Thirteen distinctive features of English phonology were used in studying misarticulating children's feature systems in comparison to the English system, and for a traditional articulation evaluation of phoneme articulation. Results showed children's feature errors consistent across phonemes containing the feature, and misarticulations only…

Examines previously published experimental work on rhythm of spoken Spanish to establish whether or not Spanish is a "syllable-timed" language. Analyzes figures from the experiments and concludes that Spanish is neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed, displaying an antirhythmic pattern where each segment has a "standard duration" dependent on its…

Examines data on homonymy and reduplication from a longitudinal study. Results show that such strategies can appear later in the child's linguistic development than has been proposed, and that the lexical item has to be considered a central unit, beyond the earliest stages, in the acquisition of phonology. (GLR)

One of the factors that affects the reliability of perceptual voice evaluation is the rating scale. Equal-appearing interval (EAI) and visual analogue (VA) scales are the two most common scales used and have attracted much attention in recent studies of perceptual voice evaluation. Available findings are contradictory, with one study finding the…

The tongue is a deformable object, and moves by compressing or expanding local functional segments. For any single phoneme, these functional tongue segments may move in similar or opposite directions, and may reach target maximum synchronously or not. This paper will discuss the independence of five proposed segments in the production of speech.…

The present study compared patterns of anticipatory coarticulation for utterances produced in habitual, loud, and slow conditions by 17 individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS), 12 individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD), and 15 healthy controls. Coarticulation was inferred from vowel F2 frequencies and consonant first-moment coefficients.…

It has been hypothesized that lax vowels may be relatively unaffected by dysarthria, owing to the reduced vocal tract shapes required for these phonetic events (G. S. Turner, K. Tjaden, & G. Weismer, 1995). It also has been suggested that lax vowels may be especially susceptible to speech mode effects (M. A. Picheny, N. I. Durlach, & L. D. Braida,…

A series of three experiments examined children's sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactic structure as reflected in the relative frequencies with which speech sounds occur and co-occur in American English. Children, ages 2-1/2 and 3-1/2 years, participated in a nonword repetition task that examined their sensitivity to the frequency of individual…

The aim of the investigation is to compare voice and speech quality in alaryngeal patients using esophageal speech (ESOP, eight subjects), electroacoustical speech aid (EACA, six subjects) and tracheoesophageal voice prosthesis (TEVP, three subjects). The subjects reading a short story were recorded in the sound-proof booth and the speech samples…

This test, conducted to prove that closed vowels can be heard in fricative utterances as open vowels in explosive utterances, gives further evidence for the closing action of constrictives and the opening action of occlusives. It also reveals a possible articulatory and auditive convergence between consonants and vowels. (Text is in French.)…

Two possible explanations based on elementary facts of physics are suggested for the universal preference for place of articulation of implosives and ejectives. Languages show a preference for ejectives in the order: velar, alveolar, and labial while implosives occur most often in the opposite order. A language will only have velar implosives if…

This paper examines the distinction between primary and secondary articulations of consonants. It shows that the description and classification of speech sounds should not be based on physical parameters alone. Some essential distinctions reveal themselves only inferentially through the relation of a sound to others in the language system.…

Revised version of a paper given at the 83rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of American, April 18-21, 1972, Buffalo, New York; research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (DD)