A series of exercises and a theory of vowel descriptions can help minimize speakers' problems of excessive tension, awareness of tongue height, and tongue retraction. Eight exercises to provide Forward Facial Stretch neutralize tensions in the face and vocal resonator and their effect on the voice. Three experiments in which sounds are repeated…

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues by 10 college age adults in the speech of 9 children with profound hearing loss and 9 children with normal hearing. Overall, listeners were able to identify vowels in productions by both groups though the patterning of vowel identification differed for the two speaker groups in…

This paper presents a single-subject case study illustrating the need to closely examine effects of dialect from syllable position on l-colouring, and the effects of domain-initial strengthening in General American English. Most investigators report lighter /l/ tokens in syllable onsets and darker tokens in coda positions in isolated words. The…

Speech errors reveal the speaker's implicit knowledge of phonotactic constraints, both languagewide constraints (e.g., /K/ cannot be a syllable onset when one is speaking English) and experimentally induced constraints (e.g., /k/ cannot be an onset during the experiment). Four experiments investigated the acquisition of novel 2nd-order…

Studies of first and second language acquisition have reported that in the acquisition of long lag (aspirated) stops, the effects of the place of articulation of the stop and the height of the following vowel may be significant. This paper examines these two variables in the acquisition of English long lag stops by Spanish speakers. Results…

Purpose: This study addressed three research questions: (a) Can listeners use anticipatory vowel information in prevocalic consonants produced by talkers with dysarthria to identify the upcoming vowel? (b) Are listeners sensitive to interspeaker variation in anticipatory coarticulation during prevocalic consonants produced by healthy talkers…

Recent literature suggests that phonological neighborhood density and word frequency can affect speech production, in addition to the well-documented effects that they have on speech perception. This article describes 2 experiments that examined how phonological neighborhood density influences the durations and formant frequencies of adults'…

Conditions favoring the development of the three major types of vowel-harmony systems: horizontal, palatal, and labial are examined in terms of correlations between sonority, contiguity, or phonetic distance on the one hand and relative assimilability of vowels on the other. Broadly speaking, the less sonorous, the more contiguous, and the closer…

The study found that stutterers (N=10) were significantly more variable than nonstutterers in their ability to achieve stable fundamental frequency diminution patterns in vowels immediately following stop consonants. Stutterers were not significantly different from the nonstutterers in their ability to achieve a stable fundamental frequency over…

A detailed analysis of the oral vowels in the French phoentic system and their nasal equivalents. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

This study investigates the influence of initial and final consonants /p, b, s, z/ on the duration of four vowels /I, i, u, ae/ in 64 CVC syllables uttered by eight speakers of English from the same dialect area. The CVC stimuli were presented to the subjects in a frame sentence from a master tape. Subjects repeated each sentence immediately after…

Research supported by the Institute of Latin American Studies and the Canada Council. (DD)