H. Timothy Bunnell
Speech Process. Lab., A. I. duPont Inst., 1600 Rockland Rd., Wilmington, DE 19899
Steven Hoskins
Univ. of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716
James Polikoff
A. I. duPont Inst., Wilmington, DE 19899
Speech produced by ten talkers with cerebral palsy was studied. Talkers recorded semantically anomalous sentences of the form ``The N1 is Ving the N2'' where N1, N2, and V are single-syllable nouns and verbs (in the bisyllabic infinitive form) selected from lists of noun and verb target words. Listeners heard sentences over headphones and identified the target words in a closed response set task in which each target word had an associated set of four to six minimally different response alternatives (e.g., {boat, moat, vote, oat}). For the present analyses, only verb targets that differed in the final consonant of the root word (e.g., waiting, wading, waning, waving, weighing) have been examined. Perceptual data were analyzed for percentage of incorrect responses and proportions of various types of errors (e.g., voicing/place/manner) per token. Acoustic analyses included measures of vowel and consonant durations, extent of VC and CV formant transitions, categorical measures of a variety of acoustic features such as presence/absence of voicing in the consonant constriction interval, nasalization, and laryngealization. Analyses completed on six of the ten talkers' data suggest that inappropriate presence/absence of voicing and laryngelization, and restricted F1 VC (but not CV) transitions are most predictive of perceptual errors. [Work supported by the Nemours Foundation.]