Purpose: Earlier work has established developmental benchmarks for intelligibility and articulation rate, but the intersection of these two variables, especially within individual children, has received limited attention. This study examines the interaction between intelligibility and speaking rate in typically developing children between the ages…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

Pacifier use during childhood has been hypothesized to interfere with language processing, but, to date, there is limited evidence revealing detrimental effects of prolonged pacifier use on infant vocabulary learning. In the present study, parents of 12- and 24-month-old infants were recruited in Oslo (Norway). The sample included 1187 monolingual…

Purpose: This meta-analysis study aimed to determine the optimal level of talker variability in training to maximize second-language speech learning. Method: We conducted a systematic search for studies comparing different levels of talker variability in nonnative speech training, published through July 2024. Two independent reviewers screened…

Purpose: Bilingual children's speech often contains high percentages of disfluencies in both their languages; however, the distribution of disfluency types and the difference across bilinguals' two languages have received insufficient and inconsistent empirical support. The present research aims to profile "typical" bilingual disfluency…

Cross-linguistic influence has been observed across all domains of language. However, nothing is known about the role of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speakers' use of vocal fry. Several recent studies have identified an upsurge in the use of vocal fry among female speakers of American English. We sought to identify cross-linguistic…

Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to examine the impact of instruction order on the speech production response when adopting higher effort speaking styles, specifically loud and clear speech. Method: Speech intensity, lip aperture range, and speech rate data were collected from 24 talkers who repeated the utterance "Buy Bobby a…

This study provides the first large-scale quantitative exploration of mathematical language use in upper elementary U.S. classrooms. Our approach employs natural language processing techniques to describe variation in teachers' and students' use of mathematical language in 1,657 fourth and fifth grade lessons in 317 classrooms in four districts…

Purpose: Vocal fry (VF), a low-pitched, grating voice quality, appears to be trending among young women. Current research lacks consensus of listeners' perceptions associated with VF. This study investigated practicing speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) perceptions of graduate speech-language pathology students who speak with VF. Method:…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to quantify changes in acoustic distinctiveness in two groups of talkers with Parkinson's disease as they modify across a wide range of speaking rates. Method: People with Parkinson's disease with and without deep brain stimulation and older healthy controls read 24 carrier phrases at different speech rates.…

Aims: Although IDS is typically described as slower than adult-directed speech (ADS), potential impacts of slower speech on language development have not been examined. We explored whether IDS speech rates in 42 mother-infant dyads at four time periods predicted children's language outcomes at two years. Method: We correlated IDS speech rate with…

Purpose: Talkers typically use a slow speaking rate when producing clear speech, a speaking style that has been widely shown to improve intelligibility over conversational speech in difficult communication environments. With training, however, talkers can learn to produce a form of clear speech at normal speaking rates that provides young…

Listeners are known to track statistical regularities in speech. Yet, which temporal cues are encoded is unclear. This study tested effects of talker-specific habitual speech rate and talker-independent average speech rate (heard over a longer period of time) on the perception of the temporal Dutch vowel contrast /?/-/a:/. First, Experiment 1…

Purpose: Conversational entrainment is the tendency for individuals to modify their behavior to more closely converge with the behavior of their communication partner and is an important aspect of successful interaction. Evidence of entrainment in adults is robust, yet research regarding its development in children is sparse. Here, we investigate…

In Simon-type interference tasks, participants are asked to perform a 2-choice reaction on a stimulus dimension while ignoring the stimulus position. Commonly, robust congruency effects are found; that is, reactions are faster when the relevant stimulus attribute and the assigned response match the location of the stimulus. Simon congruency…