Five experienced articulation judges scored the tape-recorded responses of four first and second grade children with articulatorily deviant /r/s under two response arrangement conditions. (Author)

An experimental group of education majors received 15 hours of phonetics instruction; auditory perception test results showed the group scored considerably higher than other students receiving no instruction. (SP)

Although developmental increases in the size of the position effect within a mispronunciation detection task have been interpreted as consistent with a view of the lexical restructuring process as protracted, the position effect itself might not be reliable. The current research examined the effects of position and clarity of acoustic-phonetic…

This paper compares the production and perception of the rise-fall contour of contrastive statements and the final rise-fall part of polar questions in Greek. The results show that these superficially similar rise-falls exhibit fine phonetic differences in the alignment of tonal targets with the segmental string, and that these differences can be…

Investigates the principles underlying the perception of vowel stimuli. The results support Chistovich's claim. When judging the distance between synthetic vowel stimuli, speakers refer to the phonemic structure of their native language. They determine the phonemes closest to the stimuli and then compare the phonemes and not the stimuli…

Describes studies of voice onset time in Spanish and an acoustic feature termed presence versus absence of an abrupt consonant onset. It is suggested that this feature may be used by the Spanish listener in making a perceptual distinction between voiced and voiceless stop consonants in multiple environments. (Author/KM)

Work supported in part by four U.S. Public Health Service grants. (VM)

This study examined identification and discrimination of initial bilabial stop consonants differing in voicing by 10 9-year-old children with a history of severe otitis media with effusion (OME). Long-term effects of OME were found for both identification and discrimination performance. In cases of language impairment with early OME, no additional…

Children determined to be at risk (n=24) or not at risk (n=13) for reading difficulty listened to tokens from a voice onset time (VOT) (/ga/-/ka/) or tone series played in a continuous unbroken rhythm. Changes between tokens occurred at random intervals and children were asked to press a button as soon as they detected a change. For the VOT…

A study of consonant-vowel linkages focused on the nature of the vowel boundaries with onset and codas. Subjects judged the status of various word pairs as possible exemplars of a particular manipulation they had been taught to listen for in model nonsense words. The models were of three distinct tasks: (1) a nucleus substitution task, to replace…

Electromyographic experiments were performed indicating that durational differences between vowels that precede voiced consonants and those that precede voiceless ones are due to a sustention of muscular activity in articulation, which occurs only with vowels preceding voiced consonants. (SC)

Examined the effects of rounded and unrounded vowels on the perception of the voiceless fricatives "s" and "sh" by adults and by young children who could and could not produce both sounds. Concluded that productive mastery is not critically responsible for perception of the distinction between the two phonemes or the…