TOPIC

Articulation research

Everything we have read on articulation. Each paper is summarised from the full article rather than its abstract, so the limitations are in there too, and the funding wherever the paper declares it.

582 PAPERS · PAGE 10 OF 12 · NEWEST FIRST

• SLPQualitative2025Speech and language therapists' insights into severity of speech sound disorders in children for developing the speech sound disorder severity construct.International journal of language & communication disordersTherapists do not use a single score to judge speech sound disorder severity. They weigh three main factors: how accurate the speech is, how intelligible it is in daily life, and how much the child feels burdened by their own speech.
• SLPRCT2025Closedness of Acoustic Coupling and Audiological Measures Are Associated with Individual Speech-in-Noise Benefit From Noise Reduction in Hearing Aids.Trends in hearingStrong directional and noise reduction processing improved speech-in-noise scores, but individual benefit varied widely. The most closed hearing aid coupling was the factor most closely related to benefit, although fitting choices confounded this, and audible contrast and audiogram were weaker factors; age was unrelated.
• SLPOther2025Translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the Brazilian version of the Down Syndrome Speech Intelligibility Survey.CoDASThe Down Syndrome Speech Intelligibility Survey was translated and adapted into Brazilian Portuguese. Expert judges rated it highly relevant. Parents in the pilot study struggled with technical terms and the frequency scale, leading to clarifications and examples being added to the final version.
• SLPOther2025Acoustically Transparent Hearing Aids Increase Physiological Markers of Listening Effort.Trends in hearingTransparent hearing aids increased physiological markers of listening effort in normal-hearing listeners, even though they did not significantly worsen self-reported effort. Speech intelligibility declined slightly, but the brain and eye responses showed a much larger increase in cognitive load.
• SLPOther2025Objectively Measuring Audiovisual Effects in Noise Using Virtual Human Speakers.Trends in hearingSeeing a virtual speaker's lip movements improved speech-in-noise scores and brain responses to the speech in young normal-hearing adults, but the study did not show the benefit grew as noise increased.
• SLPOther2025Influence of Noise Reduction on Ocular Markers of Listening Effort in Hearing Aid Users in Darkness and Ambient Light.Trends in hearingDirectional microphones with noise reduction improved speech understanding by about 35 percentage points in both light and dark. But pupil dilation, an objective marker of listening effort, only decreased significantly in ambient light. This means lighting conditions must be controlled when using eye-tracking to assess effort.
• SLPOther2025Towards an Agreed Labelling System and Protocol for the Diagnosis of Speech Sound Disorder Subtypes in the United Kingdom.International journal of language & communication disordersUK speech therapists agreed to use Dodd's classification for speech sound disorders, updating terms to include Childhood Apraxia of Speech. They designed a feasible diagnostic protocol prioritising the DEAP and Intelligibility in Context Scale to guide assessment within the NHS.
• SLPQualitative2025Exploring the Perceptions of Voice-Assisted Technology as a Tool for Speech and Voice Difficulties: Focus Group Study Among People With Parkinson Disease and Their Carers.JMIR rehabilitation and assistive technologiesPeople with Parkinson disease described using smart speakers as prompting them to speak louder and clearer to be understood. While this mimics speech therapy goals, participants reported frustration with device errors and distrust of privacy, suggesting technology alone is not a substitute for human therapy.
• SLPQualitative2025'To Know That You Are a Link in the Chain': A Realist Evaluation to Explore How Digital, Intensive, Parent-Implemented Interventions Work for Children With Speech Sound Disorder, Why, and for Whom.International journal of language & communication disordersParents and therapists described a three-stage journey for home-based speech therapy: building trust, tailoring practice to family life, and maintaining momentum. Digital tools were seen as helpful only when paired with active coaching and relationship-building, not as standalone replacements.
• SLPOther2025Methods of Diagnosing Speech Sound Disorders in Multilingual Children.Language, speech, and hearing services in schoolsAssessing multilingual children's speech in both home and community languages changed diagnosis for several children, and combining evidence can reduce overdiagnosis compared with English-only norm-referenced assessment.
• SLPOther2025Binaural Speech Intelligibility in Noise and Reverberation: Prediction of Group Performance for Normal-hearing and Hearing-impaired Listeners.Trends in hearingA new computer model accurately predicts how hearing loss and reverberation affect speech understanding in noise. It combines two existing approaches to handle complex listening conditions that neither previous model could solve alone, offering a better tool for assessing real-world communication difficulties.
