OBJECTIVE One of the main goals in the management of cleft palate is to achieve a good quality of speech. The aim of the prospective study was to evaluate the effectiveness of therapy in patients with velopharyngeal insufficiency treated by simultaneously performed Furlow and Orticochea operations. PATIENTS AND METHODS From May 2007 to May 2008 we treated 14 consecutive patients (6 males and ...

rant artery or cerebellopontine angle masses [2, 3] . The offending vessels are usually arterial structures, such as the anterior or posterior inferior cerebellar arteries [4] . We present the case of a patient with HFS secondary to compression by a giant vertebrobasilar dolichoectasia (VBD) and highlight the possible association of HFS with VBD and type 1 neurofibromatosis (NF-1). A 70-year-ol...

Processing large amounts of non-native (L2) phonological data for acquisition-related research remains a challenging task, especially when acoustic analyses are not straightforward as is the case with nasal vowels. Within the InterPhonologie du Français Contemporain project (IPFC), we have developed a perceptual coding procedure and a piece of dedicated software aimed at providing an intermedia...

The Lexical Access From Features (LAFF) project tries to model the representation and perception of speech by human listeners. The derivation of such a representation involves first finding certain acoustic landmarks. Based on the landmarks and the acoustic cues surrounding the landmarks, distinctive features of the speech segments may be deciphered. The present study concentrates on the nasali...

Conventional speech communication systems do not perform well in the absence of an intelligible acoustic signal. Silent Speech Interfaces enable speech communication to take place with speech-handicapped users and in noisy environments. However, since no acoustic signal is available, information on nasality may be absent, which is an important and relevant characteristic of several languages, p...

Vocal emotions, as well as different speaking styles and speaker traits are characterized by a complex interplay of multiple prosodic features. Natural sounding speech synthesis with the ability to control such paralinguistic aspects requires the manipulation of the corresponding prosodic features. With traditional concatenative speech synthesis it is easy to manipulate the “primary” prosodic f...

Allophones are diverse phonetic instantiations of a single underlying sound category. As such, they pose a peculiar problem for infant language learners: These variants occur in the ambient language, but they are not used to encode lexical contrasts. Infants' sensitivity to sounds varying along allophonic dimensions declines by 11 months of age, suggesting that there must be information to phon...

This study explores the effects of prosodic boundaries on nasality at intonational phrase, word, and syllable boundaries. The subjects were recorded saying phrases that contained a syllable-final nasal consonant followed by a syllable-initial stop. The timing, duration, and magnitude of the nasal airflows measured were used to determine the extent of nasality across boundaries. Nasal amplitudes...