The stimulus items from five commonly used speech assessment tools were examined for occurrences of vowels and diphthongs. Results indicated that the overall number of occurrences varied greatly from vowel to vowel and from test to test suggesting the need to supplement tests with additional stimulus words. (Author/DB)

This study compared the retention patterns obtained for children diagnosed with phonological disorders, 10 with developmental apraxia of speech and 10 with phonologically based speech areas. In both groups, in cases of sound substitutions, voicing was retained most frequently and place of articulation least frequently. An inverse relationship…

Stuttering on function words was examined in 51 children and adults who stutter. Stuttering rate was a function of age (children stuttered more on function words), position (function words in early positions in utterances were more likely to be stuttered), and on whether the function word occurred before or after the single content word.…

Investigated language functioning in a group of 89 children diagnosed with autism. Children were administered a battery of standardized language tests, tapping phonological, lexical, and higher-order language abilities. Among children with autism, there was significant heterogeneity in their language skills, although across all the children,…

Models of speech production differ on whether phonological neighbourhoods should affect processing, and on whether effects should be facilitatory or inhibitory. Inhibitory effects of large neighbourhoods have been argued to underlie apparent anti-frequency effects, whereby high-frequency default features are more prone to mispronunciation errors…

Purpose: This investigation was undertaken to examine the status of the velopharyngeal (VP) port during classical singing. Method: Using aeromechanical instrumentation, nasal airflow (mL/s), oral pressure (cm H[subscript 2]O), and VP orifice area estimates (cm[squared]) were studied in 10 classically trained sopranos during singing and speaking.…

This paper discusses Cantonese ESL learners' pronunciation of English final singleton consonants. Twelve learners at the intermediate and advanced levels participated in a recent research study, which included four different tasks: the reading of a word list of about 150 words, the description of about 100 pictures, the reading of three passages…

The acoustic effects of the syllable-final /l/ significantly alter the vocalic timbre of the preceding vowel in Catalan. Vowel quality is modified anticipatory to the articulatory gestures required by the /l/, resulting in a lowered second formant. Syllable-final /l/ in Catalan is heavily velarized as a result of tongue tip-tongue back coupling…

This article uses the example of aphasia to discuss to what extent and under what constraints neuropsychiatry borrows from linguistics. It is affirmed that genetic and functional, rather than static, structuralism is a useful tool for neuropsychiatry and that language functions can be seen to correspond to cerebral functions. (Text is in French.)…

IN THIS ARTICLE THE NATURE OF THE DISCIPLINE OF SPEECH SCIENCE IS CONSIDERED AND THE VARIOUS BASIC AND APPLIED AREAS OF THE DISCIPLINE ARE DISCUSSED. THE BASIC AREAS ENCOMPASS THE VARIOUS PROCESSES OF THE PHYSIOLOGY OF SPEECH PRODUCTION, THE ACOUSTICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SPEECH, INCLUDING THE SPEECH WAVE TYPES AND THE INFORMATION-BEARING ACOUSTIC…

CERTAIN FEATURES IN THE MEXICAN PRONUNCIATION OF NASAL CONSONANTS ARE PRESENTED HERE AND LINGUISTIC GENERALIZATIONS ARE FORMULATED--FIRST IN TERMS OF A CURRENT THEORY OF UNIVERSAL PHONOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVE FEATURES, AND SECOND IN TERMS OF A REVISED DISTINCTIVE FEATURE FRAMEWORK INCORPORATING THE CHANGES PROPOSED BY CHOMSKY AND HALLE IN "THE SOUND…

This paper attempts to demonstrate that children do not necessarily acquire fricatives before affricates. It begins with a summary and explanation of relevant parts of R. Jakobson's general theory of phonological acquisition. In part 2, an account of one child's acquisition of English affricates and fricatives is presented. In the period studied,…

Two groups of English speakers received either auditory or articulatory instruction in learning to produce exotic sounds. Performance on production and discrimination tests indicated a striking superiority for the subjects who received systematic training in the production of exotic sounds as opposed to those subjects who received only…

Discusses the difficulty students of Spanish have in learning the correct articulation of the various allophones of the Spanish vowels. The main problem is that they assume there are no distributional variants. Lists of the allophones are given with their respective conditioning environments. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

Reports on a study of voiced onset time in initial voiced stops in various vocalic contexts. (Author/AM)