This study is about the role of elicited verbal imitation in toddler word learning. Forty-eight toddlers were taught eight nonwords linked to referents. During training, they were asked to imitate the nonwords. Naming of the referents was tested at three intervals (one minute later [uncued], five minutes, and 1-7 days later [cued]) and recognition…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine if talkers with ALS are limited in their ability to increase lower lip and jaw speed at an early stage of the disease when their speaking rate and intelligibility are only minimally or not affected. Method: A novel metronome paced fixed-target task was used to assess movement speed capacities during…

Goal: The aim of this study was to find the prevalence of speech (articulation, voice, and fluency) disorders among elementary school students from first grade to fourth grade. This research was based on the screening implemented as part of the Madrasati Project, which is designed to serve the school system in Jordan. Method: A sample of 1,231…

Background and Context: in this paper, we argue that integrating Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) into K-12 computing education can present learners with opportunities to develop human-centered design skills as well as higher-order thinking skills. Objective: to address the issues related to the development of HCI forms of expertise, we introduce…

Purpose: The authors' general aim is to use biomechanical models of speech articulators to explore how possible variations in anatomical structure contribute to differences in articulatory strategies and phone systems across human populations. Specifically, they investigated 2 issues: (a) the link between lip muscle anatomy and variability in…

Purpose: To explore the effect of modeling and explicit elicitation of slow and accurately produced speech in typically developing preschool children. Optional phonological reductions (e.g., deleted final stops) and changes in speech rate were examined in response to an adult conversational speaker's speech style. Method: Forty 3-and…

Increased tongue-palate contact for perceptually acceptable alveolar stops has been observed in children with speech sound disorders (SSD). This is a retrospective study that further investigated this issue by using quantitative measures to compare the target alveolar stops /t/, /d/ and /n/ produced in words by nine children with SSD (20 tokens of…

Better understanding of the mechanisms underlying early reading skills can lead to improved interventions. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine multivariate associations among reading, language, spoken phonological awareness, and fingerspelling abilities for three groups of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) beginning readers: those who…

Background: Myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) is a slowly progressive multi-systemic disease with an autosomal-dominant inheritance caused by a mutation on chromosome 19 (19q13.3). Aims: To explore speech characteristics in a group of individuals with the congenital and childhood-onset forms of DM1 in terms of intelligibility, speech-sound…

The present study examined listeners' identification and rating of words in passages as stuttered when the duration and frequency of occurrence of sound prolongations were manipulated. Thirty-six participants listened to a 219-word passage containing voiceless fricatives digitally increased from their normal durations to 200, 300, and 420 ms.…

Purpose: This study investigated how different instructions for eliciting clear speech affected selected acoustic measures of speech. Method: Twelve speakers were audio-recorded reading 18 different sentences from the Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech (Yorkston & Beukelman, 1984). Sentences were produced in habitual, clear,…

Although there is consistent evidence that higher levels of processing, such as learning the form-meaning associations specific to the second language (L2), are a source of difficulty in acquiring L2 speech, no study has addressed how these levels interact in shaping L2 perception and production of intonation. We examine the hypothesis of whether…

Reading fluency is one of the basic processes of learning to read. Children begin to develop fluency when they are able to form orthographic representations of words, which provide direct, smooth, and fast reading. Dyslexic children of transparent orthographic systems are mainly characterized by poor reading fluency (Cuetos & Suárez-Coalla…

This research examined cineradiographic films (CRF) of articulatory movements in a person with congenital aglossia (PWCA) during speech production of four phrases. Pearson correlations and a multiple regression model investigated co-variation of independent variables, positions of mandible and hyoid; and pseudo-tongue-dependent variables,…

The present study sought to clarify whether phonological similarity of encoded information impairs free recall performance (the phonological similarity effect: PSE) for nonwords. Five experiments examined the influence of the encoding process on the PSE in a step-by-step fashion, by using lists that consisted of phonologically similar (decoy)…