• SLPOther2025Speech profile in patients with Huntington's Disease: cognitive, clinical, and sociodemographic correlations.CoDASEvery patient with Huntington's disease in this small study had impaired speech. Compared with matched controls, they had worse articulation, phonation and respiration, and speech problems related to motor severity. Use this for assessment awareness, not diagnostic certainty.
• SLPCase Report2025Speech Therapy in an Adult With Cleft Lip and Palate: A Clinical Case Study.Perspectives of the ASHA special interest groupsA 33-year-old woman with cleft palate underwent combined speech therapy and surgery for velopharyngeal insufficiency. Her consonant accuracy improved from 75% to 100% for targeted sounds. The case shows adult speech therapy can be effective, but cannot separate the impact of therapy from surgery.
• SLPOther2025Evaluation of Speaker-Conditioned Target Speaker Extraction Algorithms for Hearing-Impaired Listeners.Trends in hearingOne speaker-extraction algorithm consistently improved hearing-impaired listeners' speech recognition and reduced listening effort across noise levels, while a second algorithm offered no benefit. These gains were identical with and without hearing aid amplification, suggesting the algorithm does the work.
• SLPOther2025Listening Effort for Soft Speech in Quiet.Trends in hearingSoft speech in quiet was rated as requiring no effort only at 40 dB SPL on average. In normal-hearing adults, it was understandable at around 22 dB SPL but still felt effortful.
• SLPRCT2025Rapid Brain Adaptation to Hearing Amplification: A Randomized Crossover Trial of Personal Sound Amplification Products.Trends in hearingAfter three hours of use, older adults wearing high-end personal sound amplification devices reported less listening effort and showed a brain pattern linked to less effort in the hardest noise. This was a short lab test, not hearing aid evidence.
• SLPOther2025Associations Between Audiovisual Integration and Reading Comprehension in Autistic and Non-autistic School-Aged Children.Journal of autism and developmental disordersChildren who combined sight and sound information more readily had better reading comprehension. This was linked to their decoding and language comprehension, and it was the same in autistic and non-autistic school-age children.
• SLPPilot2025Psycholinguistic Variables and Spelling Accuracy for People with Logopenic Variant Primary Progressive Aphasia: A Cross-Sectional Study.AphasiologyIn 16 people with logopenic primary progressive aphasia, spelling accuracy varied by word features, not by age, education, or disease duration. Regular words were spelled more accurately than irregular words, and early-acquired, emotionally positive, and orthographically dense words were easier.
• SLPOther2025Objective Evaluation of a Deep Learning-Based Noise Reduction Algorithm for Hearing Aids Under Diverse Fitting and Listening Conditions.Trends in hearingDeep learning noise reduction in hearing aids significantly improved predicted speech intelligibility compared to traditional methods, especially when combined with beamforming. These benefits were strongest in steady noise and for side-coming speech, but the study used computer models rather than human listeners.
• SLPOther2025Unaided and Aided Speech Intelligibility in a Real and Virtual Acoustic Environment.Trends in hearingHearing aid benefit measured in a simulated living room matched that of standard clinical tests, suggesting current lab assessments are accurate for sentence recognition. However, hearing aid users with mild, sloping hearing loss showed little to no measurable benefit.
• SLPOther2025Masked-speech Recognition Using Human and Synthetic Cloned Speech.Trends in hearingOverall, synthetic voice clones were understood about as well as the human voices they copied, and listeners often could not tell them apart. Some individual voices differed, and nonsense sentences were harder than meaningful ones.
• SLPOther2025Influence of lexical and phonological variables on the production of verb tense in agrammatism.AphasiologyFor people with agrammatic aphasia, producing verb tenses is harder when the word has more sounds or is less common. Verbs that also exist as nouns (like 'walk') are produced more accurately. This suggests therapy should prioritize short, frequent, homonymous verbs.
• SLPOther2025Voice Familiarization Training Improves Speech Intelligibility and Reduces Listening Effort.Trends in hearingTraining normal-hearing adults to recognize unfamiliar voices for 10 to 60 minutes improved speech-in-noise accuracy by 13-15% and lowered self-reported effort. Pupillary responses only decreased after 60 minutes of training. These findings apply to healthy young adults, not hearing-impaired patients.
• SLPQualitative2025Exploring Speech and Language Therapists' Perspectives of Voice-Assisted Technology as a Tool for Dysarthria: Qualitative Study.JMIR rehabilitation and assistive technologiesSeven UK speech therapists found smart speakers useful for home practice because the devices give objective feedback without judgment. However, they reported clients became frustrated when the technology failed to understand their speech or timed out during exercises.
