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Purpose:This letter to the editor discusses recommendations and publicity from a recent article by Gallena and Pinto (2021) that appeared in Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups.We contextualize the recommendations made by Gallena and Pinto that young women actively suppress their use of vocal fry, a normal part of linguistic and sociolinguistic variation, to make themselves more marketable to employers who discriminate on the basis of vocal fry use. By reviewing research on vocal fry, social evaluation, and linguistic discrimination, we show how this recommendation is fundamentally flawed and how it perpetuates sexist tropes about language use. We argue that this is particularly dismaying when publicized by a journal of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, which aims to promote the universal use of language, in all its forms, as a human right.Conclusions:People stigmatize linguistic differences to devalue those who have less power. Vocal fry is not a problem; the problem is absurd sexist judgments against those who use vocal fry. The recommendations made in Gallena and Pinto (2021) and Perspectives'publicity about those recommendations both contribute to sexist linguistic discrimination. Rather than recommending that victims of sexism change their behavior to suit the biased views of others, we should use our energy to eradicate the underlying sexism.

Background: This paper examines three methods for providing ratings of within-category detail in children's productions of /s/ and /ʃ/.Method: A group of listeners (n = 61) participated in a rating task in which a forced-choice phoneme identification task was followed by one of three measures of phoneme goodness: visual analog scaling, direct magnitude estimation, or a Likert-scale judgment.Results: All three types of ratings were similarly correlated with sounds' acoustic characteristics. Visual analog scaling and Likert-scale judgments had higher intrarater reliability than did direct magnitude estimation. Moreover, both of them elicited a wider range of judgments than did direct magnitude estimation.Conclusion: Based on our evaluation, Likert-scale judgments and visual analog scaling are equally useful tasks for eliciting within-category judgments. Of these two, visual analog scaling may be preferable because it allows for more distinct levels of response.

There is a substantial body of literature showing that men and women speak differently and that these differences are endemic to the speech signal. However, the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the integration of social category perception and language are still poorly understood. Speaker attributes such as emotional state, age, sex, and race have often been treated in the literature as dissociable, but perceptual systems for social categories demonstrably rely on interdependent cognitive processes. We introduce a diversity scienceframework for evaluating the existing literature on gender and speech perception, arguing that differences in beliefs about gender may be defined as differences in beliefs about differences. Treating individual, group, and societal level contrasts in ideological patterns as phenomenologically distinctive, we enumerate six ideological arenas which define claims about gender and examine the literature for treatment of these issues. We argue that both participants and investigators predictably show evidence of differences in ideological attitudes toward the normative definition of persons. The influence of social knowledge on linguistic perception therefore occurs in the context of predictable variation in both attention and inattentionto people and the distinguishing features which mark them salient as kinds. We link experiences of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility with ideological variation regarding the significance of physiological, linguistic, and social features, concluding that gender ideologies are implicated both in linguistic processing and in social judgments of value between groups. We conclude with a summary of the key gaps in the current literature and recommendations for best practices studies that may use in future investigations of socially meaningful variation in speech perception. This article is categorized under:Linguistics > Language in Mind and BrainPsychology > LanguageLinguistics > Language AcquisitionPsychology > Perception and Psychophysics A graph compares the spectral mean frequency of two sibilants in American English speaking men and women, demonstrating that there is a range of values which are associated with different segments depending on the talker's gender. The chart illustrates relationships between three approaches to describing gendered speech. An essentialist account of gendered speech, which recruits only physiological distinctions cannot explain how perceptual ambiguity is resolved. Nor can a social constructionist account, which additionally recruits language‐specific and socially meaningful speech cues. Our proposed diversity science model describes the recognition of gendered speech as mediated by listener recognition of gendered social categories. These social categories are underspecified, but can be partially defined by metaphysical beliefs about the realness, desirability, conventionality, agency, and locality of social distinctions.

The ultimate goal for speech-language pathologists is to align the linguistic behaviors of the clients whom we serve with those of the ambient language of the community. In light of this goal, it is critical that change in speech production is measured accurately. In this article, we review the use of visual analog scaling as a measure of change in children’s speech production. Following a discussion of this tool, the authors consider the clinical utility of this type of measurement.

Objective Audible nasal emission is a common speech distortion observed in persons with cleft palate. This study examined the validity and reliability of perceptual judgments of audible nasal emission using interval scaling and magnitude estimation techniques.Participants Speech samples were collected from six adolescents with repaired cleft palate, all of whom demonstrated audible nasal emission. A total of 31 adults performed rating tasks in which they judged the severity of audible nasal emission in speech samples.Measures Occurrences of audible nasal emission in speech samples were identified using visual and auditory inspection. Using an acoustic modification technique, samples were digitally modified to amplify perceived occurrences of audible nasal emission to create three stimulus conditions. The original recording of the speech samples served as a control condition. The severity of audible nasal emission in the samples was judged by multiple listeners using interval scaling and magnitude estimation without a modulus. Statistical analysis included analysis of variance, regression, and curve-fitting methods.Results Magnitude-estimation ratings demonstrated stronger evidence of validity and reliability than interval scaling. A curvilinear relationship was found between the sets of ratings.Conclusions The results of this study suggest that audible nasal emission may be a prothetic or ratio-level perceptual continua. Listeners should consider using magnitude estimation or other ratio-based methods for perceptual judgments of audible nasal emission.

