Error inconsistency is often cited as a characteristic of children with speech disorders, particularly developmental apraxia of speech (DAS); however, few researchers operationally define error inconsistency and the definitions that do exist are not standardized across studies. This study proposes three formulas for measuring various aspects of…

Impaired speech prosody has been identified as a critical feature of suspected childhood apraxia of speech (sCAS). Lexical stress productions of children with sCAS have been characterized as 'excessive/equal/misplaced'. This investigation examines two potential explanations of this particular deficit, articulatory difficulty and impaired intrinsic…

There is an active debate within the field of phonology concerning the cognitive status of substantive phonetic factors such as ease of articulation and perceptual distinctiveness. A new framework is proposed in which substance acts as a bias, or prior, on phonological learning. Two experiments tested this framework with a method in which…

Both Italian and English have four degrees of stress: emphatic, main, secondary and weak. This paper outlines some similarities, then reviews differences between the languages that can cause difficulties in learning the second language. (CHK)

This article is a critical review of a number of statistical works, over the past 50 years, dedicated to the determination of the relative frequency of phonemes. (Author/RM)

Erroneous responses of some aphasic patients resemble the sorts of words a normal person produces when searching for a target word that is on the tip of the tongue. With aphasics, words are well-formed phonologically and the number of syllables and stress patterns are correct also. (SC)

A systematic analysis of the distribution of Nancowry phonological and morphological elements at word level is presented. Included is a systematically transcribed vocabulary which is ordered according to the word roots. In the section devoted to word phonology, included topics are syllabic structure, stress placement, vowel length and nasality,…

This study investigated the relationship between perception and production in children's phonological learning to determine whether perceptual confusions could account for the patterns of substitution and deletion found in 2-year-olds' speech. A total of 14 children were presented pairs of toy stimuli, with each pair composed of a familiar item…

This paper takes issue with the position that children's phoneme acquisition schedule is dictated primarily by auditory perceptual factors and suggests the alternative position that ease of production accounts for age of acquisition. It is felt that perceptual theory cannot adequately explain phonological development, e.g. three-year-olds produce…

This study was designed to compare children and adults on their initial ability to identify and reproduce novel speech sounds and to evaluate their performance after receiving several training sessions in producing these sounds. The novel speech sounds used were two voiceless fricatives which are consonant phonemes in Arabic but which are…

This article describes a technique used to monitor the action of the upper front surface of the soft palate during normal speech in French. Results tend to confirm the findings of other instrumental phonetic research, and contradict some theoretical claims of French phonology. (CLK)

Research supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Naval Research. (DD)