• SLPPilot2026Modulating Phonological Short-Term Memory in Stroke Survivors With Aphasia Using Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation.Neurorehabilitation and neural repairIn-phase brain stimulation improved short-term memory for sounds in people with aphasia, but only while the current was running. The effect vanished immediately after stimulation stopped, and the size of the improvement was small.
• SLPOther2026The Effects of Phonological Complexity on Word Production in French-Speaking Children.Language and speechFor French-speaking children aged 2 to 3, complex words are harder to produce, matching English-based indices. For ages 3 to 4, those indices lose sensitivity because most sounds are mastered, except alveopalatal fricatives, which remain difficult.
• SLPOther2026Child Consonant Harmony Revisited: The Role of Lexical Memory Constraints and Segment Repetition.Language and speechChildren producing words with different consonants often repeat the same consonant rather than just matching place. This suggests child consonant harmony is driven by memory constraints during word learning, not just articulatory simplification.
• SLPOther2026How Templatic Is Arabic Input to Children? The Role of Child-Directed-Speech in the Acquisition of Semitic Morpho-Phonology.Language and speechLebanese Arabic input to toddlers is less 'Semitic' than adult speech, with only 27% of frequent words having stable triliteral roots. This suggests children may not develop early sensitivity to word patterns, challenging assumptions from Hebrew.
• SLPOther2025Predictors of sentence recall performance in children with and without DLD: Complexity matters.Journal of child languageIn children with DLD, exact sentence repetition depended on working memory, morphology and phonological short-term memory, and harder sentences taxed these resources earlier than in typical peers. Morphology predicted ungrammatical recalls and tense errors in both groups.
• SLPCohort2025Consonant articulation accuracy in paediatric cochlear implant recipients.Clinical linguistics & phoneticsChildren with cochlear implants show variable speech accuracy. While most sounds improved over historical norms, the nasal /m/ was unexpectedly inaccurate, often substituted with an alveolar /n/. This specific error pattern suggests clinicians should not assume all early-acquired sounds are mastered in this population.
• SLPOther2025Dimensionality Reduction in Lingual Articulation of Vowels: Evidence From Lax Vowels in Northern Anglo-English.Language and speechStandard two-point measures of tongue position in ultrasound studies are too reductive and generate systematic errors. The study recommends measuring three specific points: the tongue root and the anterior and posterior tongue dorsum to accurately capture vowel contrasts.
• SLPOther2025Relationships Between Subjective and Objective Measures of Listening Accuracy and Effort in an Online Speech-in-Noise Study.Ear and hearingListening effort ratings distinguish people with hearing loss from those with normal hearing across most noise levels, whereas speech accuracy scores only separate them in very noisy conditions. Effort measures capture everyday listening difficulty better than accuracy alone.
• SLPOther2025Auditory and Semantic Processing of Speech-in-Noise in Autism: A Behavioral and EEG Study.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism ResearchAutistic adults judged sentences as accurately as non-autistic adults in quiet and noise, but their brains showed weaker early speech tracking and delayed semantic processing. They also did not flexibly adjust brain responses to different background noises.
• SLPOther2025Effect of Speech Material and Scoring Method on Psychometric Curves for Cochlear Implant Users and Typical Hearing Listeners.Ear and hearingFor cochlear implant users, the Matrix test is much harder than the DIN test, especially if scored by sentence. Use word scoring for Matrix sentences to get accurate results. The DIN test with digit scoring offers the best sensitivity for tracking progress in this group.
• SLPCohort2026Phonemic simplification in apraxia of speech and aphasia with phonemic paraphasia.Clinical linguistics & phoneticsPhonemic simplification occurs in both apraxia of speech and aphasia with phonemic paraphasia. It is not specific to apraxia and cannot reliably distinguish the two groups. Severity of speech errors drives simplification more than diagnosis.
• SLPCohort2025Effects of Preoperative Factors on the Learning Curves of Postlingual Cochlear Implant Recipients.Ear and hearingAverage speech recognition scores after cochlear implantation improved from 51% to 85%, with a median 1.5 months to reach 80% of gain. Preoperative factors could not reliably predict outcomes, explaining only 2%, 10%, or 19% of differences.
• SLPOther2025Seeing a Talker's Mouth Reduces the Effort of Perceiving Speech and Repairing Perceptual Mistakes for Listeners With Cochlear Implants.Ear and hearingFor cochlear implant users, seeing the talker's mouth reduced listening effort and speech errors, especially when repairing a missing word. Typical-hearing listeners showed only brief, small effort effects.
