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…

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…

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)

A study was conducted of five individuals exhibiting acquired apraxia of speech to examine vowel durations and length of intervals between words produced in utterances that varied in type of utterance as well as in length. Results found evidence that longer vowel durations were a salient characteristic of apraxia of speech. (CR)

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 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…

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.…

Twenty-four children (ages 6-10) with language impairment (LI) and 22 without participated in a study of discrimination, identification, and serial ordering of highly dissimilar and similar vowels. Children with LI were less accurate in several tasks and were found to experience auditory perception deficits which led to less robust central…

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)

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…

A study compared the laryngeal behavior associated with the perceptually fluent speech of 3-to-7-year-old stutterers (N=8) to that of normally fluent peers (N=8). Analysis of electroglottograph readings indicated that normally fluent children exhibited significantly more typical patterns during consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant transitions than…

The study employed measures of frequency resolution obtained from individual subjects (two normal and three with sensorineural hearing loss) to predict each subject's vowel recognition performance. A relation between impairments of frequency resolution and vowel recognition was found. The described model may be useful in predicting vowel…

Properties of the Vowel Corrector, a visual aid used in speech training of the hearing impaired, are examined. Implications for differentiating utterances of male, female, and child speakers are studied. Results show that the device has promising features and is especially useful for exploring the vowel space and learning a global differentiation…