Purpose: Vocal roughness is often present in many voice disorders but the assessment of roughness mainly depends on the subjective auditory-perceptual evaluation and lacks acoustic correlates. This study aimed to apply the concept of roughness in general sound quality perception to vocal roughness assessment and to characterize the relationship…

Purpose: The current study examines the pattern of misidentified vowels produced by individuals with dysarthria secondary to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Method: Twenty-three individuals with ALS and 22 typical individuals produced 10 monophthongs in an /h/-vowel-/d/ context. One hundred thirty-five listeners completed a forced-choice…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of biofeedback on control of nasalization in individuals with typical speech. Method: Forty-eight individuals with typical speech attempted to increase and decrease vowel nasalization. During training, stimuli consisted of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) tokens with the center vowels…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which vowel metrics are capable of distinguishing healthy from dysarthric speech and among different forms of dysarthria. Method: A variety of vowel metrics were derived from spectral and temporal measurements of vowel tokens embedded in phrases produced by 45 speakers with…

Purpose: Temporal interruption limits the perception of speech to isolated temporal glimpses. An analysis was conducted to determine the acoustic parameter that best predicts speech recognition from temporal fragments that preserve different types of speech information--namely, consonants and vowels. Method: Young listeners with normal hearing…

Acoustic and perceptual studies investgate B2-level Polish learners' acquisition of second language (L2) English word-boundaries involving word-initial vowels. In production, participants were less likely to produce glottalization of phrase-medial initial vowels in L2 English than in first language (L1) Polish. Perception studies employing word…

The present study is concerned with lax /[upsilon]/-fronting in Standard British English and in particular with whether this sound change in progress can be attributed to a waning of the perceptual compensation for the coarticulatory effects of context. Younger and older speakers produced various monosyllables in which /[upsilon]/ occurred in…

Research Findings: I examined the long-term association between the lexical and acoustic features of maternal utterances during book reading and the language skills of infants and children. Maternal utterances were collected from 22 mother-child dyads in picture book-reading episodes when children were ages 6-12 months and 5 years. Two aspects of…

In a previous study, the authors identified final plosive voicing contrast as the highest single error source in dysarthria associated with Friedreich's Ataxia in a group of Irish English-speaking participants. This study aimed to determine the acoustic features underlying misperceptions of voicing status and implications for clinical management.…

Purpose: This study investigated formant frequencies for their role as acoustic and perceptual correlates to the place of articulation of Cantonese final stops produced by profoundly hearing impaired speakers. Method: Speakers were 10 Cantonese adolescents (mean age = 13;5 [years;months]) who were profoundly hearing impaired (HI). Control speakers…

Reports a study of the production of Thai vowels, consonants, and tones by native English speakers using two forms of evaluation: acoustic measurements and auditory evaluation by native Thai-speaking listeners. The study focused on the differences in acoustic parameters between the two groups and the acoustic parameter influencing native…