Discussed the pronunciation of the phoneme /s/ in Spanish and all the linguistic variations of it, especially in the dialects that have the sibilant articulation. (NCR)

Ten children (mean age = 6 years, 7 months) who misarticulated /r/ participated in a task designed to survey inconsistent misarticulatory behavior, repeating 51 sentences during each of three trials. (Author/IM)

The Suvag Lingua is a machine used to facilitate better aural perception by working from and on the basis of a student's error in producing a particualr sound and adapting the model which is to be imitated. (DD)

Compares similarities in correcting defective pronunciation in the mother tongue and in a second language. (DD)

This article attempts, through a study on the acoustic and the perceptual level of the contrast between two Dutch vocalic phonemes, to present a rigorous methodology for contrastive phonetics to be used by language teachers. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Gives the results of a survey showing that the age factor, rather than the learning situation, is the predominant variant in learning the pronunciation of a second language. As Eric Lenneberg suggested, puberty may indeed be an important turning point in language learning ability. (TL)

Underwater intelligibility of three standard word lists is evaluated in two experiments. Results indicate that words which are equated for difficulty in normal conditions are likewise equated under water. Phoneme distortion was examined in a multiple choice test which showed fricatives and place of production to be most affected under water. (SC)

An auditory discrimination procedure was used in this study to attempt to correct the speech problem of a 4-year-old girl. The major characteristic of that speech problem was the consistent use of inappropriate first consonant sounds in some words, like "gog" for "dog." The child was given 25 training sessions and two posttraining sessions. The…

Examination of the speech of 33 monolingual Spanish-speaking children found that syllable type affected the correct pronunciation of novel words. The different syllable types comprising the novel words could be hierarchized. Performance on syllable type appeared to be an interaction between the structure of the syllable and phonological processes…

The need for testing oral proficiency in the foreign language is discussed and several kinds of testing procedures described. A specific oral language production test is suggested. (RM)

A study examined patterns in production of Spanish voiced and voiceless stop consonants by native English speakers, focusing on the interaction between two acoustic cues of stops: voice closure interval and voice onset time (VOT). The study investigated whether learners acquire the appropriate phonetic categories with regard to these stops and if…

Black children and White children were equally intelligible to Black adult listeners, while White adult listeners found White children significantly more intelligible than Black children. Noise deteriorated word discrimination scores of the Black and White listeners differently. (Author/RL)