Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research recent issues

Word Learning Processes in Children With Cochlear Implants [Article]

Walker, E. A., McGregor, K. K. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

To determine whether 3 aspects of the word learning process—fast mapping, retention, and extension—are problematic for children with cochlear implants (CIs).

Method

The authors compared responses of 24 children with CIs, 24 age-matched hearing children, and 23 vocabulary-matched hearing children to a novel object noun training episode. Comprehension and production were measured immediately following training (fast mapping) as well as 1 day later (retention). Extension was measured in terms of the ability of the participants to identify new (untrained) exemplars.

Results

Compared with their hearing age-mates, children with CIs performed marginally more poorly on fast mapping as measured by the comprehension probe and more poorly on retention as measured by comprehension and production probes. The age-mates improved over the retention interval, but the children with CIs did not. Most of the children with CIs performed similarly to their age-mates on extension, but 2 children underextended, and 5 children failed to understand the task. Compared with younger vocabulary-matched peers, children with CIs did not differ at fast mapping, retention, or extension.

Conclusions

Children with CIs demonstrated deficits in word learning, with retention being especially problematic. Their learning did not differ from that of younger children with similarly sized vocabularies.

Effect of Perceptual Load on Semantic Access by Speech in Children [Article]

Jerger, S., Damian, M. F., Mills, C., Bartlett, J., Tye-Murray, N., Abdi, H. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

To examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children.

Method

Children (N = 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory–no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory–static face and audiovisual–dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load, and the multimodal task had a high load (i.e., respectively naming pictures displayed on a blank screen vs. below the talker's face on his T-shirt). Semantic content of distractors was manipulated to be related vs. unrelated to the picture (e.g., picture "dog" with distractors "bear" vs. "cheese"). If irrelevant semantic content manipulation influences naming times on both tasks despite variations in loads, Lavie's (2005) perceptual load model proposes that semantic access is independent of capacity-limited attentional resources; if, however, irrelevant content influences naming only on the cross-modal task (low load), the perceptual load model proposes that semantic access is dependent on attentional resources exhausted by the higher load task.

Results

Irrelevant semantic content affected performance for both tasks in 6- to 9-year-olds but only on the cross-modal task in 4- to 5-year-olds. The addition of visual speech did not influence results on the multimodal task.

Conclusion

Younger and older children differ in dependence on attentional resources for semantic access by speech.

Effects of Noise Suppression on Intelligibility: Experts' Opinions and Naive Normal-Hearing Listeners' Performance [Article]

Hilkhuysen, G. L. M., Gaubitch, N., Huckvale, M. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors investigated how well experts can adjust the settings of a commercial noise-reduction system to optimize the intelligibility for naive normal-hearing listeners.

Method

In Experiment 1, 5 experts adjusted parameters for a noise-reduction system while aiming to optimize intelligibility. The stimuli consisted of speech presented in car-cabin noise or babble at 5 different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In Experiment 2, the effects of processing with these settings were measured with 10 listeners undertaking an intelligibility test. In Experiment 3, the intelligibility of a broad range of settings was investigated with another 10 listeners to determine whether the experts' chosen settings could have been improved.

Results

Low Cronbach's alphas indicated that parameter settings varied considerably within and across experts. For very low SNRs, mean proposed settings differed from those for higher SNRs. The different settings had no significant effects on intelligibility for naive normal-hearing listeners. At high SNRs, the settings proposed by experts were found to deteriorate intelligibility. Superior intelligibility for naive normal-hearing listeners was achievable from settings other than the ones proposed by the experts.

Conclusion

While attempting to enhance noisy speech, experts may propose settings that deteriorate intelligibility for naive normal-hearing listeners.

Speechreading Development in Deaf and Hearing Children: Introducing the Test of Child Speechreading [Article]

Kyle, F. E., Campbell, R., Mohammed, T., Coleman, M., MacSweeney, M. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

In this article, the authors describe the development of a new instrument, the Test of Child Speechreading (ToCS), which was specifically designed for use with deaf and hearing children. Speechreading is a skill that is required for deaf children to access the language of the hearing community. ToCS is a deaf-friendly, computer-based test that measures child speechreading (silent lipreading) at 3 psycholinguistic levels: (a) Words, (b) Sentences, and (c) Short Stories. The aims of the study were to standardize the ToCS with deaf and hearing children and to investigate the effects of hearing status, age, and linguistic complexity on speechreading ability.

Method

Eighty-six severely and profoundly deaf children and 91 hearing children participated. All children were between the ages of 5 and 14 years. The deaf children were from a range of language and communication backgrounds, and their preferred mode of communication varied.

Results

Speechreading skills significantly improved with age for both groups of children. There was no effect of hearing status on speechreading ability, and children from both groups showed similar performance across all subtests of the ToCS.

Conclusion

The ToCS is a valid and reliable assessment of speechreading ability in school-age children that can be used to measure individual differences in performance in speechreading ability.

