Purpose: Poor nonword repetition accuracy is a hallmark of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, other diagnostic categories also show impaired nonword repetition performance relative to children with typical development (TD); therefore, this task is currently a sensitive but nonspecific index of DLD. In this study, we…

Stuttering is a disorder that affects about 1% of the population and manifests as speech disfluencies. Reading difficulties and disabilities are commonly found in this population. Nonetheless, speech disfluencies have not been explored in adult struggling readers (ASRs). In the current study, we examined the rate of stuttering in ASRs as well as…

Purpose: This purpose of this study was to assess the frequency and types of phonological process errors in patients with velopharyngeal dysfunction (VPD) and the different types of palatal anomalies. Method: A total of 808 nonsyndromic patients with VPD, who underwent follow-up at the Center for Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Anomalies, from 2000…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of electrolaryngeal (EL) speech among untrained speakers to aid in its effective introduction and to identify syllables and words that are easy or difficult to pronounce. Method: A total of 21 healthy individuals who had never used an EL were included. The participants were…

Purpose: Robust improvements in intelligibility following familiarization, a listener-targeted perceptual training paradigm, have been revealed for talkers diagnosed with spastic, ataxic, and hypokinetic dysarthria but not for talkers with hyperkinetic dysarthria. While the theoretical explanation for the lack of intelligibility improvement…

Purpose: Studies of infants' early vocalizations have proven helpful in describing the developmental characteristics of various communication disorders. However, few studies have addressed the early vocalizations of infants and toddlers who were later diagnosed, as older children, with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). We refer to these infants…

Purpose: Congenital amusia is an inborn neurogenetic disorder of fine-grained pitch processing. This study attempted to pinpoint the impairment mechanism of speech processing in tonal language speakers with amusia. We designed a series of perception tasks aiming at selectively probing low-level pitch processing and relatively high-level…

Purpose: Bilingual children often demonstrate a high rate of disfluencies, which might impact the diagnostic evaluation of fluency disorders; however, research on the rates and types of disfluencies in bilinguals' two languages is limited. The purpose of this research is to profile disfluencies of two types, stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and…

Purpose: Auditory perceptual judgments are commonly used to diagnose dysarthria and assess treatment progress. The purpose of the study was to examine the acoustic underpinnings of perceptual speech abnormalities in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Auditory perceptual judgments were obtained from sentences produced by 13 speakers…

Purpose: Children with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy may experience reduced speech intelligibility and diminished communicative participation. However, minimal research has been conducted examining the outcomes of behavioral speech treatments in this population. This study examined the effect of Speech Intelligibility Treatment (SIT), a…

Purpose: This study compared the performance of three amplification devices hypothesized to improve speech communication in individuals with hypophonia (HP), as well as to identify individuals' device preferences. Method: Twenty-two individuals with HP and their primary communication partners participated in a cross-over design study comparing…

Purpose: This tutorial summarizes current best practices in treating American English /r/ distortions in children with residual speech errors. Method: To enhance the effectiveness of clinicians' cueing and feedback, the phonetics of /r/ production is reviewed. Principles of acquisition, which can inform how to practice /r/ in the early stages of…

Purpose: A fundamental feature of human speech is variation, including the manner of phonation, as exemplified in the case of whispered speech. In this study, we employed whispered speech to examine an unresolved issue about congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical pitch processing, which also affects speech pitch processing…

Purpose: Very preterm (VPT) children are at risk for speech and language problems throughout school age. However, little is known about early speech sound production in these children. This study aims to present a detailed description of early speech sound production and its trajectories in VPT children from 2 to 4 years of age. In addition, this…

Background: Cluttering is a fluency disorder characterized by an abnormally fast or irregular speech delivery rate along with disfluencies that are frequent but are not judged to be stuttering. Data on cluttering prevalence in the general population are scarce, as well as its association with psychological well-being indices, such as anxiety, and…