Auditory Discrimination Ability and Consistency of Articulation of /r/

Abstract

Twenty-seven subjects were drawn from the case loads of three public school speech clinicians, on the basis that /r/ was the only phoneme missing. Minimum chronological age was eight years. Four tests of auditory discrimination were administered to each subject, including three new tests; a list of 30 monosyllabic words, a test of instantaneous judgment, a test of comparison from tapes. The ability to discriminate between paired auditory stimuli presented by another speaker is unrelated to the ability to judge one''s own speech productions. The ability measured by the traditional tests of speech-sound discrimination is not related to consistency of articulation. The ability to judge one''s own speech productions is significantly related to the consistency of articulation.