Toddlers with slow expressive language development were compared to normally speaking age-mates on three global measures of phonological behavior: the average level of complexity of their syllable structures, the number of different consonant phonemes produced, and the percentage of consonants correctly produced in intelligible utterances. The groups were found to differ significantly on all th...

This study investigated acoustic-phonetic correlates of intelligibility for adult and child talkers, and whether the relative intelligibility of different talkers was dependent on listener characteristics. In experiment 1, word intelligibility was measured for 45 talkers (18 women, 15 men, 6 boys, 6 girls) from a homogeneous accent group. The material consisted of 124 words familiar to 7-year-o...

BACKGROUND Research has indicated that 24-36-month-olds with late language emergence ('late talkers') are at risk for later language-learning difficulties. Previous reviews have examined the efficacy of treatment for children with language delay/disorders; however, no systematic review has examined the effects of language treatment specifically for children with late language emergence. AIMS ...

Although many researchers have commented on the potential of audio display technology to improve intelligibility in multitalker speech communication tasks, no consensus has been reached on how to design an “optimal” multitalker speech display. This paper reviews a set of experiments that used a consistent procedure to evaluate the impact of six different parameters on overall intelligibility in...

Perceptual and acoustic research on dialect variation in the United States requires an appropriate corpus of spoken language materials. Existing speech corpora that include dialect variation are limited by poor recording quality, small numbers of talkers, and/or small samples of speech from each talker. The Nationwide Speech Project corpus was designed to contain a large amount of speech produc...

This paper describes the collection of a bilingual database of Finnish/English and German/English data. In addition, the accents of the talkers in the database have been rated. English, German and Finnish listeners assessed the English, German and Finnish talkers’ degree of foreign accent in English. Native English listeners showed higher inter-listener agreement than non-native listeners. Furt...

Speech recognizers provide good performance for most users but the error rate often increases dramatically for a small percentage of talkers who are "different" from those talkers used for training. One expensive solution to this problem is to gather more training data in an attempt to sample these outlier users. A second solution, explored in this paper, is to artificially enlarge the number o...

Twenty-one apparently normal children between 18 and 34 months of age with slow expressive language acquisition were compared to a group of normally speaking children matched for age, SES, and sex ratio, on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (Sparrow, Balla, & Cicchetti, 1984). The late talkers (LTs) scored significantly lower not only in expressive communication, but also in receptive commu...

Late talkers (LTs) — children who show a marked delay in vocabulary learning — have also been shown to differ from normally-developing (ND) children with respect to the semantic organization of their learned vocabulary. We use a computational model of word learning to study how individual differences between LTs and NDs give rise to differences in abstract knowledge of categories emerging from ...