Amplitude Rise Time Does Not Cue the /ba/-/wa/ Contrast for Adults or Children [Article]

Nittrouer, S., Lowenstein, J. H., Tarr, E. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

Previous research has demonstrated that children weight the acoustic cues to many phonemic decisions differently than do adults and gradually shift those strategies as they gain language experience. However, that research has focused on spectral and duration cues rather than on amplitude cues. In the current study, the authors examined amplitude rise time (ART; an amplitude cue) and formant rise time (FRT; a spectral cue) in the /ba/–/wa/ manner contrast for adults and children, and related those speech decisions to outcomes of nonspeech discrimination tasks.

Method

Twenty adults and 30 children (ages 4–5 years) labeled natural and synthetic speech stimuli manipulated to vary ARTs and FRTs, and discriminated nonspeech analogs that varied only by ART in an AX paradigm.

Results

Three primary results were obtained. First, listeners in both age groups based speech labeling judgments on FRT, not on ART. Second, the fundamental frequency of the natural speech samples did not influence labeling judgments. Third, discrimination performance for the nonspeech stimuli did not predict how listeners would perform with the speech stimuli.

Conclusion

Even though both adults and children are sensitive to ART, it was not weighted in phonemic judgments by these typical listeners.

The Effects of Data Reduction in Determining the Schedule of Voicing Acquisition in Young Children [Article]

Hitchcock, E. R., Koenig, L. L. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

In this study, multiple measures of voicing acquisition were used to evaluate the extent to which developmental patterns based on voice onset time (VOT) mean data differed from those based on token-by-token analyses in typically developing 2-year-olds.

Method

Multiple repetitions of words containing initial /b p d t/ were elicited from 10 English-speaking children biweekly for 4 months. VOT was measured for each stop. For each child, consonant, and recording session, means and ranges were obtained, as were measures of accuracy, discreteness, and overshoot calculated for session means and for individual tokens.

Results

The token-by-token analyses suggested lower accuracy and more category overlap than the session means and revealed an overshoot phase for all children. They also showed examples of both abrupt and gradual changes that were not always evident in the means. Measures of range, accuracy, discreteness, and overshoot all continued to change after statistically significant VOT differences were observed.

Conclusions

The findings suggest that some aspects of voicing development may not be evident in analyses that rely on VOT mean data and patterns of statistical significance. Token-by-token measures provide a more complete picture of stages of voicing development than those based solely on mean VOT values.

Effects of Prosody and Position on the Timing of Deictic Gestures [Article]

Rusiewicz, H. L., Shaiman, S., Iverson, J. M., Szuminsky, N. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors investigated the hypothesis that the perceived tight temporal synchrony of speech and gesture is evidence of an integrated spoken language and manual gesture communication system. It was hypothesized that experimental manipulations of the spoken response would affect the timing of deictic gestures.

Method

The authors manipulated syllable position and contrastive stress in compound words in multiword utterances by using a repeated-measures design to investigate the degree of synchronization of speech and pointing gestures produced by 15 American English speakers. Acoustic measures were compared with the gesture movement recorded via capacitance.

Results

Although most participants began a gesture before the target word, the temporal parameters of the gesture changed as a function of syllable position and prosody. Syllables with contrastive stress in the 2nd position of compound words were the longest in duration and also most consistently affected the timing of gestures, as measured by several dependent measures.

Conclusion

Increasing the stress of a syllable significantly affected the timing of a corresponding gesture, notably for syllables in the 2nd position of words that would not typically be stressed. The findings highlight the need to consider the interaction of gestures and spoken language production from a motor-based perspective of coordination.

Gaze Patterns and Audiovisual Speech Enhancement [Article]

Yi, A., Wong, W., Eizenman, M. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors sought to quantify the relationships between speech intelligibility (perception) and gaze patterns under different auditory–visual conditions.

Method

Eleven subjects listened to low-context sentences spoken by a single talker while viewing the face of one or more talkers on a computer display. Subjects either maintained their gaze at a specific distance (0°, 2.5°, 5°, 10°, and 15°) from the center of the talker's mouth (CTM) or moved their eyes freely on the computer display. Eye movements were monitored with an eye-tracking system, and speech intelligibility was evaluated by the mean percentage of correctly perceived words.

Results

With a single talker and a fixed point of gaze, speech intelligibility was similar for all fixations within 10° of the CTM. With visual cues from two talker faces and a speech signal from one of the talkers, speech intelligibility was similar to that of a single talker for fixations within 2.5° of the CTM. With natural viewing of a single talker, gaze strategy changed with speech-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For low speech-SNR, a strategy that brought the point of gaze directly to within 2.5° of the CTM was used in approximately 80% of trials, whereas in high speech-SNR it was used in only approximately 50% of trials.

