Purpose: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder affecting articulatory planning and speech programming. When AOS is the sole manifestation of neurodegeneration, it is termed primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS). Recent work has shown that there are distinct PPAOS subtypes: phonetic, prosodic, and those that do not clearly…

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…

The areas of "mispronunciation detection" (or "accent detection" more specifically) within the speech recognition community are receiving increased attention now. Two application areas, namely language learning and speech recognition adaptation, are largely driving this research interest and are the focal points of this work.…

Research in second language speech has often focused on listeners' accent judgment and factors that affect their perception. However, the topic of listeners' application of specific sound categories in their own perceptual judgments has not been widely investigated. The current study explored how listeners from diverse language backgrounds weighed…

The focus of this dissertation is on how language experience shapes perception of a non-native prosodic contrast. In Tokyo Japanese, fundamental frequency (F0) peak and fall are acoustic cues to lexically contrastive pitch patterns, in which a word may be accented on a particular syllable or unaccented (e.g., "tsuru" "a crane", "tsuru" "a vine",…

Purpose: Little is known about the phonological aspects of derivational processes. Neutral suffixes (e.g., "-ness") that do not change stress and rhythmic or nonneutral suffixes (e.g., "-ity") that alter stem stress were used in a production task that explored developmental changes in phonological accuracy of derived English…

The goal of this study is to discover the phonetic difficulties encountered in the acquisition of French as a second language by English-speaking children. The children are studying French in a total immersion situation without benefit of structural exercises or special French language laboratory classes. Of particular interest here is the extent…

The sounds of Standard Indonesian, or Bahasa Indonesian, used in official government and private communication, are presented here. The place and manner of articulation and the distinctive features of consonants, vowels, diphthongs, and vocalic combinations are thoroughly explained through text, illustrations, and charts. Variants of…