Research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Health. (VM)

A study of four children with deafness who had cochlear implants investigated the use of negative intraoral air pressure in articulation, from both the physiological and phonological perspectives. The study showed that the children used speech-production strategies that were different from hearing children and that deviant speech behaviors should…

Seventeen children (ages 6-11) with developmental apraxia of speech were administered tests of identification and discrimination of resynthesized and synthesized monosyllabic words differing in place of articulation of the initial voiced stop consonants and intensity of the third formant. Results indicated no phonetic processing deficit in…

This study examined articulation in 13 Dutch individuals (ages 7-29, IQs 38-83) with Prader-Willi syndrome using a picture naming test with transcribed samples subjected to analyses for articulation errors. Results suggest that the impaired articulation found is a function of IQ and that with increasing age, phonological problems gradually resolve…

This study shows that utterances ending in an extra-clausal response particle provide interesting evidence in favor of the hypothesis that theme-rheme articulation in Norwegian utterances is grammatically underdetermined. First, a review of the approach used in the study of the functions of Norwegian intonational phrasing is provided. In this…

Observations are reported of the pronunciation of English by Japanese immigrants in British Columbia. It is argued that although predictions of syllable pronunciations have been based on vowels, in certain cases whether the hearer will try to retain features of the vowel or consonant is unpredictable. (RM)

This collection of articles is one of a series of semiannual reports on the status of speech research at Haskins' Laboratories. The titles of the 18 articles and their authors are as follows: "The Alphabetic Principle and Learning to Read" (Isabelle Y. Liberman and others); "Language Development from an Evolutionary…

Two experiments conducted at the University of Texas at Austin are discussed in this paper. One experiment deals with the production of final syllable lengthening and stress in Spanish and English by native Spanish speakers learning English. The other experiment deals with judgments about the Spanish speakers' production of English by native…

This paper reviews the evidence that Proto-Niger-Congo was a tone language with only two level tones and seeks to find the evidence that will explain how some of the descendant languages have more than two tones. In particular it shows how synchronic tone rules in Cama and consonant correspondences between Cama and Yoruba suggest a new factor in…

This article intends to shed light on the somewhat nebulous term "basis of articulation," which is used frequently in Eastern European phonetic and linguistic literature but highly neglected in contemporary American literature. In a historical approach, it is shown how the term originated and developed, how it is defined by various authors, and…

Describes a prototype electronic device that may be used in the classroom or in the laboratory to display pedagogical models and student articulations of target language sounds simultaneously. (Author/AM)

Describes a study of young children's production of novel words serving as names of objects and actions, which were matched according to consonant and syllable structure. On each measure, accuarate production of new consonants was greater for the object words, possibly because action words have greater semantic complexity than object words. (SED)

An analysis of the linguistic and social contexts of the occurrence of verbal "-s" marking in early Black English, within a historical and comparative perspective, shows that both third person singular and nonconcord "-s" are subject to regular, parallel environmental conditioning. (68 references) (Author/CB)

Investigates the incidence of segmental and prosodic contrasts in recorded sentence materials and the use of such distinctions in the processing of utterances. The chosen materials involve sites of parsing ambiguity. Results show that in the immediate interpretation of spoken language input, intonational contrasts function as clear structural…

This study examined whether toddlers build a repertoire of words as integral sequences of gestures and then differentiate these sequences into their gestural and segmental components. Results demonstrate clear differences in duration and coordination of gestures between children and adults and a shift toward the patterns of adult speakers during…