Conclusions

With natural viewing of a single talker and high speech-SNR, subjects can shift their gaze between points on the talker's face without compromising speech intelligibility. With low-speech SNR, subjects change their gaze patterns to fixate primarily on points that are in close proximity to the talker's mouth. The latter strategy is essential to optimize speech intelligibility in situations where there are simultaneous visual cues from multiple talkers (i.e., when some of the visual cues are distracters).

Aerodynamic Profiles of Women With Muscle Tension Dysphonia/Aphonia [Article]

Gillespie, A. I., Gartner-Schmidt, J., Rubinstein, E. N., Abbott, K. V. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors aimed to (a) determine whether phonatory airflows and estimated subglottal pressures (est-P_sub) for women with primary muscle tension dysphonia/aphonia (MTD/A) differ from those for healthy speakers; (b) identify different aerodynamic profile patterns within the MTD/A subject group; and (c) determine whether results suggest new understanding of pathogenesis in MTD/A.

Method

Retrospective review of aerodynamic data collected from 90 women at the time of primary MTD/A diagnosis.

Results

Aerodynamic profiles were significantly different for women with MTD/A as compared with healthy speakers. Five distinct profiles were identified: (a) normal flow, normal est-P_sub; (b) high flow, high est-P_sub; (c) low flow, normal est-P_sub; (d) normal flow, high est-P_sub; and (e) high flow, normal est-P_sub.

Conclusions

This study is the first to identify distinct subgroups of aerodynamic profiles in women with MTD/A and to quantitatively identify a clinical phenomenon sometimes described in association with it—"breath holding"—that is shown by low airflow with normal est-P_sub. Results were consistent with clinical claims that diverse respiratory and laryngeal functions may underlie phonatory patterns associated with MTD/A. One potential mechanism, based in psychobiological theory, is introduced to explain some of the variability in aerodynamic profiles of women with MTD/A.

Individual Variability in Delayed Auditory Feedback Effects on Speech Fluency and Rate in Normally Fluent Adults [Article]

Chon, H., Kraft, S. J., Zhang, J., Loucks, T., Ambrose, N. G. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) is known to induce stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and cause speech rate reductions in normally fluent adults, but the reason for speech disruptions is not fully known, and individual variation has not been well characterized. Studying individual variation in susceptibility to DAF may identify factors that predispose an individual to be more or less dependent on auditory feedback.

Method

Participants were 62 normally fluent adults. Each participant performed a spontaneous speech task in 250-ms DAF and amplified nondelayed auditory feedback (NAF) conditions. SLDs, other disfluencies (ODs), speech errors (SEs), and articulation rate (AR) were measured under each condition.

Results

In the DAF condition, SLDs and SEs significantly increased, and AR decreased. Sex had a limited effect in that men exhibited higher rates of ODs and faster AR than women. More important, parametric cluster analysis identified that 2- and 3-subgroup solutions reveal important variation that differentiates tendencies toward disfluency changes and rate reduction under DAF, which are theoretically and empirically preferred to a single-group solution.

Conclusion

Individual variability in response to DAF may be accounted for by subgroups of individuals. This suggests that certain normally fluent individuals could be more dependent on intact feedback to maintain fluency.

A Motor Speech Assessment for Children With Severe Speech Disorders: Reliability and Validity Evidence [Article]

Strand, E. A., McCauley, R. J., Weigand, S. D., Stoeckel, R. E., Baas, B. S. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

In this article, the authors report reliability and validity evidence for the Dynamic Evaluation of Motor Speech Skill (DEMSS), a new test that uses dynamic assessment to aid in the differential diagnosis of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS).

Method

Participants were 81 children between 36 and 79 months of age who were referred to the Mayo Clinic for diagnosis of speech sound disorders. Children were given the DEMSS and a standard speech and language test battery as part of routine evaluations. Subsequently, intrajudge, interjudge, and test–retest reliability were evaluated for a subset of participants. Construct validity was explored for all 81 participants through the use of agglomerative cluster analysis, sensitivity measures, and likelihood ratios.

Results

The mean percentage of agreement for 171 judgments was 89% for test–retest reliability, 89% for intrajudge reliability, and 91% for interjudge reliability. Agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis showed that total DEMSS scores largely differentiated clusters of children with CAS vs. mild CAS vs. other speech disorders. Positive and negative likelihood ratios and measures of sensitivity and specificity suggested that the DEMSS does not overdiagnose CAS but sometimes fails to identify children with CAS.

Conclusions

The value of the DEMSS in differential diagnosis of severe speech impairments was supported on the basis of evidence of reliability and validity.

Morphological Variation in the Adult Hard Palate and Posterior Pharyngeal Wall [Article]

Lammert, A., Proctor, M., Narayanan, S. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

Adult human vocal tracts display considerable morphological variation across individuals, but the nature and extent of this variation has not been extensively studied for many vocal tract structures. There exists a need to analyze morphological variation and, even more basically, to develop a methodology for morphological analysis of the vocal tract. Such analysis will facilitate fundamental characterization of the speech production system, with broad implications from modeling to explaining interspeaker variability.

