Purpose: In this study, we examined the utility of vowel intelligibility testing for assessing the impact of dysarthria on speech characteristics in people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We tested the sensitivity and specificity of overall vowel identification, as well as that of vowel-specific identification, to dysarthria presence and…

Purpose: This study examines the efficacy of perceptual training for improving typical listeners' identification of vowels produced by individuals with dysarthria. We examined whether training on a subset of vowels can generalize to (a) untrained vowels and (b) other speakers with similar overall intelligibility. Method: Sixty naive listeners…

Previous research has revealed that when learners encounter multiple artificial languages in succession only the first is learned, unless there are contextual cues correlating with the change in structure or if exposure to the second language is protracted. These experiments provided a fixed amount of exposure irrespective of when learning…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated the hypothesis that the perceived tight temporal synchrony of speech and gesture is evidence of an integrated spoken language and manual gesture communication system. It was hypothesized that experimental manipulations of the spoken response would affect the timing of deictic gestures. Method: The…

This study evaluates the utility of perioperative spectral and cepstral acoustic analyses to monitor voice change after thyroidectomy. Perceptual and acoustic analyses were conducted on speech samples (sustained vowel /[alpha]/ and CAPE-V sentences) provided by 70 participants (36 women and 34 men) at four study time points: prior to thyroid…

This dissertation presents a dialectological study of the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, and the neighboring towns in the boundary area between the North and Midland dialect regions. Erie occupies a unique place in the dialect geography of North America, in that it appears to have switched status from the North to the Midland. Since the dialect…

The phonological system of the French of Frenchville, Pennsylvania (USA) demonstrates a dramatic case of transfer in the latest (and last) generation of bilingual French-English speakers: the mid front round vowels, [ligature of o and e] and [slashed o], have often been replaced by the English rhoticized schwa as found in the word "sir."…

Bullock and Gerfen show that two of the last speakers of French in Frenchville, Pennsylvania, systematically replace the French front mid round vowel (in words like "deux, neuf") with the rhoticized schwa of American English, their dominant language. As the authors argue, it is unlikely that this sound change would have arisen in the…