Listeners' identification of young children's productions of minimally contrastive words and predictive relationships between accurately identified words and intelligibility scores obtained from a 100-word spontaneous speech sample were determined for 36 children with typically developing speech (TDS) and 36 children with speech sound disorders…

The effects of choral speech and altered auditory feedback (AAF) on stuttering frequency were compared to identify those properties of choral speech that make it a more effective condition for stuttering reduction. Seventeen adults who stutter (AWS) participated in an experiment consisting of special choral speech conditions that were manipulated…

Children with residual speech sound errors are often underserved clinically, yet there has been a lack of recent research elucidating the specific deficits in this population. Adolescents aged 10-14 with residual speech sound errors (RE) that included rhotics were compared to normally speaking peers on tasks assessing speed and accuracy of speech…

This study investigates the influence of the acoustic properties of vowels on 6- and 10-month-old infants' speech preferences. The shape of the contour (bell or monotonic) and the duration (normal or stretched) of vowels were manipulated in words containing the vowels /i/ and /u/, and presented to infants using a two-choice preference procedure.…

The purpose of the present investigation was to assess longitudinal word- and sentence-level measures of stuttering in young children. Participants included 12 stuttering and non-stuttering children between 36 and 71 months of age at an initial visit who exhibited a range of stuttering rates. Parent-child spontaneous speech samples were obtained…

The present study aimed at assessing perception of filtered speech that simulated different configurations of hearing loss. The simulation was done by filtering four equivalent lists of a monosyllabic test developed by Shivaprasad for Indian-English speakers. This was done using the Adobe Audition software. Thirty normal hearing participants in…

Studies of English and German find that children tend to acquire word-final consonant clusters before word-initial consonant clusters. This order of acquisition is generally attributed to articulatory, frequency and/or morphological factors. This contrasts with recent experimental findings from French, where two-year-olds were better at producing…

The current dissertation investigated clear speech production of Korean stops to examine the proposal that the phonetic targets of phonological categories are more closely approximated in hyperarticulated speech. The investigation also considered a sound change currently underway in Korean stops: younger speakers of the Seoul dialect produce the…

Purpose: To investigate the developmental time course of tongue-to-palate contact patterns during speech from childhood to adulthood using electropalatography (EPG) and a comprehensive profile of data analysis. Method: Tongue-to-palate contacts were recorded during productions of /t/, /l/, /s/, and /k/ in 48 children, adolescents and adults (aged…

This study examined the speech perception, speech, and language developmental progress of 25 children with hearing loss (mean Pure-Tone Average [PTA] 79.37 dB HL) in an auditory verbal therapy program. Children were tested initially and then 21 months later on a battery of assessments. The speech and language results over time were compared with…

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, "staat" "nation" simply combines with "kunde" "art" ("staatkunde" "political science, statesmanship"), but needs a linking element "s" or…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate adaptation to the electropalatograph (EPG) from the perspective of consonant acoustics, listener perceptions, and speaker ratings. Method: Seven adults with typical speech wore an EPG and pseudo-EPG palate over 2 days and produced syllables, read a passage, counted, and rated their adaptation to…

In the speech production model proposed by [Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. "Behavioral and Brain Sciences," 22, pp. 1-75.], syllables play a crucial role at the interface of phonological and phonetic encoding. At this interface, abstract phonological syllables are translated…

In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription-based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought,…

Reports results of a study in which the investigator attempted to identify dimensions of perceived vocal attributes, assess the specific effects of perceived vocal attributes on credibility evaluations, and compare attributes and dimensions of attributes on their contributions to variance in credibility judgments. (GW)