Purpose: With the goal of using articulatory adjustments to reduce hypernasality, this study utilized an articulatory synthesis model (Childers, 2000) to simulate the adjustment of articulatory configurations with an open velopharynx to achieve the same acoustic goal as normal speech simulated with a closed velopharynx. Method: To examine the…

This study reported adult scores on two measures of tongue shape, based on midsagittal tongue shape data from ultrasound imaging. One of the measures quantified the extent of tongue dorsum excursion, and the other measure represented the place of maximal excursion. Data from six adult speakers of Scottish Standard English without speech disorders…

While stuttering is known to be characterized by anomalous brain activations during speech, very little data is available describing brain activations during stuttering. To our knowledge there are no reports describing brain activations that precede blocking. In this case report we present magnetoencephalographic data from a person who stutters…

Coarticulation data for Catalan reveal that, while being less sensitive to vowel effects at the consonant period, the alveolar trill [r] exerts more prominent effects than [dark "l"] on both adjacent [a] and [i]. This coarticulatory pattern may be related to strict manner demands on the production of the trill. Both consonants also differ…

The present article reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of the Spanish /e/-/ei/ contrast, as in "pena-peina" and "reno-reino," by native-English intermediate and advanced learners of Spanish. The acoustic parameter that distinguishes Spanish /e/ from /ei/ is formant change--/e/ is a…

Purpose: This study investigated children's acquisition of Hong Kong Cantonese. Method: Participants were 1,726 children ages 2;4 to 12;4 (years;months). Single-word speech samples were collected to examine 4 measures: initial consonants, final consonants, vowels/diphthongs, and lexical tones. A 2-way analysis of variance was performed to examine…

Experimental studies of the articulation, acoustics, and perception of nasal and pharyngeal consonants and adjacent vowels were conducted to investigate nasality in Moroccan Arabic (MA). The status of nasality in MA is described as coarticulatorily complex, where two phoneme types (pharyngeal segments and nasal segments) yield similar…

English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as "t" after [[esh]] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [[esh]k, [esh]t, sk, st] clusters…

Purpose: In this study, the authors classified vocalic segments produced by control speakers (C) and speakers with dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson's disease (PD); classification was based on movement measures. The researchers asked the following questions: (a) Can vowels be classified on the basis of selected…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate how speaking clearly influences selected acoustic and orofacial kinematic measures associated with diphthong production. Method: Forty-nine speakers, drawn from the University of Wisconsin X-Ray Microbeam Speech Production Database (J. R. Westbury, 1994), served as participants. Samples of clear…

A common feature of public speech in Catalan is the placement of prominence on lexically unstressed syllables ("emphatic stress"). This paper presents an acoustic study of radio speech data. Instances of emphatic stress were perceptually identified. Within-word comparison between vowels with emphatic stress and vowels with primary lexical stress…

In foreign accent syndrome (FAS), changes in articulation and prosody cause listeners to perceive the speaker as "foreign-sounding." Fewer than 100 cases of FAS have been described in the literature; commonly associated with brain damage, only a handful of these have been analyzed with respect to acoustic measures. Acoustic and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe normative and validation data on the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS; McLeod, Harrison, & McCormack, 2012c) for English-speaking children. Method: The ICS is a 7-item, parent-report measure of children's speech intelligibility with a range of communicative partners. Data were collected…

The presented study is aimed at investigating the interaction of palatalization and intrinsic prosodic features of the vowel in CVC (consonant+vowel+consonant) syllables in Russian. The universal nature of intrinsic prosodic vowel features was confirmed with the data from the Russian language. It was found that palatalization of the consonants…

Increasingly, Chinese students are pursuing their studies abroad in English-speaking countries, such as the USA, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Despite the fact that they have studied English as a compulsory subject for a number of years and have passed multiple English proficiency tests, many still find it is difficult to communicate well in…