Evidence is lacking on the impact of bilingualism on the speech skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study described the speech production of children with CIs acquiring French and one or more additional spoken languages. Four groups of children aged 4-11 were included: bilinguals (n = 15) and monolinguals (n = 14) with CIs and…

Purpose: Place and manner of articulation in American English-learning children's salient consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (C[subscript 1]VC[subscript 2]V) target words (e.g., "baby," "bunny," and "cookie") were compared with their actual productions of these words. We hypothesized that target words with repeated place…

Consonants and vowels differentially contribute to lexical acquisition. From 8 months on, infants' preferential reliance on consonants has been shown to predict their lexical outcome. Here, the predictive value of German-learning infants' (n = 58, 29 girls, 29 boys) trajectories of consonant and vowel perception, indicated by the…

Background: Young children clearly know quite a bit about the conventions of written language; for instance, 5-year-old children are sensitive to the fact that words tend to include both consonants and vowels, rather than just one or the other. The core theoretical debate lies in whether this understanding of sub-lexical orthographic regularities…

This dissertation examines whether EFL and ESL Korean learners of English are able to produce and perceive two English phonological contrasts that depend on vowel duration differences, coda consonant voicing contrasts and the tense-lax distinction in vowels. For production, it examines differences in vowel duration and vowel quality associated…

This study investigates the production of Arabic intervocalic geminate obstruents as produced by American L2 learners of Arabic. The participants of the study were 24 Arabic learners (12 advanced, 12 beginners) at North Georgia University and 12 native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (the control group). An examination of the results reveals that…

In this study we asked whether nonwords created by transposing two phonemes (/biks[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) are perceived as being more similar to their base words (/bisk[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) than nonwords created by substituting two phonemes (/bipf[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/). Using the short-term phonological priming and a…

Purpose: Prior work suggests that voice onset time (VOT) may be impacted by laryngeal tension: VOT means decrease when individuals with typical voices increase their fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) and VOT variability is increased in individuals with vocal hyperfunction, a voice disorder characterized by increased laryngeal tension. This…

Purpose: This study aims at investigating the phonological development of the six guttural consonants of Jordanian Arabic, /[chi]/, /[voiced uvular fricative]/, /[voiceless pharyngeal fricative]/, /[voiced pharyngeal fricative]/, /[glottal stop]/, and /h/. Method: An articulation test is designed to involve two tasks: picture naming and…

Background: Previous research has found that high-frequency energy of speech signals decreased while wearing face masks. However, no study has examined the specific spectral characteristics of fricative consonants and vowels and the perception of clarity of speech in mask wearing. Aims: To investigate acoustic-phonetic characteristics of fricative…

Purpose: Vowels and consonants play different roles in language acquisition and speech recognition, yet standard clinical tests do not assess vowel and consonant perception separately. As a result, opportunities for targeted intervention may be lost. This study evaluated closed-set word recognition tests designed to rely predominantly on either…

Purpose: Envelope following responses (EFRs) could be useful for objectively evaluating audibility of speech in children who are unable to participate in routine clinical tests. However, relative to adults, the characteristics of EFRs elicited by frequency-specific speech and their utility in predicting audibility in children are unknown. Method:…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the vocal characteristics of children with cerebral palsy (CP) and anarthria using the stage model of vocal development. Method: Vocal characteristics of 39 children with CP and anarthria around 4 years of age were analyzed from laboratory-based caregiver--child interactions. Perceptual coding analysis was…

Speaker's good pronunciation makes his/her listener comfortable, and confident to participate in the conversation and his/her mispronunciations bring implications to the listener's awareness and involvement with the message spoken. The research was aimed at detecting the mispronunciations produced by 70 nonnative (L2) post-graduate students who…

Purpose: The primary aim was to assess whether children have difficulty distinguishing similar-sounding novel words. The secondary aim was to assess what task characteristics might hinder or facilitate perceptual discrimination. Method: Three within-subjects experiments tested ninety-nine 3- to 5-year-old children total. Experiment 1 presented two…