Method

A data-driven methodology to automatically analyze the extent and variety of morphological variation is proposed and applied to a diverse subject pool of 36 adults. Analysis is focused on two key aspects of vocal tract structure: the midsagittal shape of the hard palate and the posterior pharyngeal wall.

Result

Palatal morphology varies widely in its degree of concavity but also in anteriority and sharpness. Pharyngeal wall morphology, by contrast, varies mostly in terms of concavity alone. The distribution of morphological characteristics is complex, and analysis suggests that certain variations may be categorical in nature.

Conclusion

Major modes of morphological variation are identified, including their relative magnitude, distribution, and categorical nature. Implications of these findings for speech articulation strategies and speech acoustics are discussed.

The Effects of Behavioral Speech Therapy on Speech Sound Production With Adults Who Have Cochlear Implants [Research Note]

Pomaville, F. M., Kladopoulos, C. N. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors examined the treatment efficacy of a behavioral speech therapy protocol for adult cochlear implant recipients.

Method

The authors used a multiple-baseline, across-behaviors and -participants design to examine the effectiveness of a therapy program based on behavioral principles and methods to improve the production of target speech sounds in 3 adults with cochlear implants. The authors included probe items in a baseline protocol to assess generalization of target speech sounds to untrained exemplars. Pretest and posttest scores from the Arizona Articulation Proficiency Scale, Third Revision (Arizona–3; Fudala, 2000) and measurement of speech errors during spontaneous speech were compared, providing additional measures of target behavior generalization.

Results

The results of this study provided preliminary evidence supporting the overall effectiveness and efficiency of a behavioral speech therapy program in increasing percent correct speech sound production in adult cochlear implant recipients. The generalization of newly trained speech skills to untrained words and to spontaneous speech was demonstrated.

Conclusion

These preliminary findings support the application of behavioral speech therapy techniques for training speech sound production in adults with cochlear implants. Implications for future research and the development of aural rehabilitation programs for adult cochlear implant recipients are discussed.

Alternative Tense and Agreement Morpheme Measures for Assessing Grammatical Deficits During the Preschool Period [Article]

Gladfelter, A., Leonard, L. B. — 2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

P. A. Hadley and H. Short (2005) developed a set of measures designed to assess the emerging diversity and productivity of tense and agreement (T/A) morpheme use by 2-year-olds. The authors extended 2 of these measures to the preschool years to evaluate their utility in distinguishing children with specific language impairment (SLI) from their typically developing (TD) peers.

Method

Spontaneous speech samples from 55 children (25 with SLI, 30 TD) at 2 different age levels (4;0–4;6 [years;months] and 5;0–5;6) were analyzed, using a traditional T/A morphology composite that assessed accuracy, and the Hadley and Short measures of Tense Marker Total (assessing diversity of T/A morpheme use) and Productivity Score (assessing productivity of major T/A categories).

Results

All 3 measures showed acceptable levels of sensitivity and specificity. In addition, similar differences in levels of productivity across T/A categories were seen in the TD and SLI groups.

Conclusion

The Tense Marker Total and Productivity Score measures seem to have considerable utility for preschool-age children, in that they provide information about specific T/A morphemes and major T/A categories that are not distinguished using the traditional composite measure. The findings are discussed within the framework of the gradual morphosyntactic learning account.

Early Vocabulary Delay and Behavioral/Emotional Problems in Early Childhood: The Generation R Study [Article]

2013-05-20T06:59:30-07:00

Purpose

The authors tested associations between (a) parent-reported temporary vs. persistent vocabulary delay and (b) parent-reported behavioral/emotional problems in a sample of 5,497 young Dutch children participating in a prospective population-based study.

Method

Mothers completed the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory—Netherlands (Zink & Lejaegere, 2003) at age 18 months and the Language Development Survey (Rescorla, 1989) at age 30 months, with expressive vocabulary delay defined as scores in the lowest 15th age- and gender-specific percentiles. The Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000) was completed by mothers when their children were age 18 months and by both parents when their children were age 36 months, from which Internalizing Problems and Externalizing Problems scores were analyzed.

Results

All analyses were adjusted for covariates. Expressive vocabulary delay at age 18 months was weakly related to Internalizing Problems scores at age 18 months as well as mother-reported Externalizing and Internalizing Problems scores at age 36 months (the latter for boys only). Expressive vocabulary delay at age 30 months was weakly associated with mother-reported Externalizing and Internalizing Problems scores (the latter for boys only) and father-reported Internalizing Problems scores. Persistent expressive vocabulary delay predicted the highest risk of mother-reported internalizing and externalizing problems at age 36 months.

Conclusion

This population-based study showed modest associations between vocabulary delay and behavioral/emotional problems detectable from 18 months onward.

Linking Infant-Directed Speech and Face Preferences to Language Outcomes in Infants at Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder [Article]

Droucker, D., Curtin, S., Vouloumanos, A. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors aimed to examine whether biases for infant-directed (ID) speech and faces differ between infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (SIBS-A) and infant siblings of typically developing children (SIBS-TD), and whether speech and face biases predict language outcomes and risk group membership.

