Background: The detection and description of language impairments in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's Disease (AD) play an important role in research, clinical diagnosis and intervention. Various methodological protocols have been implemented for the assessment of morphosyntactic abilities in AD; narrative discourse elicitation tasks…

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is an acquired neurodegenerative syndrome that has specific and devastating effects on an individual's speech and language ability. Based on a detailed assessment of behavior and cognition, combined with structural neuroimaging data and pathological evidence, PPA is typically classified into three variants: the…

Purpose: This study examines intraword variability in 40 typically developing French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 2;6-4;8 (years;months). Specifically, it measures rate of intraword variability and investigates which factors best account for it. They include child-specific ones such as age, expressive vocabulary, gender,…

This study examined the validity of data collected from a novel online story retell task. The task was specifically designed for use by junior school teachers with the support of speech-language therapists or literacy specialists. The assessment task was developed to monitor children's oral language progress in their first year at school as part…

This study explored the attitudes of ethnic Latvian listeners towards Latvian-Russian bilinguals. Fifty-seven ethnic Latvians completed an identity questionnaire to obtain estimates of their ethnic beliefs and rated the speech of eight Latvian-Russian bilinguals for personal traits, judged how well social and ethnic labels apply to bilinguals, and…

The cultural and linguistic diversity of our nation continues to grow and the skills needed by speech-language pathologists to address the needs of their existing caseload continue to be vast. According to the ASHA (2016) Schools Survey, only 8% of speech-language pathologists (n=1689) reported feeling very qualified to address cultural and…

Few studies have examined connected speech in demented and non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). We assessed the speech production of 35 patients with Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including non-demented PD patients, patients with PD dementia (PDD), and patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), in a semi-structured…

We describe an analysis of speech errors on a confrontation naming task in a man with progressive speech degeneration of 10-year duration from Pick's disease. C.S. had a progressive non-fluent aphasia together with a motor speech impairment and early assessment indicated some naming impairments. There was also an absence of significant…

This article analysed the acoustic structure of voiced stop ++ vowel sequences in a group of persons who stutter (PWS). This phonetic unit was chosen because successful production is highly dependent on the differential tweaking of right-to-left anticipatory coarticulation as a function of stop place. Thus, essential elements of both speech motor…

This article documents the typological occurrence and interactions of two seemingly independent error patterns, namely Velar Fronting and Labial Harmony, in a cross-sectional investigation of the sound systems of 235 children with phonological delays (ages 3;0 to 7;9). The results revealed that the occurrence of Labial Harmony depends on the…

The goal of this research programme was to evaluate the role of word lexicality in effecting phonological change in children's sound systems. Four children with functional speech sound disorders (SSDs) were enrolled in an across-subjects multiple baseline single-subject design; two were treated using high-frequency real words (RWs) and two were…

This study describes the realization of onset and coda clusters in a 4-year old child acquiring American English, and with a higher than usual level of unintelligible speech. It reviews previous studies that have tested cluster realization against markedness and, in particular, the sonority hypothesis. This latter predicts steep rises in sonority…

This study investigated the development of English two-member onset #sC clusters in Spanish-English bilingual children with phonological disorders. Data from 30 children were analysed in terms of correct and incorrect productions, implicational relationships, and possible groupings according to the sonority index of the second member of the…

This study examines the production and reduction patterns of initial /s/ clusters by Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders. Data were collected from 30 children with phonological disorders between the ages of 3;5-5;2. The data were elicited by means of a picture-naming task combined with a sentence completion task. Target words…

Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…