Immediate compensation in bite-block speech.

An experiment was conducted to examine whether a bite block affects the latency and/or the quality of spoken vowels. The results suggest that vowels spoken with the bite block and vowels spoken normally were (1) of the same latency, that is, the same time elapsed between visual presentation and initiation of response; and (2) of the same quality, and that is, the acoustic measures of the vowels did not differ substantially. Moreover, there was minimal evidence of improvement in either latency or quality with practice, and minimal evidence of an effect of time pressure on the quality of bite-block vowels. A detailed consideration is given to the implications of these and other findings for two recent perspectives on vowel production.