Method

Thirty-six infants were tested at ages 6, 8, 12, and 18 months. Infants heard 2 ID and 2 adult-directed (AD) speech passages paired with either a checkerboard or a face. The authors assessed expressive language at 12 and 18 months and general functioning at 12 months using the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (Mullen, 1995).

Results

Both infant groups preferred ID to AD speech and preferred faces to checkerboards. SIBS-TD demonstrated higher expressive language at 18 months than did SIBS-A, a finding that correlated with preferences for ID speech at 12 months. Although both groups looked longer to face stimuli than to the checkerboard, the magnitude of the preference was smaller in SIBS-A and predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months in this group. Infants' preference for faces contributed to risk-group membership in a logistic regression analysis.

Conclusion

Infants at heightened risk of ASD differ from typically developing infants in their preferences for ID speech and faces, which may underlie deficits in later language development and social communication.

Sentence Comprehension in Specific Language Impairment: A Task Designed to Distinguish Between Cognitive Capacity and Syntactic Complexity [Article]

Leonard, L. B., Deevy, P., Fey, M. E., Bredin-Oja, S. L. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

This study examined sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI) in a manner designed to separate the contribution of cognitive capacity from the effects of syntactic structure.

Method

Nineteen children with SLI, 19 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and 19 younger typically developing children (TD-Y) matched according to sentence comprehension test scores responded to sentence comprehension items that varied in either length or their demands on cognitive capacity, based on the nature of the foils competing with the target picture.

Results

The TD-A children were accurate across all item types. The SLI and TD-Y groups were less accurate than the TD-A group on items with greater length and, especially, on items with the greatest demands on cognitive capacity. The types of errors were consistent with failure to retain details of the sentence apart from syntactic structure.

Conclusions

The difficulty in the more demanding conditions seemed attributable to interference. Specifically, the children with SLI and the TD-Y children appeared to have difficulty retaining details of the target sentence when the information reflected in the foils closely resembled the information in the target sentence.

Referential Communication in Children With ADHD: Challenges in the Role of a Listener [Article]

Nilsen, E. S., Mangal, L., MacDonald, K. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

Successful communication requires that listeners accurately interpret the meaning of speakers' statements. The present work examined whether children with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) differ in their ability to interpret referential statements (i.e., phrases that denote objects or events) from speakers.

Method

Children (6 to 9 years old), diagnosed with ADHD (n = 27) and typically developing (n = 26), took part in an interactive task in which they were asked by an adult speaker to retrieve objects from a display case. Children interpreted the referential statements in contexts that either did or did not require perspective-taking. Children's eye movements and object choices were recorded. Parents completed questionnaires assessing their child's frequency of ADHD symptoms and pragmatic communicative abilities.

Results

Behavioral and eye movement measures revealed that children with ADHD made more interpretive errors and were less likely to consider target referents across the 2 communicative conditions. Furthermore, ADHD symptoms related to children's performance on the communicative task and to parental report of the child's pragmatic skills.

Conclusion

Children with ADHD are less accurate in their interpretations of referential statements. Such difficulties would lead to greater occurrences of miscommunication.

Rapid Naming by Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment [Article]

Coady, J. A. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

Previous studies have reported that children with specific language impairment (SLI) name pictures more slowly than do chronological age–matched (CAM) peers. Rapid naming depends on 2 factors known to be problematic for children with SLI—lexical retrieval and nonlinguistic speed of processing. Although all studies implicate a speed-of-processing deficit as a contributing factor, researchers do not agree on the influence of language factors. The purpose of the current study was to explore word frequency (WF) and phonotactic pattern frequency (PPF) as potential lexical factors contributing to the naming deficits experienced by children with SLI.

Method

Three groups of children—20 children with SLI (M_age = 9;8 [years;months]), 20 younger vocabulary-matched (VM) controls, and 20 CAM controls—named pictures whose labels varied by WF and PPF.

Results

Reaction time results revealed significant main effects of group (CAM < SLI = VM) and WF (high WF < low WF). Effects due to WF were comparable for all groups, but a significant Group x PPF interaction revealed that PPF effects were greater for children with SLI than for VM or CAM children.

Conclusion

Results replicate previous findings of a naming deficit in children with SLI. Furthermore, results suggest that children with SLI are more vulnerable to increased competition from words with frequent phonotactic patterns, which also come from dense phonological neighborhoods.

Exemplar Variability Facilitates Rapid Learning of an Otherwise Unlearnable Grammar by Individuals With Language-Based Learning Disability [Article]

von Koss Torkildsen, J., Dailey, N. S., Aguilar, J. M., Gomez, R., Plante, E. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

Even without explicit instruction, learners are able to extract information about the form of a language simply by attending to input that reflects the underlying grammar. In this study, the authors explored the role of variability in this learning by asking whether varying the number of unique exemplars heard by the learner affects learning of an artificial syntactic form.

