Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the types of speech errors that are produced by children with speech-sound disorders and the children's phonological awareness skills during their prekindergarten and kindergarten years. Method: Fifty-eight children with speech-sound disorders were assessed during the…

The observation of a syllable frequency effect in naming latencies has been an argument in favor of a functional role of stored syllables in speech production. Accordingly, various theoretical models postulate that a repository of syllable representations is accessed during phonetic encoding. However, the direct empirical evidence for locating the…

Conditions favoring the development of the three major types of vowel-harmony systems: horizontal, palatal, and labial are examined in terms of correlations between sonority, contiguity, or phonetic distance on the one hand and relative assimilability of vowels on the other. Broadly speaking, the less sonorous, the more contiguous, and the closer…

The study examined the sensitivity of young children (3-7 years old) and adults to the acoustic variations resulting from a speaker's coarticulation (or coproduction) of phonetic segments. Results indicated perceptual sensitivity to certain coarticulatory effects present as early as three years of age. (Author/DB)

Sixty-five six-year-old deaf children from state supported schools were given an adaptation of the Goldman Fristoe test of articulation to assess their spontaneous speech production. Journal availability: Elsevier North Holland, Inc., 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017. (Author)

Comparison of acoustic correlates of phonatory control in the fluent utterances of 10 preschool-aged boys who were stutterers and in nonstuttering control subjects found significant differences between the two groups for shimmer measures. (Author/DB)

Describes the major types of acoustic analysis available for the study of speech, identifies equipment and other components needed for a modern speech-analysis laboratory, and lists possible measurements for various aspects of phonation, articulation, and resonance, as they might be seen in neurologically disordered speech. (Author/DB)

This study examined effects of manipulating lung volume on phonatory and articulatory kinematic behavior during sentence production in ten healthy adults. Significant differences at different lung volume levels were found for sound pressure level, fundamental frequency, semitone standard deviation, and upper and lower lip displacements and peak…

Studies of normal and disordered articulatory movement often rely on the use of short, simple speech tasks. However, the severity of speech disorders can be observed to vary markedly with task. Understanding task-related variations in articulatory kinematic behavior may allow for an improved understanding of normal and disordered speech motor…

Although word stress has been hailed as a powerful speech-segmentation cue, the results of 5 cross-modal fragment priming experiments revealed limitations to stress-based segmentation. Specifically, the stress pattern of auditory primes failed to have any effect on the lexical decision latencies to related visual targets. A determining factor was…

The goal of this study was to classify children with speech sound disorders (SSD) empirically, using factor analytic techniques. Participants were 3-7-year olds enrolled in speech/language therapy (N=185). Factor analysis of an extensive battery of speech and language measures provided support for two distinct factors, representing the skill…

Research supported by the Institute of Latin American Studies and the Canada Council. (DD)