Three experimental groups consisting of ten four-year-olds, ten 11-year-olds, and ten adults were presented with tape-recorded voiceless stop + vowel syllables and subsyllabic segments isolated from the syllables by electronic gating. Subjects were instructed to identify each syllable. Comparisons of the performances of subjects in the three age groups permitted description of maturational influences on the ability to utilize coarticulatory cues in speech perception. The responses of the four-year-olds indicated that they were able to process coarticulatory information for the identification of consonants and vowels from subsyllabic segments. However, their ability to utilize these cues was more limited than that of 11-year-olds and adults. The four-year-old children experienced particular difficulty in the use of aperiodic information. The relative distribution of perceptual cues throughout the portions of the CV syllables was similar for all age groups. The overall phoneme identification accuracy levels of the 11-year-olds appeared to be established at an adult accuracy level. However, differences among all three age groups in regard to consistency of responses, markedness of substitution error preferences, and magnitude of the influence of acoustic stimulus duration on response accuracy suggest that strategies for estimation of phoneme identity may undergo further modification beyond the 11-year-old level before attaining the characteristics of the adult decoding process.

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Forty speech‐language pathologists listened to randomised recorded samples of the ‘Grandfather Passage’ read aloud by 10 normal elderly male adults, 10 normal young male adults and 6 dysarthric subjects. The speech samples were rated according to the 38 dimensions devised by Darley and colleagues for the study of the dysarthrias. The ratings of the speech of the older adults fell significantly further from ‘normal’ on a seven‐point continuum than those given to the young adults on nine of the dimensions. The most apparent young/old differences involved laryngeal dimensions. Ratings for the normal geriatric subjects resembled those of the dysarthric groups in some respects. Several instances of misclassification of the normal elderly individuals as ‘dysarthric’ were also observed.

Ten normal adult speakers produced the alveolar consonants /t, d, n, s, z/ in VCV bisyllables embedded in a carrier sentence. The stimulus consonants were produced in the symmetrical contexts /j/ and /a/ under voiced and whispered speaking conditions. Spectrographic analysis of steady-state portions of vowels and closure and constriction durations for consonants revealed significant durational differences associated with speaking conditions for /t, d, s, z, i, a/. Durational effects for /n/ were nonsignificant. Implications with regard to the Schwartz hypothesis [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 51, 2025–2029 (1972)] that individuals prolong air-arresting articulatory gestures in whispered speech are discussed.