Lung volumes and ventilatory patterns used by 10 healthy and 14 asthmatic subjects during conversation, monologue, and counting at two loudness levels were studied. Asthmatics were found to favor respiratory over communications needs. They used a greater percentage of their reduced vital capacity, with slower inspiratory and faster expiratory flow…

Stuttering frequency in 10 adult stutterers (ages 22-48 years) was measured when speaking spontaneously alone, then with an adult male conversationalist, and finally speaking alone again. Percent stuttering increased in the conversational situation compared with the first alone situation and decreased again during the second alone situation.…

Results of a study involving 20 severely to profoundly hearing impaired adults are consistent with prior research that suggests independent primary and secondary roles for segmental and prosodic speech characteristics, respectively, in determining intelligibility in severely to profoundly hearing-impaired speakers. (Author/CL)

Results indicated that normal-language children responded meaningfully to print settings that contained reduced nonprint cues while language-disordered Ss did not. General language ability was correlated with print awareness, but knowledge of specific oral lexemes was not necessary for accurate print responses. Parent questionnaire data suggested…

Analysis of the liquid, fricative, and affricate sounds in the phonological system of a misarticulating four year old found that the child's perception of certain sounds was superior to his productions, whereas for other sounds productive skill was superior to perceptual performance. A two-lexicon model of underlying representation best accounted…

This preliminary study examined effects of word visibility and prime association factors on visual spoken word recognition in lipreading, using a related/unrelated prime-target paradigm with 20 hearing adults. In related prime-target pairings, more targets with a high than low prime association were identified. In unrelated prime-target pairings,…

Ten toddlers produced tokens of phonologically individualized words over 12 experimental sessions. Productions in later sessions were significantly shorter in vowel and overall duration than in the early sessions. Familiarity seemed to influence duration of early productions of novel words, and these findings are discussed as evidence of…

Analysis of articulation and stress patterns of five young (18-30 months of age) hearing children of deaf parents revealed that phonological processes used most frequently were those identified as common processes among children from hearing homes. None of the children adopted, with any frequency, the less typical productions found in their…

Small-set segmental identification experiments were conducted with three deaf-blind subjects who were highly experienced users of the Tadoma method. Systematic variations in the positioning of the hand on the speaker's face for Tadoma produced systematic effects on percent-correct scores, information transfer, and perception of individual…

Spectrographic analyses were performed of utterances of three groups of children: four producing correct /w,r,l,j/ (ages three-five), four with developmental w/r and w/l substitutions (age four), and four with articulation impairments (ages six-seven). Findings supported the hypothesis that children's underlying forms are unique and represent…

An investigation of turn-taking during conversations between speech-handicapped adults with cerebral palsy and normally speaking adults found that interactants used available behaviors to signal turn exchanges and that most control rested with the normal speaker. Handicapped speakers were frequently unsuccessful at interaction management and in…

Models of stuttering and delayed auditory feedback propose that, in these conditions, the rhythmic structure of fluent speech prespecifing the intervals between vowels of stressed syllables is lacking and that auditory perception of vowels of stressed syllables is predicted incorrectly. A model regarding onset of stuttering in children is also…

Preschool children were paired in 12 speaker-listener dyads in which the speaker described common familiar items, and the listener attempted to guess their identity. Postfeedback, the speakers used longer, more informative descriptions for items originally failed and shorter, less informative descriptions for items successfully guessed on the…

The study examined adult-child interactions during conversation with respect to the effects of adult paralinguistic speech variations on the speech production of four four-year-old children. Analysis indicated that each child's response time latency (RTL) was significantly longer when the experimenter's RTL was longer. (Author/DB)

A two-microphone adaptive digital noise cancellation technique improved word-recognition ability for 20 normal and 12 hearing-impaired adults by reducing multitalker speech babble and speech spectrum noise 18-22 dB. Word recognition improvements averaged 37-50 percent for normal and 27-40 percent for hearing-impaired subjects. Improvement was best…