Recent efforts to motivate parents' involvement in their child's literacy development involve informing parents about how to incorporate literacy development into daily routines. Teacher leadership and communication are critical--the more teachers encourage and assist parents and caregivers in supporting their child's literacy development, the…

Comparison of the formant frequencies of 15 adult stutterers' fluent and disfluent vowels and of stutterers' and nonstutterers' fluent vowels indicated that differences (between stutterers and nonstutterers) could be accounted for by differences in vocal tract dimensions. No differences were found between frequencies of fluent and disfluent vowels…

Investigates 9- to 11-year-old children's skill in written spelling of simple, monosyllabic nonwords. Nonword spelling was poorer for these children than for tested adults. Results suggest that word knowledge has direct (biasing) and indirect (general word spelling knowledge) effect on performance of the spelling task. (Author/BE)

The sustained vowel sounds of 14 noninstitutionalized 7- to 10-year-old children with Down's syndrome were analyzed acoustically for vowel formant amplitude levels. The subjects with Down's syndrome had formant amplitude intensity levels significantly lower than those of a similar group of speakers without Down's syndrome. (Author/DB)

Although the recent publication of the Rose Report appears to draw a line in the sand that privileges synthetic phonics over other methods in the UK, history indicates a pendulum swing of preference between whole-word and phonics since the advent of mass education. Suggesting that the current "victory" for exponents of synthetic phonics…

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues by 10 college age adults in the speech of 9 children with profound hearing loss and 9 children with normal hearing. Overall, listeners were able to identify vowels in productions by both groups though the patterning of vowel identification differed for the two speaker groups in…

Conversational speech of five children who stutter was recorded and then portions manipulated to modify interval duration and vowel duration. Results indicated that both interval and vowel durations moderately affected listeners' perception of stuttering. Generally, repetitions with short vowel and interval durations were judged as more…

The effects of consonantal context on vowel lipreading were assessed for 30 adult males with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss who lipread videotape recordings of two female talkers. Results indicated that vowel intelligibility was significantly poorer in most contexts involving highly visible consonants. (Author/DB)

Perception and production of vowels in the words "pit,""pet," and "pat" were investigated with 19 adolescents with reading disabilities. Students with reading disabilities perceived and produced less well-defined vowel categories than a control group. Results suggest that speech processing difficulties of students with reading disabilities include…

The study found that stutterers (N=10) were significantly more variable than nonstutterers in their ability to achieve stable fundamental frequency diminution patterns in vowels immediately following stop consonants. Stutterers were not significantly different from the nonstutterers in their ability to achieve a stable fundamental frequency over…

Ten normally hearing and 10 age-matched subjects with moderate-to-severe hearing impairments (ages 6-9) were recorded producing a protocol of 18 basic syllables. The syllables were analyzed for total duration, voice-onset time of the initial consonant, fundamental frequency at midpoint of vowel, and formant frequencies at midpoint of vowel.…

A distribution of the Italian definite articles "il" and "lo" is proposed that makes use of both Steriade's syllabification rules and a language-specific sonority hierarchy. The incorporation of these rules results in the generalization that the definite article "il" occurs before nouns or adjectives that begin with a consonant that is a member of…

Two profoundly hearing-impaired adolescents received systematic speech training to improve their production of two vowel sounds. Both subjects demonstrated significant changes in their production of the two vowels at the acoustic and perceptual levels following treatment, but changes were highly individualized. (DB)

Thirty children (aged 4-10) and 10 adults repeated 2 target syllables, which were analyzed acoustically to evaluate development of identification and discrimination in children for the vowel duration cue to final consonant voicing. Results showed that category boundary, category separation, response consistency, and perceptual consistency…

The stimulus items from five commonly used speech assessment tools were examined for occurrences of vowels and diphthongs. Results indicated that the overall number of occurrences varied greatly from vowel to vowel and from test to test suggesting the need to supplement tests with additional stimulus words. (Author/DB)