• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.21-28
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• 2022

Previous studies have provided important findings on children's speech production development. They have revealed that essentially all aspects of children's speech shift toward adult-like characteristics over time. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the perceptual aspects of children's speech tokens, as perceived by naive adult listeners. To fill the gap between children's production and adults' perception, we conducted cross-sectional perceptual studies of monosyllabic words produced by children aged two to six years. Monosyllabic words in the consonant-vowel-consonant form were extracted from children's speech samples and presented aurally to five listener groups (20 listeners in total). Generally, the agreement rate between children's production of target words and adult listeners' responses increases with age. The perceptual responses to tokens produced by two-year old children induced the largest discrepancies and the responses to words produced by six years olds agreed the most. Further analyses were conducted to identify the sources of disagreement, including the types of segments and syllable structure. This study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the development and perception of children's speech across age groups.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2020

The perceptual assimilation of a nonnative phonological contrast can change with linguistic experience, resulting in naïve listeners and novice second language (L2) learners potentially assimilating the members of a nonnative contrast to different native (L1) categories. While it has been shown that this sort of change can affect the discrimination of the nonnative contrast, it has not been tested whether such a change could have consequences for the production of the contrast. In this study, L1 speakers of Mandarin Chinese who were (1) naïve to Korean, (2) novice L2 learners, or (3) advanced L2 learners participated in a Korean non-word repetition task using word-initial sibilants. The initial CVs of their repetitions were then played to L1 Korean listeners who categorized the initial consonant. The naïve talkers were more likely to repeat an initial /s^ha/ as an affricate, whereas the L2 learners repeated it as a fricative, in line with how these listeners have been shown to assimilate Korean sibilants to Mandarin categories. This result suggests that errors in the production of new words presented auditorily to nonnative listeners may be driven by how they perceptually assimilate the nonnative sounds, emphasizing the need to better understand what drives changes in perceptual assimilation that accompany increased linguistic experience.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.117-124
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• 2011

This study investigated the effects of the types of noise and signal to noise ratios (SNRs) on speech intelligibility of an adult with dysartrhia. Speech intelligibility was judged by 48 naive listeners using a word transcription task. Repeated measures design was used with the types of noise (multi-talker babble/environmental noise) and SNRs (0, +10 dB, +20 dB) as within-subject factors. The dependent measure was the percentage of correctly transcribed words. Results revealed that two main effects were statistically significant. Listeners performed significantly worse in the multi-talker babble condition than the environmental noise condition, and they performed significantly better at higher levels of SNRs. The current results suggested that the multi-talker babble and lower level of SNRs decreased the speech intelligibility of adults with dysarthria, and speech-language pathologists should consider environmental factors such as the types of noise and SNRs in evaluating speech intelligibility of adults with dysarthria.