Background: Speech-sound development in preschoolers with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) as a group is delayed/disordered, and obstruents comprise the most vulnerable sound class. Aims: To evaluate the development of obstruent correctness (PCC-obs) and error types (cleft speech characteristics (CSCs) and developmental speech…

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech…

Purpose: Articulatory control and speech production accuracy were examined in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and typically developing (TD) controls within a novel word-learning task to better understand the influence of planning and programming deficits in the production of unfamiliar words. Method: Participants included 16…

Purpose: Subjective speech intelligibility assessment is often preferred over more objective approaches that rely on transcript scoring. This is, in part, because of the intensive manual labor associated with extracting objective metrics from transcribed speech. In this study, we propose an automated approach for scoring transcripts that provides…

Purpose: Our proof-of-concept study tested the feasibility of virtual testing using child assessments that were originally validated for in-person testing only. Method: Ten adult-child dyads were assigned to complete both in-person and virtual tests of language, cognition, and narratives. Child participants fell between the ages of 4 and 8 years;…

Purpose: This study investigated the possible relationship between hypokinetic speech production and speech intensity perception in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Method: Participants included 14 patients with idiopathic PD and 14 matched healthy controls (HCs) with normal hearing and cognition. First, speech production was objectified…

Purpose: To date, the literature on perception of affective, pragmatic, and grammatical prosody abilities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been sparse and contradictory. It is interesting to note that the primary perception of syllable stress within the word structure, which is crucial for all prosody functions, remains relatively unexplored…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate how deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the caudal zona incerta (cZi) affects speech intelligibility in persons with essential tremor. Method: Thirty-five participants were evaluated: off stimulation, on chronic stimulation optimized to alleviate tremor, and during unilateral stimulation at increasing…

Purpose: Children with a cleft palate (± cleft lip; CP±L) can have difficulties communicating and participating in daily life, yet speech-language pathologists typically focus on speech production during routine assessments. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health: Children and Youth Version (ICF-CY; World Health…

Purpose: Measuring tongue deformation and internal muscle motion during speech has been a challenging task because the tongue deforms in 3 dimensions, contains interdigitated muscles, and is largely hidden within the vocal tract. In this article, a new method is proposed to analyze tagged and cine magnetic resonance images of the tongue during…

Purpose: The authors investigated how different variants of clear speech affect segmental and suprasegmental acoustic measures of speech in speakers with Parkinson's disease and a healthy control group. Method: A total of 14 participants with Parkinson's disease and 14 control participants served as speakers. Each speaker produced 18 different…

The purpose of this article is to report results of an investigation into the production of a covert contrast by native speakers of Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish in the acquisition of the English distinction between the high front vowels /i/ and /?/. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable acoustic distinction made by a language learner…

Purpose: Physiological and phonetic studies suggest that, at moderate levels of epilaryngeal stricture, the ventricular folds impinge upon the vocal folds and influence their dynamical behavior, which is thought to be responsible for constricted laryngeal sounds. In this work, the authors examine this hypothesis through biomechanical modeling.…

Purpose: We examined variability of speech intelligibility scores and how well intelligibility scores predicted group membership among 5-year-old children with speech motor impairment (SMI) secondary to cerebral palsy and an age-matched group of typically developing (TD) children. Method: Speech samples varying in length from 1-4 words were…

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to examine spatial and temporal aspects of articulatory control in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), children with speech delay characterized by an articulation/phonological impairment (SD), and controls with typical development (TD) during speech tasks that increased in word length. Method:…