Race Identification in American English.

Purpose: This study examined the race identification of Southern American English speakers from two geographically distant regions in North Carolina. The purpose of this work is to explore how talkers' self-identified race, talker dialect region, and acoustic speech variables contribute to listener categorization of talker races.

Method: Two groups of listeners heard a series of /h/-vowel-/d/ (/hVd/) words produced by Black and White talkers from East and West North Carolina, respectively.

Implementing Dialogic Reading Intervention Through Community-Based Participatory Research: A Tutorial.

Purpose This work describes community-based participatory research (CBPR) to support language and literacy development with Pre-K and kindergarten African American boys. Method The aim and goals of the project were designed using the CBPR model. Interventionists were trained with researcher-designed videos.

Effect of Competition, Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Race, and Sex on Southern American English Dialect Talkers' Sentence Recognition.

Background: Although numerous studies have examined regional and racial-ethnic labeling of talker identity, few have evaluated speech perception skills of listeners from the southern United States.

Purpose: The objective of the study was to examine the effect of competition, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), race, and sex on sentence recognition performance in talkers from the Southern American English dialect region.

Research Design: A four-factor mixed-measures design was used.

Evaluating Nasalance Values Among Bilingual Mandarin-English Speakers.

Objective: The goals of this research are (1) to establish normative nasalance values for bilingual Mandarin-English speakers and compare values to those of previously reported monolingual Mandarin speakers, and (2) to examine whether sex, age, dialect, and language proficiency affect levels of nasalance among Mandarin-English speakers in both English and Mandarin.

Design: All participants recorded the speech stimuli, constructed to include oral sentences, nasal sentences, oronasal sentences, and vowels /ɑ, i, u/ in Mandarin and English. Nasalance measurements were recorded using the Nasometer II 6450.

Nasometric Comparison Between Spanish-English Bilingual and English Monolingual Children.

Objective: It is well established in the literature that English diagnostic tests should not be directly applied to speakers whose primary language is Spanish. Normative nasalance data across word and sentence-level stimuli among Spanish-English bilingual children living in the United States have not been provided. The present study aims to (1) compare differences in nasalance between typically developing Spanish-English bilingual children and English-speaking monolingual children and (2) determine whether within-speaker nasalance differences exist in Spanish-English bilingual children when presented with English and Spanish speech stimuli.

Mechanisms of Vowel Variation in African American English.

Purpose: This research explored mechanisms of vowel variation in African American English by comparing 2 geographically distant groups of African American and White American English speakers for participation in the African American Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift.

Method: Thirty-two male (African American: n = 16, White American controls: n = 16) lifelong residents of cities in eastern and western North Carolina produced heed,hid,heyd,head,had,hod,hawed,whod,hood,hoed,hide,howed,hoyd, and heard 3 times each in random order. Formant frequency, duration, and acoustic analyses were completed for the vowels /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ɔ, u, ʊ, o, aɪ, aʊ, oɪ, ɝ/ produced in the listed words.

Lexical diversity in Parkinson's disease.

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative syndrome of the basal ganglia (BG) believed to disrupt cortical-subcortical pathways critical to motor, cognitive and expressive language function. Recent studies have shown subtle deficits in expressive language performance among individuals with PD even in the earliest stage of the disease. The objective of this study was to use measures of lexical diversity to examine expressive language performance during discourse production in a sample of individuals with PD.