Method

Learners with normal language (n = 16) and language-based learning disability (LLD; n = 16) were exposed to strings of nonwords that represented an underlying grammar. Half of the learners heard 3 exemplars 16 times each (low variability group), and the other half of the learners heard 24 exemplars twice each (high variability group). Learners were then tested for recognition of items heard and generalization of the grammar with new nonword strings.

Results

Only those learners with LLD who were in the high variability group were able to demonstrate generalization of the underlying grammar. For learners with normal language, both those in the high and the low variability groups showed generalization of the grammar, but relative effect sizes suggested a larger learning effect in the high variability group.

Conclusion

The results demonstrate that the structure of the learning context can determine the ability to generalize from specific training items to novel cases.

Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Effects on Verbal Working Memory and Vocabulary: Testing Language-Minority Children With an Immigrant Background [Article]

de Abreu, P. M. J. E., Baldassi, M., Puglisi, M. L., Befi-Lopes, D. M. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors explored the impact of test language and cultural status on vocabulary and working memory performance in multilingual language-minority children.

Method

Twenty 7-year-old Portuguese-speaking immigrant children living in Luxembourg completed several assessments of first (L1)- and second-language (L2) vocabulary (comprehension and production), executive-loaded working memory (counting recall and backward digit recall), and verbal short-term memory (digit recall and nonword repetition). Cross-linguistic task performance was compared within individuals. The language-minority children were also compared with multilingual language-majority children from Luxembourg and Portuguese-speaking monolinguals from Brazil without an immigrant background matched on age, sex, socioeconomic status, and nonverbal reasoning.

Results

Results showed that (a) verbal working memory measures involving numerical memoranda were relatively independent of test language and cultural status; (b) language status had an impact on the repetition of high- but not on low-wordlike L2 nonwords; (c) large cross-linguistic and cross-cultural effects emerged for productive vocabulary; (d) cross-cultural effects were less pronounced for vocabulary comprehension with no differences between groups if only L1 words relevant to the home context were considered.

Conclusion

The study indicates that linguistic and cognitive assessments for language-minority children require careful choice among measures to ensure valid results. Implications for testing culturally and linguistically diverse children are discussed.

Enduring Advantages of Early Cochlear Implantation for Spoken Language Development [Article]

Geers, A. E., Nicholas, J. G. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

In this article, the authors sought to determine whether the precise age of implantation (AOI) remains an important predictor of spoken language outcomes in later childhood for those who received a cochlear implant (CI) between 12 and 38 months of age. Relative advantages of receiving a bilateral CI after age 4.5 years, better pre-CI-aided hearing, and longer CI experience were also examined.

Method

Sixty children participated in a prospective longitudinal study of outcomes at 4.5 and 10.5 years of age. Twenty-nine children received a sequential second CI. Test scores were compared with normative samples of hearing age mates, and predictors of outcomes were identified.

Results

Standard scores on language tests at 10.5 years of age remained significantly correlated with age of first cochlear implantation. Scores were not associated with receipt of a second, sequentially acquired CI. Significantly higher scores were achieved for vocabulary as compared with overall language, a finding not evident when the children were tested at younger ages.

Conclusion

Age-appropriate spoken language skills continued to be more likely with younger AOI, even after an average of 8.6 years of additional CI use. Receipt of a second implant between ages 4 and 10 years and longer duration of device use did not provide significant added benefit.

Reading Vocabulary in Children With and Without Hearing Loss: The Roles of Task and Word Type [Article]

Coppens, K. M., Tellings, A., Verhoeven, L., Schreuder, R. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

To address the problem of low reading comprehension scores among children with hearing impairment, it is necessary to have a better understanding of their reading vocabulary. In this study, the authors investigated whether task and word type differentiate the reading vocabulary knowledge of children with and without severe hearing loss.

Method

Seventy-two children with hearing loss and 72 children with normal hearing performed a lexical and a use decision task. Both tasks contained the same 180 words divided over 7 clusters, each cluster containing words with a similar pattern of scores on 8 word properties (word class, frequency, morphological family size, length, age of acquisition, mode of acquisition, imageability, and familiarity).

Results

Whereas the children with normal hearing scored better on the 2 tasks than the children with hearing loss, the size of the difference varied depending on the type of task and word.

Conclusions

Performance differences between the 2 groups increased as words and tasks became more complex. Despite delays, children with hearing loss showed a similar pattern of vocabulary acquisition as their peers with normal hearing. For the most precise assessment of reading vocabulary possible, a range of tasks and word types should be used.

Word Learning in Adults With Second-Language Experience: Effects of Phonological and Referent Familiarity [Article]

Kaushanskaya, M., Yoo, J., Van Hecke, S. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

The goal of this research was to examine whether phonological familiarity exerts different effects on novel word learning for familiar versus unfamiliar referents and whether successful word learning is associated with increased second-language experience.

