Purpose: The goal of this study was to explore the relationships among vocal effort, extrinsic laryngeal muscle activity, and vocal tract length (VTL) within healthy speakers. We hypothesized that increased vocal effort would result in increased suprahyoid muscle activation and decreased VTL, as previously observed in individuals with vocal…

Preschoolers born preterm are at an increased risk for adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes; however, the impact of preterm birth on speech development has not been fully investigated. The primary objective of this study was to document the conversational speech production abilities of preschoolers born preterm via speech sample analysis. A…

The acquisition of Italian stop consonants by Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners has hardly been investigated. This study was designed to fill this gap. To investigate Chinese learners' acquisition patterns of Italian voiced and voiceless stops, a perception experiment and a production experiment were conducted. Twenty Mandarin Chinese-speaking…

Background: Despite the ability of cochlear implants (CIs) to provide children with access to speech, there is considerable variability in spoken language outcomes. Research aimed at identifying factors influencing speech production accuracy is needed. Aims: To characterize the consonant production accuracy of children with cochlear implants…

Yamdena is an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia. Although many language materials are available, the language has received very little scientific attention. In this article, I present the Yamdena corpus, which includes glossed legacy materials and original fieldwork. I also give an up-to-date introduction to Yamdena grammar, sketching its…

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

Writing systems differ in various aspects. English and Korean share basic principles of the alphabetic writing system. As an alphabetic script, Korean Hangul has relatively more regular mapping between graphemes and phonemes; however, its letters are written in syllable units, which encourages phonological retrieval at the syllable level.…

Purpose: Auditory feedback perturbation with voice pitch manipulation has been widely used in previous studies. There are several hardware and software tools for such manipulations, but audio plug-ins developed for music, movies, and radio applications that operate in digital audio workstations may be extremely beneficial and are easy to use,…

Purpose: Phoneme categorization (PC) for voice onset time and second formant transition was studied in adult cochlear implant (CI) users with early-onset deafness and hearing controls. Method: Identification and discrimination tasks were administered to 30 participants implanted before 4 years of age, 21 participants implanted after 7 years of…

Current theories of phonological development make contrasting predictions about the role of vocabulary growth and orthographic knowledge in the emergence of segmental phonological representations. Testing these predictions in children is made difficult by the metacognitive nature of tasks used to assess phonological representations. In this study,…

This study tested the potential of a technological intervention procedure for promoting letter-naming and initial-phoneme detection skills among preschoolers at risk for Specific Learning Disorder. The study rational is based on evidence for paired associated learning of visual-verbal stimuli, integrated with the use of a tangible technological…

Previous studies attest that early bilinguals can modify their perceptual identification according to the fine-grained phonetic detail of the language they believe they are hearing. Following Gonzales et al. (2019), we replicate the double phonemic boundary effect in late learners (LBs) using conceptual-based cueing. We administered a forced…

Visual information conveyed by a speaking face aids speech perception. In addition, children's ability to comprehend visual-only speech (speechreading ability) is related to phonological awareness and reading skills in both deaf and hearing children. We tested whether training speechreading would improve speechreading, phoneme blending, and…

Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers…

This paper examines the understudied phenomenon of consonant gemination in the pronunciation of English among Levantine Arabic learners of English (LA learners). The very few studies that touched on gemination among LA learners attributed gemination to spelling in the target language (English). This study challenges this analysis and demonstrates…