Background: School-aged children with persisting speech sound disorders (SSDs) may show little improvement in speech accuracy following phonological or articulation therapy. Aims: To determine the effects of establishing consonant production in facilitative vowel contexts for a 7-year-old boy (CD) with persisting post-alveolar fronting. CD had…

The goal of this work is to investigate whether children with speech dysfunctions (SD) show a deficit in planning some Portuguese syllable structures (PSS) in continuous speech production. Knowledge of which aspects of speech production are affected by SD is necessary for efficient improvement in the therapy techniques. The case-study is focused…

This study presents two cases with fluent aphasia in Telugu with semantic dementia and post-stroke fluent aphasia. Comparable scores were obtained on the conventional neuropsychological and language tests that were administered on the two cases. Both cases demonstrated fluent, grammatical and well-articulated speech with little content, impaired…

Purpose: This study presents an analysis of language skills in individuals with Noonan syndrome (NS), an autosomal dominant genetic disorder. We investigated whether the language impairments affecting some individuals arise from deficits specifically within the linguistic system or whether they are associated with cognitive, perceptual, and motor…

Working memory is believed to play a central role in almost all domains of higher cognition, yet the specific mechanisms involved in working memory are still fiercely debated. We describe a neuroimaging experiment with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a companion behavioral experiment, and in both we seek to adjudicate between…

Purpose: This study explored vowel production and adaptation to articulatory constraints in adults with acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) plus aphasia. Method: Five adults with acquired AOS plus aphasia and 5 healthy control participants produced the vowels [iota], [epsilon], and [ash] in four word-length conditions in unconstrained and bite block…

Listeners' identification of young children's productions of minimally contrastive words and predictive relationships between accurately identified words and intelligibility scores obtained from a 100-word spontaneous speech sample were determined for 36 children with typically developing speech (TDS) and 36 children with speech sound disorders…

The purpose of this study was to use acoustic analyses to describe speech outcomes over the course of 1 year after radial forearm free flap (RFFF) reconstruction of the tongue. Eighteen Canadian English-speaking females and males with reconstruction for oral cancer had speech samples recorded (pre-operative, and 1 month, 6 months, and 1 year…

Acoustic and perceptual correlates of emphasis, a secondary articulation in the posterior vocal tract, in Urban Jordanian Arabic were studied. CVC monosyllables and CV.CVC bisyllables with emphatic and plain target consonants in word-initial, word-medial and word-final positions were examined. Spectral measurements on the target vowels at vowel…

Purpose: To study the perceptual consequences of changes in parameters of vocoded speech in various reverberation conditions. Method: The 3 controlled variables were number of vocoder bands, instantaneous frequency change rate, and reverberation conditions. The effects were quantified in terms of (a) nonsense words' recognition scores for young…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to determine if a semi-occluded vocal tract could be used to measure phonation threshold pressure. This is in contrast to the shutter technique, where an alternation between a fully occluded tract and an unoccluded tract is used. Method: Five male and 5 female volunteers phonated through a thin straw held…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated (a) the effects of task, vocal distinctiveness of the competing talkers, and meaningfulness of the competitor on older listeners' identification of a target in the presence of competition and (b) the factors that are most predictive of the variability in target identification observed among older…

The effects of choral speech and altered auditory feedback (AAF) on stuttering frequency were compared to identify those properties of choral speech that make it a more effective condition for stuttering reduction. Seventeen adults who stutter (AWS) participated in an experiment consisting of special choral speech conditions that were manipulated…

This dissertation examines the relationship between the structural, phonemic properties of vowel inventories and their acoustic phonetic realization, with particular focus on the adequacy of Dispersion Theory, which maintains that inventories are structured so as to maximize perceptual contrast between their component vowels. In order to assess…

This perceptual study describes changes in how listeners perceive VCV elements within successive truncations taken from an iambic phrase containing l (e.g. "a leaf", or "a load") spoken by four male speakers of General American English. Evidence of the respective roles of dorsal gestural affiliation between l and the reduced…