Employers' attitudes toward employees' speech affects hiring. (CH)

Presents an Ohio experiment in which 30 kindergartners and 76 first graders, all English speakers, attempt to learn to produce three non-English phones. Bibliography. (MB)

Examines the relationship between phonetic substitution patterns in child speech and sound change patterns in dialects of adult language, basing an explanation of these phenomena on acoustic data and language universals. (AM)

Subsyllabic awareness was investigated with a word synthesis task completed by 96 children in kindergarten, first, and second grade. Evidence supports a developmental trend that shows performance improved with each grade. Children blended speech segments more easily when the segments were the syllable onset and rime. (SLD)

Examined the phonological memory capacity, rate of articulation, phonological encoding, and perceptual-processing abilities of 13 specifically language-impaired (SLI) children and 13 language-matched normal (NL) children. The results of a nonsense word repetition task showed that SLI children repeated significantly fewer multisyllabic nonsense…

This study, involving five experienced and trained speech language pathologists, categorized the elicited imitations of five profoundly and five severely prelingually hearing-impaired subjects using the Phonetic Level Evaluation. Failure to obtain acceptably high levels of reliability suggests that this measure may not yet be an accurate and…

The errors on word-initial consonant clusters made by children (ages 2-9) in the Iowa-Nebraska Articulation Norms Project were tabulated by age range and frequency. Error data showed support for previous research in the acquisition of clusters. Cluster errors are discussed in terms of theories of phonologic development. (Author/JDD)

A 12-lesson college-level French unit using the same recorded text to teach three aspects of oral language (pronunciation, comprehension, and production) is described and documented. The activity attempts to use the unit vocabulary as much as possible in a variety of exercises to develop communicative competence. (13 references) (MSE)

This study compared the responses of 28 Detroit (Michigan) low income African-American preschoolers who were speakers of Black English (BE) on the Arizona Articulation Proficiency Scale, using a standard English and a BE scoring procedure. Findings indicated that this test does not require a BE scoring adjustment for northern BE speakers.…

Presents findings from the first phase of a longitudinal study examining the development of articulation quality and specific phoneme awareness during the fourth year of life. Articulation and phoneme awareness of /r/ and a control phoneme were assessed for 80 3-year-old children. (Author/JL)

The relationship between specific subtypes of speech language impairment (SLI) and concomitant social competence and behavioral adjustment was investigated. Teachers and parents completed behavior ratings of SLI preschoolers enrolled in a language-based intervention program and preschoolers without language impairment, including the Parent-Child…

Most junior syndicate teachers have concerns about the speech clarity of some of the children in their class. It is difficult for teachers to know whether to refer such students for speech assessments by their speech-language therapist. This article outlines a project which gathered New Zealand normative data for a test of articulation. A summary…

Relationships among articulation, vocabulary, phonemic awareness, and word reading were examined in 45 children who spoke either Hmong or Spanish as their primary language. A theoretical perspective suggesting that English articulation and vocabulary would influence children's English phonemic awareness and English word reading was developed.…