The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis) ability across languages. However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children's production units. A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of age. The technique of ultrasound imaging allowed for comparing the articulatory foundations of children's coarticulatory patterns. Four behavioral tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness from large to small units and expressive vocabulary were also administered. Generalized additive modeling revealed strong interactions between children's vocabulary and phonological awareness with coarticulatory patterns. Greater knowledge of sub-lexical units was associated with lower intra-syllabic coarticulation degree and greater differentiation of articulatory gestures for individual segments. This interaction was mostly nonlinear: an increase in children's phonological proficiency was not systematically associated with an equivalent change in coarticulation degree. Similar findings were drawn between vocabulary and coarticulatory patterns. Overall, results suggest that the process of developing spoken language fluency involves dynamical interactions between cognitive and speech motor domains. Arguments for an integrated-interactive approach to skill development are discussed.

Trying to pay special attention to dominant, characteristic and differential species, we make a synthesis of vegetal associations of class Lemnetea mentioned in Romania; they were presented from a cenotaxonomical, ecological, syndynamical point of view, as well as the structural and floristical composition.

Until at least the end of adolescence, children articulate speech differently than adults. While this discrepancy is often attributed to the maturation of the speech motor system, we sought to demonstrate that the development of spoken language fluency is shaped by complex interactions across motor and cognitive domains. In this study, we specifically tested for a relationship between reading proficiency and coarticulatory organization, a fundamental correlate of spoken language fluency, used for both reading aloud and conversational speech. We conducted reading assessments and ultrasoundbased kinematic measurements of intersegmental coarticulation in a group of 32 German children. In German, a language which supports rather consistent grapheme-to-phoneme relationships, reading aloud uses similar phoneme to speech motor gesture correspondences as well as coarticulatory mechanisms as conversational speech. Using general additive modeling we found that better readers exhibited lower degrees of intersegmental coarticulation than poorer readers. This study therefore provides evidence that reading proficiency interacts with coarticulatory patterns in beginning readers. It suggests that in addition to maturational factors, interactions between speech motor ability and other co-developing skills must be considered to fully account for spoken language fluency.

F3 is know to exhibit higher values in darker varieties of /l/. This contrast has been attributed to differences in closure fronting and front cavity configuration. In this paper we propose a possible alternative explanation for higher F3 in dark /l/, based on sensitivity functions. Both allophones have an apical gesture, but differ in their tongue dorsum gestures: clear /l/ has a raising and fronting gesture, while dark /l/ has postdorsum retraction towards the uvular region. We propose that the gestural composition of dark /l/ creates two constriction sites in the vocal tract that correspond to the two maxima of the F3 sensitivity function, thus resulting in higher values for dark /l/. To address these predictions we analyzed both acoustic and articulatory data from 6 speakers of the Wisconsin XRMB database. Articulatory strategies vary both inter and intra-speakers. High F3 values are obtained with both elevated tongue tip and retracted postdorsum, while low F3 values, have small values of postdorsum retraction. Overall results show that, despite inter-speaker variability in vocal tract shape and articulatory strategies, F3 is positively correlated with tongue dorsum retraction.

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