The perception of syllable-initial stop consonants as voiced or voiceless was shown to depend on prevailing rate of articulation. Reducing articulatory rate of a precursor phrase causes a greater proportion of test consonants to be identified as voiced. Timing should be regarded as intrinsic to the acoustical specifications of phonetic events.…

Presents an overview of old and new apparatus which has been useful in providing visual and auditory feedback and feedforward in the teaching and learning of pronounciation. Includes extensive bibliographic references. (PMJ)

Reports that when hearing-impaired children imitated nonsense words containing bilabial consonants, the rank order of correct responses and total choices was "b" (highest), "m," and "p" (lowest). The data are discussed in terms of auditory-visual perceptions of the hearing impaired and the order of the sounds in normal-hearing children. (Author/RL)

This article discusses a study designed to obtain some information regarding the nature of the awareness children have of their own articulatory activity and the level of mental development at which this awareness appears. (Author/CFM)

The magnitudes and patterns of two-point difference limens (DL) of the tongue were studied in children with and without articulation errors. Many children with misarticulation of /r/ had DLs that differed in magnitude and pattern from those of children with normal articulation and those with misarticulations of /s/. (NCR)

This study examined stimulability in 30 children (ages 3 to 5) with articulation impairments. Factors found to relate to stimulability were articulation visibility, the child's age, the family's socioeconomic status, and the child's overall imitative ability. Perception, severity, otitis media history, language abilities, consistency of…

Five children with developmental apraxia of speech (DAS), 5 controls (ages 5-6), and 6 adults produced utterances in a normal condition and in a bite-block condition in which the mandible was in a fixed position. In children with DAS, the bite-block had large effects on coarticulatory patterns and vowel quality. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

An analysis of the linguistic and social contexts of the occurrence of verbal "-s" marking in early Black English, within a historical and comparative perspective, shows that both third person singular and nonconcord "-s" are subject to regular, parallel environmental conditioning. (68 references) (Author/CB)

Ten mothers and 20 children, aged 5 and 10 years, were examined to determine the time at which velopharyngeal port opening began in /dVn/ syllables and velopharyngeal port closing reached completion in /nVd/ syllables. Adults and children nasalized most vowels in the /dVn/ context and the /nVd context. (Author/JDD)

Investigates the incidence of segmental and prosodic contrasts in recorded sentence materials and the use of such distinctions in the processing of utterances. The chosen materials involve sites of parsing ambiguity. Results show that in the immediate interpretation of spoken language input, intonational contrasts function as clear structural…

This study of 20 stuttering and 20 nonstuttering preschool children found that stuttering children scored lower on 7 out of 8 language measures, with no significant intergroup differences on articulation proficiency or fluency. There were few significant correlations between measures of stuttering rate, speaking rate, and language performance…

This study examined whether toddlers build a repertoire of words as integral sequences of gestures and then differentiate these sequences into their gestural and segmental components. Results demonstrate clear differences in duration and coordination of gestures between children and adults and a shift toward the patterns of adult speakers during…

The inability to focus on the rhythmic pattern as a whole is one of the main deficiencies in the teaching of English rhythm, and it is partly responsible for syllabic rhythm in the speech of learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). A technique is proposed that isolates the segmental phones and sequences so that EFL learners recognize them.…