Method

Eighty-one adult native English speakers with various levels of Spanish knowledge learned phonologically familiar novel words (constructed using English sounds) or phonologically unfamiliar novel words (constructed using non-English and non-Spanish sounds) in association with either familiar or unfamiliar referents. Retention was tested via a forced-choice recognition task. A median-split procedure identified high-ability and low-ability word learners in each condition, and the two groups were compared on measures of second-language experience.

Results

Findings suggest that the ability to accurately match newly learned novel names to their appropriate referents is facilitated by phonological familiarity only for familiar referents but not for unfamiliar referents. Moreover, more extensive second-language learning experience characterized superior learners primarily in one word-learning condition: in which phonologically unfamiliar novel words were paired with familiar referents.

Conclusions

Together, these findings indicate that phonological familiarity facilitates novel word learning only for familiar referents and that experience with learning a second language may have a specific impact on novel vocabulary learning in adults.

Is More Better? Milieu Communication Teaching in Toddlers With Intellectual Disabilities [Article]

Fey, M. E., Yoder, P. J., Warren, S. F., Bredin-Oja, S. L. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

The authors sought to determine whether a program of 5 weekly doses of milieu communication teaching (MCT) would yield improvements in children's communication and word use compared with a once-weekly delivery of the same treatment.

Method

Sixty-four children with intellectual and communication delay were randomly assigned to receive 60-min sessions of MCT either 1 time or 5 times per week over a 9-month treatment. Growth curves were fit to data collected at 5 points before, during, and after the MCT was delivered.

Results

With groups collapsed, significant growth across the experimental period was observed on all measures, but this was not associated unconditionally with treatment intensity. Children who played with 9 or more objects during a standard play assessment, an empirically identified cut-point, benefited more from the high- than from the low-intensity treatment on lexical measures (Hedges's g range = .49 to .65).

Conclusions

More MCT is not always better for all children. Clinicians can expect that increasing the frequency of MCT sessions will yield moderate enhancement of outcomes if the child has high interest in objects.

The Effect of Homonymy on Learning Correctly Articulated Versus Misarticulated Words [Article]

Storkel, H. L., Maekawa, J., Aschenbrenner, A. J. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

The goal of the current study was to examine the effect of homonymy (learning a second meaning for a known word form vs. learning a novel meaning and novel word form) and articulation accuracy (IN vs. OUT sounds) on word learning by preschool children. An added goal was to determine whether word frequency altered the effect of homonymy on word learning.

Method

Twenty-nine 3- to 4-year-old children were taught homonyms and novel words. Stimuli further varied in whether homonymy was present in both the adult input and the child's output (as for IN sounds) versus present only in the child's output (as for OUT sounds).

Results

For IN sounds, children learned homonyms more rapidly than novel words. Moreover, the homonym advantage was modulated by word frequency, such that children learned a new meaning for a high-frequency word more accurately than they learned a new meaning for a low-frequency word. In contrast, for OUT sounds, there was no evidence that homonymy influenced learning.

Conclusions

Homonymy in the adult input facilitates word learning by preschool children, whereas homonymy in the child's output alone does not. This effect is captured in a usage-based model of phonology and the lexicon.

Investigating the Relationship Between Nonword Repetition Performance and Syllabic Structure in Typical and Atypical Language Development [Article]

Tamburelli, M., Jones, G. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors examined the role of syllabic structure in nonword repetition performance in typically developing (TD) children and children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

Eighteen children with SLI (5;7–6;7 [years;months]) and 18 TD children matched for chronological age were tested on their ability to repeat phonemes in different positions within syllable structure (onset, nucleus, coda). The test involved 2 separate nonword repetition tasks differing in lexicality (high vs. low). High-lexicality nonwords contained subparts that are morphemes of the language (i.e., subparts were "lexical"), whereas nonlexical nonwords did not.

Results

Repetition performance across the 3 syllabic positions showed a significant effect for both populations and on both tasks. However, although on the high-lexicality task the direction of the effect revealed the onset as the most error-prone constituent (onset > coda > nucleus), on the low-lexicality task, it was the coda that attracted most errors (coda > onset > nucleus).

Conclusions

Results suggest that the procedures involved in computing syllabic structure are qualitatively similar in the 2 populations. We take these results to support the view that different syllabic positions involve different levels of phonological complexity and that tests that control for lexicality are crucial in illuminating these differences.

Vocalization Development in Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder [Article]

Plumb, A. M., Wetherby, A. M. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors aimed to examine the vocalizations of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the second year of life and their relationship to other areas of development.

Method

Vocalizations were examined in 125 children between ages 18 and 24 months: 50 later diagnosed with ASD, 25 with developmental delays (DD) in which ASD was ruled out, and 50 with typical development (TD). Precise measures of vocalizations were obtained through coding of video-recorded behavior samples from the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales Developmental Profile (Wetherby & Prizant, 2002b).

