Purpose: Beyond hallmark production deficits characterizing childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), largely attributed to disruption(s) in speech motor planning, children with CAS often present with co-occurring speech perception and language difficulties. Thus, careful consideration of the potential for speech perception difficulties to have cascading…

The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best, 1995) claims listeners directly perceive articulatory gestures of the vocal tract rather than acoustic/auditory signals. Accordingly, the articulatory similarities and discrepancies between native and non-native sounds determine the perceptual assimilation patterns of non-native sounds. This study…

Purpose: Gradual and sudden perturbations of vocal fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]), also known as adaptive and reflexive f[subscript o] perturbations, are techniques to study the influence of auditory feedback on voice f[subscript o] control mechanisms. Previous vocal f[subscript o] perturbations have incorporated varied setup-specific…

Clinicians providing intervention for pediatric speech sound disorders (SSDs) have many treatment approach options from which to select. Because treatment needs vary across children based on many factors including the error type(s) present and patterns of deficit noted, these factors need to be considered early in the therapeutic process to find…

Purpose: Smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS) and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR) are acoustic measures related to the periodicity, harmonicity, and noise components of an acoustic signal. To date, there is little evidence about the advantages of CPPS over HNR in voice diagnostics. Recent studies indicate that voice fundamental frequency (F0)…

This study investigates whether audiovisual phonetic training with hand gestures encoding visible or nonvisible articulation features has a differential impact on learning second language sounds. Ninety-nine Catalan-Spanish bilingual students were trained to differentiate English /ae/ and /[lambda]/, which differ in the visible lip aperture and…

Speech-to-text applications have great potential for helping students with English language comprehension and pronunciation practice. This study explores the functionality of five speech-to-text (STT) applications (Google Docs voice typing tool, Apple Dictation, Windows 10 Dictation, Dictation.io [a website service], and "Transcribe" [an…

Background: Dysarthria is a common symptom following stroke and represents an important cause of functional impairment in stroke patients. A better characterization of dysarthria could facilitate differential diagnosis and optimize healthcare service distribution. Aim: To determine the speech characteristics, dysarthria type and severity in the…

The influence of visual impairment (i.e., blindness or low vision) on the development of children's speech sound production has undergone some speculation for over half a century. Children learn to produce speech sounds by utilizing and integrating several cognitive-linguistic and sensory-perceptual processes, which may include processing visual…

This dissertation examines how listeners' knowledge of interspeaker variability guides their generalization of perceptual learning in multi-talker listening. A series of perceptual learning experiments are conducted to evaluate whether listeners generalize what they have learned about a previous talker's production of sibilants and stop VOT to…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between perceived single-word speech severity and intelligibility in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), with and without comorbid language impairment (LI), and to investigate the contribution of different CAS signs to perceived single-word speech severity and…

Purpose: Although mobile apps are used extensively by speech-language pathologists, evidence for app-based treatments remains limited in quantity and quality. This study investigated the efficacy of app-based visual-acoustic biofeedback relative to nonbiofeedback treatment using a single-case randomization design. Because of COVID-19, all…

Activities that teach PreK-1 students the six components of emergent literacy and beginning reading and word study are presented for classroom settings. These activities are adaptable developmentally and they highlight four important aspects of teaching phonics, spelling and word knowledge that are often overlooked: the rhythm of literacy, Concept…

This study explored how university students in North America acquired the ability to express their career-related competencies in the context of a pre-professional career education program. We examined the intersection of happenstance learning theory (HLT) and experiential learning theory (ELT) to facilitate significant experiences that inspired…

Background: 'Speech sound disorder' is an umbrella term that encompasses dysarthria, articulation disorders, childhood apraxia of speech and phonological disorders. However, differential diagnosis between these disorders is a persistent challenge in speech pathology, as many diagnostic procedures use symptom clusters instead of identifying an…