speech Disorders Classification System (SDCS). The SDCS uses perceptual and acoustic data reduction methods to obtain information on a speaker's speech, prosody, and voice. The present paper provides reliability estimates for…

Purpose: This study examined the use of different acoustic cues in auditory perception of consonant and vowel contrasts by profoundly deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) in comparison to age-matched children and young adults with normal hearing. Method: A speech sound categorization task in an XAB format was administered to 15 children ages…

Purpose: Attaining speech accuracy requires that children perceive and attach meanings to vocal output on the basis of production system capacities. Because auditory perception underlies speech accuracy, profiles for children with hearing loss (HL) differ from those of children with normal hearing (NH). Method: To understand the impact of auditory…

The strongest support for feedback in speech perception comes from evidence of apparent lexical influence on prelexical fricative-stop compensation for coarticulation. Lexical knowledge (e.g., that the ambiguous final fricative of "Christma?" should be [s]) apparently influences perception of following stops. We argue that all such previous…

This thesis investigates the relationship between the phonological distribution of Cw combinations, and the acoustic/perceptual distinctiveness between syllables with plain C onsets and with Cw combination onsets. Distributional asymmetries of Cw combinations discussed in this thesis include the avoidance of Cw combinations in the labial consonant…

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the impact of phonological variation resulting from a vowel merger on phoneme perception. The perception of the /e/-/[epsilon]/ contrast which does not exist in Southern French-speaking regions, and which is in the process of merging in Northern French-speaking regions, was compared to the…

Spoken word recognition shows gradient sensitivity to within-category voice onset time (VOT), as predicted by several current models of spoken word recognition, including TRACE (McClelland, J., & Elman, J. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. "Cognitive Psychology," 18, 1-86). It remains unclear, however, whether this sensitivity is…

While there is growing evidence that pronunciation teaching can work, there is a need to establish what it is that makes it work. The study reported here tested for the effect of two particular factors: socially constructed metalanguage (SCM) and critical listening (CL). SCM is a term proposed for metalanguage developed by students working…

The present study examined the perception of Mandarin disyllabic tones by inexperienced American English speakers. Participants heard two naturally-produced Mandarin disyllables, and indicated if the two were the same or different. A small native Mandarin-speaking control group participated as well. All 21 possible Mandarin contrasts where the…

A variety of studies have demonstrated that organizing stimuli into categories can affect the way the stimuli are perceived. We explore the influence of categories on perception through one such phenomenon, the perceptual magnet effect, in which discriminability between vowels is reduced near prototypical vowel sounds. We present a Bayesian model…

Traditional pronunciation instruction and instruction in second language (L2) phonetics have been shown to improve learners' L2 accent in some, though certainly not all, cases. Learners in intermediate and advanced Spanish FL courses have shown modest improvement in the pronunciation of some L2 phones after receiving such instruction.…