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…

Previous Language Testing research has largely reported that although many raters' characteristics affect their evaluations of language assessments (Reed & Cohen, 2001), being a native speaker or non-native speaker rater does not significantly affect final ratings (Kim, 2009). In Second Language Acquisition, some researchers conclude that…

The German sibilant /esh/ is produced with a constriction in the postalveolar region and often with protruded lips. By covarying horizontal lip and tongue position speakers can keep a similar acoustic output even if the articulation varies. This study investigates whether during two weeks of adaptation to an artificial palate speakers covary these…

Listeners are exquisitely sensitive to fine-grained acoustic detail within phonetic categories for sounds and words. Here we show that this sensitivity is optimal given the probabilistic nature of speech cues. We manipulated the probability distribution of one probabilistic cue, voice onset time (VOT), which differentiates word initial labial…

What is second language fluency? What is a foreign accent? Is it possible for an adult second language learner to speak fluently with a heavy accent or vice versa? What factors contribute to the perception of fluency and a foreign accent? What acoustic attributes correlate with the perception of fluency and a foreign accent? To answer these…

As a group, children with hearing loss demonstrate delays in language development relative to their peers with normal hearing. Early intervention has a profound impact on language outcomes in children with hearing loss. Data examining the relationship between degree of hearing loss and language outcomes are variable. Two approaches are used in the…

Purpose. The primary purpose of this study was to assess whether very early access to speech sounds provided by the cochlear implant enabled children with severe to profound hearing loss to develop age-appropriate phonological awareness abilities during their preschool years. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine whether preschoolage…

Background and Aims: The current study is a first investigation reporting the speech production characteristics of an early deafened adult cochlear implant user after a course of speech-language treatment. Methods and Procedures: The participant is culturally deaf and received the cochlear implant when she was 43 years old. A 24-week ABCABC…

There is now a renewed emphasis in the UK on short intensive interventions to tackle reading failure. In this paper we report on the effect of a programme based on a view that reading problems are associated with the inability of the learner to deal with speech at the level of individual speech sounds even though they may be fully competent in the…

Focuses on aspects of spoken language skill that may contribute to the development of phonological awareness, as manifested in rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness. Examined rhyme awareness, articulation, speech perception, vocabulary, and letter and word knowledge in 40 preschool children. (Author/VWL)

Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical applications of research are included in this status report for the April 1-June 30, 1980, period. The reports deal with the following topics: (1) the perceptual equivalent of two acoustic cues for a speech contrast is specific to phonetic…

Investigates the incidence of segmental and prosodic contrasts in recorded sentence materials and the use of such distinctions in the processing of utterances. The chosen materials involve sites of parsing ambiguity. Results show that in the immediate interpretation of spoken language input, intonational contrasts function as clear structural…

Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical applications of research are included in this status report for the July 1-December 31, 1980, period. The 19 reports deal with the following topics: (1) the structuring of language; (2) whether movements are prepared in parts; (3)…

Thirteen manuscripts and extended reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research are presented in this status report on speech research for the period of July-December 1979. The topics dealt with include speech perception, children's memory for sentences and word strings in relation…

One of a regular series on the status and progress of studies into the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research, this report covers the period of January 1 to March 31, 1982. The 13 studies deal with the following topics: (1) speech perception and memory coding in relation to reading ability,…