Voice onsets and segment durations of normal speakers and beginning stutterers

Longer VOT and segment durations apparently characterize the contrived responses of school-age stutterers examined under laboratory conditions. Thus, these variables may reflect basic disparities between the speech production abilities of stutterers and normal speakers. To better explore this possibility, VOT and segment durations were assessed in five nonstutterers who were closely matched with five preschool stutterers who had been diagnosed and tested in the experiment within six months of parental concern about fluency development. Target words were measured in isolation, in elicited sentences, and conversation. Results revealed significantly slower VOT and longer segment durations in the young stuttering members of the pairs of speakers. The stutterers were also more variable in their management of these same two aspects of motor speech timing control.     

Spelling and dialect: Comparisons between speakers of African American vernacular English and White speakers

One characteristic of African American vernacular English (AAVE) is final obstruent devoicing, where the final consonant of a word likerigid is pronounced more like /t/ than /d/. To determine whether this dialect characteristic influences adults’ spelling, African American and White college students spelled words such asrigid andballot, pronounced by either a speaker of their own dialect or a speaker of the other dialect. African Americans, especially those who often devoiced final /d/, were more likely than Whites to confused andt. Both African American and White spellers made mored/t confusions when the words were spoken by an African American experimenter than by a White experimenter. Thus, the different phonological systems of AAVE and White speakers can cause them to make different types of spelling errors. Discussions of AAVE and literacy have focused on its syntax, but its phonology must also be considered.     

Facilitating morphosyntactic and semantic prediction among second language speakers of German

Using two visual priming experiments, the present study investigates whether presenting facilitative semantic (i.e. colour) and morphosyntactic (i.e. grammatical gender) information in a prime image prior to reading a target sentence facilitates naming of a sentence-final target image among L1 German and L1 English-L2 German speakers. In Experiment 1, L1 and L2 German speakers used both semantic and gender cues to predict the sentence-final target image. In Experiment 2, a new group of L2 German speakers used gender cues to predict, but this effect was stronger when gender information was provided via a gender-marked indefinite article and adjective in the prime, than when the prime contained only the gender-marked article. These results suggest that if L2 speakers are able to overcome unstable and often inaccurate L2 gender assignment, they can use gender cues in a native-like manner for prediction, but that multiple gender-marked cues may be necessary for such prediction to occur.     

Tense and Agreement dissociations in German agrammatic speakers: underspecification vs. hierarchy

The aim of the present paper was to investigate whether German agrammatic production data are compatible with the Tree-Pruning-Hypothesis (TPH; Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997). The theory predicts unidirectional patterns of dissociation in agrammatic production data with respect to Tense and Agreement. However, there was evidence of a double dissociation between Tense and Agreement in our data. The presence of a bidirectional dissociation is incompatible with any theory which assumes a hierarchical order between these categories such as the TPH or other versions thereof (such as Lee's, 2003 top--down hypothesis). It will be argued that the data can better be accounted for by relying on newer linguistic theories such as the Minimalist Program (MP,), which does not assume a hierarchical order between independent syntactic Tense and Agreement nodes but treats them as different features (semantically interpretable vs. uninterpretable) under a single node.     

Predicting stuttering from linguistic factors for German speakers in two age groups

Brown's factors [J. Speech Disorders 10 (1945) 181] predict the likely loci of disfluency in English-speaking adults who stutter. A word is more likely to be stuttered for these speakers if it is a content word, starts with a consonant, is positioned at the beginning of a sentence, and if it is a long word. These same factors were examined in native German-speaking children and adults who stutter. Speech data of 15 German adults and 17 children were coded according to Brown's factors. For the adult group, it was predicted that words starting with consonants would not lead to as much of an increase in disfluencies compared with English samples, because of cross-linguistic differences in syllable onset properties. It was predicted that stuttering would be more likely in later sentence positions in German because in German the verb is usually near the end of a sentence. There were no obvious reasons to expect differences on the two remaining factors, content words and word length. With children, it was hypothesised that Brown's factors that specify level of linguistic difficulty would not be such a good predictor of stuttering rate. Specifically, it was predicted that the difference in stuttering rate between function and content words would be lower in children. For the adults both word type (content/function) and word length increased stuttering rate significantly, whereas changes in stuttering rate for the other two factors were non-significant. It was also found that when word difficulty (based on a combined measure of all factors) increased, stuttering rate rose. With children, only the word-length factor was significant, and stuttering rate was not governed to the same extent by overall word difficulty. Conclusions are drawn as to the effect of linguistic and motor influences on stuttering. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to describe: (1) how linguistic factors affect stuttering rates in German; (2) the different patterns of adults and children who stutter and how language might influence this pattern; and (3) how to interpret these findings in light of a current theory of fluency failure.     

Listeners' cognitive and affective reactions to English speakers with standard American English and Asian Accents

Using a 2 (speaker accent: standard American, Asian) x 2 (speakers' sex: male, female) between-subjects design, the present study examined the effects of accent and sex on listeners' cognitive and affective reactions towards speakers with standard American English accents and Asian accents. 70 female and 27 male college students (M = 21.8 yr., SD = 4.7) listened to the audio recording of a monologue by one of the speakers in the early 20s who differed in accent and sex. Standard American English was operationalized as nonaccented English, typical of the western part of the USA, and Vietnamese-accented English was used as an exemplar of Asian-accented English. Results showed that relative to standard American-accented English speakers, Asian-accented English speakers were perceived as poorer communicators who were less potent, less threatening, and more concerned about others. These cognitive reactions to Asian-accented English speakers include (a) the general stereotype associated with an accent, status and solidarity, as well as (b) the stereotype unique to Asians as an ethnic group, being concerned for others and poorer communicators. Analysis also showed that speakers with an Asian accent evoked more negative affect and required more attention from listeners than did speakers with a standard American English accent. Implications of the study are discussed.     

Voice stress analysis: Use of telephone recordings

Voice stress analyses were performed on tape recorded pre-employment interviews in both their original form and after they had been transmitted via telephone and re-recorded. Expert voice stress examiners, blind to the telephone condition, reported less stress in the telephone charts than in the original charts. There was little relationship between the stress rating for the same charts in their original and telephone forms. Reliability estimates were low for both the original and telephone stress ratings. Summing over the stress ratings from individual questions and advanced training on the part of the examiners both appeared to improve the reliability estimates. The continued use of telephone recorded tapes as substitutes for the original tapes is highly questionable. In addition, these results suggest that voice analysis ratings, as they are currently used, do not show sufficient reliability to warrant their continued use as a selection procedure for employment.An earlier version of this article was presented at the Ninety Third annual convention of the American Psychological Association. We thank Patrick A. Knight for his helpful comments and thoughts on the article.