Although standard descriptions of spoken Brazilian Portuguese assign separate allophones to both /1/ and /u/ in utterance-final position after a vowel, it has been observed that in rapid speech native speakers articulate /l/ and /u/ in this position so that they are indistinguishable to the average speaker. To answer questions about the possible…

This report, covering the period of January 1 to June 30, 1974, is one of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. Among the 17 manuscripts and extended reports are "The Role of Speech in Language: Introduction to the Conference,""The Human…

This is primarily a book for the classroom teacher, although it will also prove useful to parents, child-guidance workers, physicians, and others who are concerned with the development and training of children with speech handicaps. Contents include "Speech Improvement as an Educational Problem,""Recognizing Speech Disabilities,""The Development…

The task is to carry out the final development of a computer-based system for automated instruction of the new speech sounds of second languages, and to field-test this system for two language pairs: English speakers learning Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish speakers learning English. This report describes the first evaluation experiment of the Mark…

Differences in articulation error rates and error patterns as a function of five elicitation modes (picture, picture with pretraining, word repetition, sentence repetition, and nonsense word repetition) were examined. The same 15 words (or pictures representing them) were stimuli in four real word conditions; nonsense words were formed by…

Discribed is precision therapy, an eclectic approach which uses behavior modification, programming principles, and traditional methods in treating children's articulation disorders. (CL)

The author presents the theory, based on longitudinal audiovisual observations of infants, that language develops from an expanding and differentiating interactive communication system in which infants and adults, and often older children, are participants. (SBH)

The inability of foreign language students to produce acceptable approximations of new vowel sounds initiated a study to devise a real-time visual display system whereby the students could match vowel production to a visual pedagogical model. The system used amateur radio equipment and a standard oscilloscope. (CHK)

Examination of the role of duration in the perception of phonemic contrast (English /r/-/l/) by Cantonese speakers (N=5) showed that increased duration was not sufficient to facilitate perception; differences in the perception of the two sounds by Japanese and Cantonese speakers were partially explained by differences in the phonological…

Analysis of the distributional properties of non-syllabic vowels within word boundaries in Italian demonstrates: the role of phonological constraints on the distribution of non-syllabic words; the syllabification possibilities within each type of sequence by setting up a structural model; and the phonemic occurrences in vowel sequences collected…

Successful pronunciation of English as a second language can be influenced by the instructor's use of self-correcting and self-monitoring techniques which involve student motivation, adequate explanations, practice, and feedback. (CB)

The relationship between speech perception and speech production was investigated, by comparing five six and seven-year-old Dutch children who misarticulated the final consonant cluster /-ts/ with three control groups. Results indicate that the poorer the articulation proficiency of a group, the more variability there was in both production and…

Attempts to improve speech production and self-monitoring skills by 10 hearing-impaired subjects (ages 17-24) using visual feedback from the Speech Spectrographic Display and feedback from a speech-language pathologist were compared. Speech production improved significantly under both conditions but self-monitoring skills did not. No significant…

Presents the results of an experiment which examined the temporal characteristics of voiceless plosives in American English, Arabic, and Arabic-accented English. Results showed that Arabic-accented English departed from the target language goal and constituted an articulation type characterizable as more Arabic than Arabic itself. (Author/SED)