Background: Intelligibility refers to understandability of speech; and lack of it can negatively affect children’s overall communication effectiveness. Children with repaired cleft lip and/or cleft palate (CL/P) may experience poor speech intelligibility. This study aimed at evaluating speech intelligibility in children with repaired CL/P who had not been referred to sp...

Young children often insert 'fillers' in their first multiwordutterances: vocalizations that do not correspond to conventional words. For instance, it is hard to determine the meaning of the syllables [m] and [∂] in utterance (1). So far, fillers have been investigated in French (i.a. Veneziano & Sinclair, 2000; Kilani-Schoch & Dressler, 2000), English (i.a. Peters & Menn, 1993; Feldman & Menn,...

OBJECTIVE Our objective was to estimate nasalance due to transpalatal transfer of acoustic energy during production of voiced stop consonants by noncleft speakers. We also determined the relationship between the transpalatal nasalance and fundamental frequency (F0) of the speakers. METHOD Participants were 8 men and 10 women (mean age = 21.9 years, SD = 4.0) without cleft palate who produced ...

Sensorineural loss is characterized by increased hearing threshold, reduction in the dynamic range of hearing and loudness recruitment, and increased temporal and spectral masking, resulting in degraded speech perception. Several techniques including spectral contrast enhancement, multi-band frequency compression, and dichotic binaural presentation have been investigated for reducing the advers...

89 Velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) is a condition in which the velopharyngeal structures fail to close the nasal cavity while the patient is speaking. VPI usually presents in association with cleft palate, submucous cleft palate, palatal fistulae, adenoidectomy, and neuromuscular disorders; after cleft palate surgery; or after the removal of tumors. Adult onset VPI is uncommon, and relativel...

Voice quality variations include a set of voicing sound source modifications ranging from laryngealized to normal to breathy phonation. Analysis of reiterant imitations of two sentences by ten female and six male talkers has shown that the potential acoustic cues to this type of voice quality variation include: (1) increases to the relative amplitude of the fundamental frequency component as op...

The Agreement-By-Correspondence framework (=‘ABC’) is a theory of agreement developed (by Walker 2000a,b, Hansson 2001, and especially Rose & Walker 2004) to explain long-distance consonant harmony: patterns where non-adjacent consonants agree with each other, but do not interact with the other material that intervenes between them. In ABC, the basis for this agreement is Surface Correspondence...

This study investigates the contribution of voice quality to the expression of “positive politeness” under varying conditions of relative social status between male speakers of Japanese. In previous studies, suprasegmental features have been found to express politeness. Bandwidth of the first formant (BW1) was also found to be relevant to perceived politeness. However, the association between B...

This report presents an analysis of speech productions obtained from 14 children with cochlear implants who completed a nonword repetition task. The stimuli consisted of 20 auditorily-presented multisyllabic nonwords. The analyses reported here include a descriptive analysis of the children’s errors, and a summary of how accurately the children imitated the duration, number of syllables, and in...