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Previous work on children's acquisition of complex sequences points to a tendency for affricates to be acquired before clusters, but there is no clear evidence of a difference in order of acquisition between clusters with /s/ that violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), such as /s/ followed by stop in onset position, and other clusters that obey the SSP. One problem with studies that have compared the acquisition of SSP-obeying and SSP-violating clusters is that the component sounds in the two types of sequences were different. This paper examines the acquisition of initial /s/-stop and stop-/s/ sequences by sixty Greek children aged 2 through 5 years. Results showed greater accuracy for the /s/-stop relative to the stop-/s/ sequences, but no difference in accuracy between /ts/, which is usually analyzed as an affricate in Greek, and the other stop-/s/ sequences. Moreover, errors for the /s/-stop sequences and /ts/ primarily involved stop substitutions, whereas errors for /ps/ and /ks/ were more variable and often involved fricative substitutions, a pattern which may have a perceptual explanation. Finally, /ts/ showed a distinct temporal pattern relative to the stop-/s/ clusters /ps/ and /ks/, similar to what has been reported for productions of Greek adults. (Contains 5 figures and 6 tables.)

This study uses the technique of electropalatography to investigate lingualpalatal contact patterns during the production of the consonants /t, k, s, x, n, l, / by four Greek speakers with profound hearing impairment and with differences in the intelligibility of their speech. The study provides a detailed description of their tongue-palate contact patterns and discusses some of the articulatory parameters that differentiate consonantal articulation between speakers with normal hearing and hearing impairment. Deviant patterns were found for the majority of consonants and involved substitutions, distortions, and epenthesis of segments. The segments that deviated from normal for all speakers were the fricative /s/, the palatal obstruents [c] and [c?], and the tap [ ]. Significant differences in articulatory variability during consonantal production were also found. The study discusses deviant patterns in consonant production in relation to the differences in intelligibility among the speakers and with reference to data from previous studies.

This study investigates the development of Greek vowel reduction across different prosodic positions (stressed, pre-stressed, post-stressed), examining normative data from 72 participants aged 3 years to adulthood and balanced for gender. Participants performed a delayed repetition task, producing real trisyllabic words with the vowels [i, ε, ɐ, o, u] examined in the second syllable. Measurements included relative vowel duration, normalized acoustic vowel space areas, and Euclidean distances of vowels from the centroid of the acoustic space. Our findings show that changes in speech motor control, system stiffness, and stress marking with age, along with children's prosody sensitivity, contributed to several developmental milestones: the completion of the developmental trajectory of relative vowel duration and temporal vowel reduction at early adolescence; the attainment of adult-like spatial vowel characteristics and their reduction at preschool age; and the early acquisition of the prosodic strength of the stress conditions, leading to vowel reduction from the stressed to pre-stressed to post-stressed conditions. The correlation strength between temporal and spatial vowel reduction across ages revealed age-related differences in spatiotemporal speech organization, with significant gender-related differences observed only in vowel space areas, where females exhibited larger areas possibly related to sociophonetic factors. Intrinsic vowel duration appeared from age 3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fricatives, and especially sibilants, are very frequently misarticulated by speakers with hearing loss. Misarticulations can result in phonemic contrast weakening or loss, compromising intelligibility. The present study focuses on the examination of acoustic characteristics of the Greek alveolar fricative /s/, an articulatorily demanding sound, produced by young adult speakers with profound hearing impairment and with normal hearing. An array of variables was examined using mixed-effects and random forest models aiming to assess the effectiveness of various measures in differentiating hearing-impaired and normal-hearing /s/ production. Significant differences were found in spectral and amplitude measures, but not in temporal measures. In hearing-impaired speech, spectral slope and RMS amplitude had significantly lower values, indicating a more distributed spectrum, suggestive of decreased flow velocity through the fricative constriction. Also, a trend for concentration of energy at lower frequencies was observed suggesting more posterior fricative articulation than normal. Moreover, measures capturing the variation of frequency and amplitude over time revealed different patterns of sibilance development across time than normal, denoting the production of a less well-formed or less sibilant /s/ by speakers with hearing impairment. The investigation of contextual effects on /s/ in hearing-impaired speech showed increased spectral variance, negative skewness and lower kurtosis in the labial (rounded) context /u/ in relation to the nonlabial contexts /i/ and /a/, indicating a more diffuse, less compact spectrum with concentration at high frequencies. Findings are discussed in relation to previous literature on fricative production by speakers with hearing impairment and normal hearing in Greek and other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hearing loss affects both speech perception and production with detrimental effects on various speech characteristics including coarticulatory dynamics. The aim of the present study is to explore consonant-to-vowel (C-to-V) and vowel-to-vowel (V-to-V) coarticulation in magnitude, direction and temporal extent in the speech of young adult male and female speakers of Greek with normal hearing (NH) and hearing impairment (HI). Nine intelligible speakers with profound HI, using conventional hearing aids, and five speakers with NH produced /pV1CV2/ disyllables, with the point vowels /i, a, u/ and the consonants /p, t, s/, stressed either on the first or the second syllable. Formant frequencies F1 and F2 were measured in order to examine C-to-V effects at vowel midpoint and V-to-V effects at vowel onset, midpoint and offset. The acoustic and statistical analyses revealed similarities but also significant differences regarding coarticulatory patterns of the two groups. Interestingly, prevalence of anticipatory coarticulation effects in alveolar contexts was observed for speakers with HI. Findings are interpreted on account of possible differences in articulation strategies between the two groups and with reference to current coarticulatory models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates spatio-temporal variability during the production of the lingual consonants /t, k, s, x, n, l, ▒/ by four Greek speakers with profound hearing impairment and with differences in the intelligibility of their speech. It examines important factors that have been documented to influence intelligibility, i.e. durational variability, articulatory (token-to-token) variability, and coarticulatory patterns. The technique of electropalatography was used to record tongue-palate contact patterns during consonant production in order to examine differences in articulatory variability among speakers and in V-to-C coarticulatory effects. The study reports durational differences in consonant production between speakers with hearing impairment and normal hearing and investigates the relationship between token-to-token variability in tongue-palate contact patterns and duration. The results indicate a negative relationship between duration and variability, i.e. as segmental duration decreases there is an increase in variability in tongue-palate contact patterns. Significant speaker-dependent differences in duration, articulatory variability and coarticulatory patterns are reported and are discussed in relation to differences in intelligibility among the speakers with hearing impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]