• SLPOther2025Morphological awareness and reading skill for deaf and hearing adults.Journal of deaf studies and deaf educationFor deaf adults reading English, morphological awareness strongly predicts reading comprehension, but only for those who already have high morphological skills. Hearing readers rely more on phonological awareness. This suggests deaf readers use visual word parts to infer meaning, not sound.
• SLPOther2026Sources of Intelligibility of Distant Languages: An Empirical Study.Language and speechPeople can guess meanings of words in unknown languages better than chance. Success relies on linguistic affinity, cognates, phonological similarity, and word length agreement. Even distant languages like Japanese and Hindi yielded above-chance guesses, proving zero intelligibility is incorrect.
• SLPSystematic Review2025Phonological Awareness Skills in Thai-Speaking Children: A Scoping Review.International journal of language & communication disordersPhonological awareness strongly predicts reading in Thai-speaking children. Initial phoneme identification is the most useful screening task. However, no standardised test covers all skills, and current assessments miss speech sound disorders, limiting clinical utility.
• SLPPilot2025Daily-Life Fatigue Among Adolescents Who Are Hard of Hearing: An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study.Ear and hearingAdolescents who are hard of hearing did not report more daily fatigue than peers with typical hearing. Fatigue levels changed based on whether it was school or summer, but the groups did not differ in how tired they felt.
• SLPCohort2025Characterizing the Relationship Between the Intelligibility in Context Scale and Transcription Intelligibility in Typically Developing English-Speaking Children Between Ages 2;6 and 9;11.American journal of speech-language pathologyParent ratings of how well a child is understood do not match objective tests of speech clarity in typical children. The two measures capture different things, so a parent's high rating should not be read as proof the child's speech is clearly understood by strangers.
• SLPOther2026Perceptual Style-Shifting Across Singing and Speech: Music Activates Pop Song English for NZ Listeners.Language and speechNew Zealand listeners expect an American-influenced accent when hearing singing. They identify ambiguous vowels as sung rather than spoken, and process American voices faster than local voices when music is present.
• SLPOther2026The Role of Phonological Factors in the Processing of Polish Phonotactics.Language and speechPolish adults judged made-up words more possible when final consonant pairs followed Polish sound rules and existed in Polish. Vowel type also mattered: /a/ and /ɛ/ increased acceptance, while /ɔ/ was judged fastest but accepted least often.
• SLPCohort2025Consonant Proficiency in Children With and Without Hearing Impairment Assessed With Profiles of Early Expressive Phonological Skills - Swedish (PEEPS-SE).International journal of language & communication disordersChildren with hearing impairment had fewer established consonants at 24 and 30 months. Their consonant accuracy was lower at 24 months, but at 30 months it did not separate the groups.
• SLPOther2026Exploring the Predictive Role of Lexical Stress Discrimination in the Phonological and Grammatical Skills of Teenagers With Down Syndrome.Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDRWord stress discrimination did not predict phonological scores in teenagers with Down syndrome, but it predicted better grammar scores.
• SLPSurvey2025Can Structured Literacy Be a New Dimension for Interprofessional Practice Between Teachers and SLTs? Perceptions of Irish SLTs on Their Capacity and Practices in Supporting Children With Literacy Difficulties.International journal of language & communication disordersMost Irish SLTs see literacy work as within their scope but feel unprepared for it. Only 13% felt confident working in literacy, and none said their degree prepared them. They value consulting with teachers but rarely find it feasible to team-teach or work inside classrooms.
• SLPOther2025Voice-Assisted Technology as a Potential Tool for Addressing Speech and Voice Concerns Experienced by People With Parkinson's Disease and Other Conditions Presenting With Dysarthria: A Scoping Review.International journal of language & communication disordersOff-the-shelf smart speakers may encourage clearer, louder speech in people with dysarthria, but recognition is unreliable and varies by severity. Therapists should use them cautiously for home practice, not as assessment tools, watching for frustration and bias.
• SLPOther2025The Cleveland Family Speech and Reading Study: A Review of Long-Term Outcomes Linking Phenotypes and Genotypes for Speech Sound Disorders.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHRAdolescents with persistent speech sound disorders or childhood apraxia of speech showed significant reading and language deficits compared to peers. Even those whose speech errors resolved continued to struggle with literacy, indicating that speech outcomes do not guarantee reading success.
• SLPOther2025Motor-Speech Performance in Very Old Speakers: Associations With Physio-Anatomical and Cognitive-Linguistic Factors.International journal of language & communication disordersVery old speakers (80+) showed slower speech rates than younger adults. Denture wearers and those with higher education performed slower on rapid repetition tasks. Better language skills predicted faster speech. Use these norms to distinguish typical aging from neurological decline in very old clients.