Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical application of research are included in this status report for January 1-March 31, 1981. The reports deal with the following topics: (1) distinguishing temporal information for speaking rate from temporal information for intervocalic stop…

In 1974, the Office of Demographic Studies, Gallaudet College, conducted a survey in which the teachers of 978 hearing-impaired students in special education programs across the United States rated the degree to which the speech of each student would be understood by the average person. These ratings were then analyzed for their relationships to…

The phenomenon of retroflexion is discussed, and its occurrence in about 150 selected languages is examined from a geographical and a diachronic point of view. The clustering of such languages into distinct areas has been explained through the postulation of a hypothesis regarding their development in language. After a detailed examination of four…

This paper argues that Chomsky's and Halle's restriction on the features [+high, +low] are too severe; that this restriction is inconsistent with the generative treatment of affricates, laterally-released stops, and prenasalized stops; and that the restriction is inconsistent with the notion that linguistic descriptions are abstract theories about…

This research report examines the pronunciation that children give to synthetic words containing vowel-cluster spellings and analyzes the observed pronunciations in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. The pronunciations associated with vowel-cluster spellings are among the most unpredictable letter-sound…

Measurements of lingual two-point discrimination, oral form discrimination, and alternate motion rate of the tongue were made in 15 adolescents who had normal articulation, 15 adolescents who misarticulated /s/, and 15 adolescents who misarticulated /r/. (Author)

Understanding spoken English is often difficult for students of English as a second language because words are run together. Some of the common types of word blendings are: final consonant sounds, links with beginning vowel sound, same consonant is shared across word borders, and similar consonants blend. (SW)

Conversational speech samples from 33 two-year-olds were analyzed to determine word and syllable shapes produced, inventories of initial and final consonantal phones, and percentage of consonants correct. A profile of the normally developing two-year-old's range of sounds and structures is presented to aid assessment of young children with…

Techniques for alleviating language students' fears of listening to themselves and making themselves heard and understood, using reading aloud, are presented and illustrated. (MSE)

A 2-year, 8-month old boy with a language handicap was the subject of a 5-month training program which investigated the generalization of articulatory ability during and after a series of sessions aimed at correcting the boy's misarticulation of the letter "t." Before training began, three matters necessitated attention: (1) the establishment of…

The feature system of Nitinaht is characterized by extensive exploitation of the possible glottal and pharyngeal articulatory notions. The proposed orthography for Nitinaht partially reflects the distinctive feature composition of segments, in particular for affricate (delayed release) and glottalized (constricted glottis) consonants. (Author)

Although standard descriptions of spoken Brazilian Portuguese assign separate allophones to both /1/ and /u/ in utterance-final position after a vowel, it has been observed that in rapid speech native speakers articulate /l/ and /u/ in this position so that they are indistinguishable to the average speaker. To answer questions about the possible…

The task is to carry out the final development of a computer-based system for automated instruction of the new speech sounds of second languages, and to field-test this system for two language pairs: English speakers learning Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish speakers learning English. This report describes the first evaluation experiment of the Mark…

Presents the results of an experiment which examined the temporal characteristics of voiceless plosives in American English, Arabic, and Arabic-accented English. Results showed that Arabic-accented English departed from the target language goal and constituted an articulation type characterizable as more Arabic than Arabic itself. (Author/SED)

This study looks for support for the suggestion in the Speech Learning Model that the phonetic category established in childhood for a first language (L1) sound may evolve gradually if it is linked perceptually to a second language (L2) sound. Assessed here is voice onset time (VOT) in two groups of five bilingual (English and Japanese) speakers,…