Objective: To examine the influence of speech perception, cognition, and implicit phonological learning on articulation skills of children with velocardiofacial syndrome (VCFS) and children with cleft palate or velopharyngeal dysfunction (VPD).Design: Cross-sectional group experimental design.Participants: Eight children with VCFS and five children with nonsyndromic cleft palate or VPD.Methods and Measures: All children participated in a phonetic inventory task, speech perception task, implicit priming nonword repetition task, conversational sample, nonverbal intelligence test, and hearing screening. Speech tasks were scored for percentage of phonemes correctly produced. Group differences and relations among measures were examined using nonparametric statistics.Results: Children in the VCFS group demonstrated significantly poorer articulation skills and lower standard scores of nonverbal intelligence compared with the children with cleft palate or VPD. There were no significant group differences in speech perception skills. For the implicit priming task, both groups of children were more accurate in producing primed nonwords than unprimed nonwords. Nonverbal intelligence and severity of velopharyngeal inadequacy for speech were correlated with articulation skills.Conclusions: In this study, children with VCFS had poorer articulation skills compared with children with cleft palate or VPD. Articulation difficulties seen in the children with VCFS did not appear to be associated with speech perception skills or the ability to learn new phonological representations. Future research should continue to examine relationships between articulation, cognition, and velopharyngeal dysfunction in a larger sample of children with cleft palate and VCFS.

The notion that an individual's sexual orientation can be ascertained through distinctive speech patterns abounds in popular culture. This article reviews the small but growing body of literature examining whether sexual orientation is conveyed and perceived through speech. These studies show some individuals speak in a way that conveys their sexual orientation to naïve listeners. Contrary to many popular-culture stereotypes, the phonetic parameters that convey gay, lesbian, or bisexual identities are not whole-sale approximation of opposite sex norms, nor does the perception of sexual orientation through speech appear to involve the simple perception of the sex typicality of a talker's voice. In addition to reviewing these studies, this article discusses their implications for research on language acquisition, language processing, and sociolinguistics.

While young children’s ability to use dynamic acoustic information to categorize speech sounds has been studied in some detail [Nittrouer, J. Phon. 20, 1–32 (1992)], relatively little is known about their ability to use dynamic information for word recognition. This study investigates whether preschool children could use dynamic acoustic information to identify familiar words with missing consonants or vowels. A gated series [Elliot etal., Percept. Psychophys. 42, 150–157 (1987)] was used to examine young children’s identification of familiar CVC words with missing final consonants; similarly, a silent center series [Fox etal., J. Speech Hear. Res. 35, 892–902 (1992)] was used to examine identification of CVC words with missing vowels. Eighteen typically developing children aged three to five were tested. It was found that even the youngest children did remarkably well at recognizing words with missing final consonants, even at the longest gate when the consonant was deleted 40 ms before stop closure. By contrast, the children had more difficulty with the silent center series, with some children being unable to perform the task. Results will be presented also for a second set of gating and silent center tasks, in which a picture‐pointing response, rather than a spoken response, was used.

An acoustic study of patterns of intonation and phrase‐final lengthening was completed for one aphasic patient, referred to as Nick. Nick, who is technically classified as a Broca’s aphasic with a large left hemisphere lesion, exhibits an exceptional pattern of language breakdown in that his segmental output has been reduced to the syllable [thopen oh˜]. The results of this study show that the range of Nick’s fundamental frequency is within normal range, while his patterns of phrase‐final lengthening are abnormal. This finding is interpreted within the framework of current theory on prosody, which claims that intonation is composed of two distinct components: Prosodic structure (which conditions phrase‐final lengthening) and tonal melody [J. Pierrehumbert and M. Beckman, Phonology 3 (1986)]. Nick’s abnormal patterns of phrase‐final lengthening are indicative of a breakdown in the prosodic structure component of intonation, while his intact fundamental frequency range illustrates an intact tonal melody component. Nick’s selective impairment of prosodic structure provides further evidence that the two components of intonation are processed by different mechanisms, a claim suggested in previous work [D. Van Lancker and J. Sidtis, J. Speech Hear. Res. 35, 936–970 (1992)]. [Work supported by NIH.]

Several cationic porphyrins are known to bind to DNA by intercalate and outside binding modes. This study identifies the 2 and trans isomers of bis(N-methyl-4-phridiniumyl)diphenyl porphyrln as DNA intercalators based on evidence from a DNA topoisomerase I assay. Moreover, both isomers are shown to be potent photosensitizers of DNA, inducing multiple S1 nuclease sensitive breaks in the phosphodiester backbone. Porphyrin-lnduced photodamage in DNA was also shown to be quantitatively dependent upon ionic strength and to inhibit the action of restriction endonucleases. The results indicate that these porphyrins can be useful probes of DNA structure and have potential as DNA-targeted photosensitizers.