Results

The ASD group used a significantly lower proportion of vocalizations with speech sounds and a significantly higher proportion of atypical vocalizations than children with TD. The ASD group used a significantly higher proportion of distress vocalizations than the TD and DD groups. For the ASD group, the frequency of vocalizations with speech sounds correlated significantly with developmental levels both concurrently and predictively. In the ASD group, communicative vocalizations late in the second year were found to uniquely predict expressive language outcome at age 3 years above noncommunicative vocalizations.

Conclusions

Further examination of distress vocalizations as a potential early indicator of ASD is recommended. In addition, the importance of early communicative vocalizations for later language development is highlighted.

Lexical Development in Korean: Vocabulary Size, Lexical Composition, and Late Talking [Article]

Rescorla, L., Lee, Y. M. C., Oh, K. J., Kim, Y. A. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors aimed to compare vocabulary size, lexical composition, and late talking in large samples of Korean and U.S. children ages 18–35 months.

Method

Data for 2,191 Korean children (211 children recruited "offline" through preschools, and 1,980 recruited "online" via the Internet) and 274 U.S. children were obtained using the Language Development Survey (LDS).

Results

Mean vocabulary size was slightly larger in the offline than the online group, but the groups were acquiring almost identical words. Mean vocabulary size did not differ by country; girls and older children had larger vocabularies in both countries. The Korean–U.S. Q correlations for percentage use of LDS words (.53 and .56) indicated considerable concordance across countries in lexical composition. Noun dominance was as large in Korean lexicons as in U.S. lexicons. About half of the most commonly reported words for the Korean and U.S. children were identical. Lexicons of late talkers resembled those of typically developing younger children in the same sample.

Conclusions

Despite linguistic and discourse differences between Korean and English, LDS findings indicated considerable cross-linguistic similarity with respect to vocabulary size, lexical composition, and late talking.

The Efficacy of a Vocabulary Intervention for Dual-Language Learners With Language Impairment [Article]

Restrepo, M. A., Morgan, G. P., Thompson, M. S. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors evaluated the efficacy of a Spanish–English versus English-only vocabulary intervention for dual-language learners (DLLs) with language impairment compared to mathematics intervention groups and typically developing controls with no intervention. Further, in this study the authors also examined whether the language of instruction affected English, Spanish, and conceptual vocabulary differentially.

Method

The authors randomly assigned 202 preschool DLLs with language impairment to 1 of 4 conditions: bilingual vocabulary, English-only vocabulary, bilingual mathematics, or English-only mathematics. Fifty-four DLLs with typical development received no intervention. The vocabulary intervention consisted of a 12-week small-group dialogic reading and hands-on vocabulary instruction of 45 words. Postintervention group differences and linear growth rates were examined in conceptual, English, and Spanish receptive and expressive vocabulary for the 45 treatment words.

Results

Results indicate that the bilingual vocabulary intervention facilitated receptive and expressive Spanish and conceptual vocabulary gains in DLLs with language impairment compared with the English vocabulary intervention, mathematics intervention, and no-intervention groups. The English-only vocabulary intervention differed significantly from the mathematics condition and no-intervention groups on all measures but did not differ from the bilingual vocabulary intervention. Vocabulary growth rates postintervention slowed considerably. Results support the idea that bilingual interventions support native- and second-language vocabulary development.

Conclusion

English-only intervention supports only English. Use of repeated dialogic reading and hands-on activities facilitates vocabulary acquisition.

Semantic Convergence in Spanish-English Bilingual Children With Primary Language Impairment [Research Note]

Sheng, L., Bedore, L. M., Pena, E. D., Taliancich-Klinger, C. — 2013-05-20T06:59:31-07:00

Purpose

To examine the degree of convergence in word association responses produced by bilingual children with primary language impairment (PLI) in relation to bilingual age peers.

Method

Thirty-seven Spanish–English bilingual children with PLI, 37 typically developing (TD) controls, and a normative sample of 112 children produced associations to 24 English and Spanish words. The 5 most frequent responses for each stimulus were identified for the normative sample; then the frequency of occurrence of these frequent normative responses was tabulated and compared between the PLI and TD groups.

Results

Children with PLI generated fewer frequent normative responses than their TD peers. Spearman rank correlations revealed that the rank frequency of responses in the normative group was significantly correlated with that of the TD and PLI groups; however, in English, the correlation was stronger for the TD cohort. Cross-language associations were also revealed in the generation of frequent norming responses.

Conclusions

Semantic convergence is determined by multiple factors. Reduced production of frequent normative responses and weakened correlation with group association behavior in English suggest that children with PLI were delayed in converging on a central core of semantic knowledge that is characteristic of bilingual children with typical language skills.

The Impacts of Language Background and Language-Related Disorders in Auditory Processing Assessment [Article]

Loo, J. H. Y., Bamiou, D.-E., Rosen, S. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

To examine the impact of language background and language-related disorders (LRDs—dyslexia and/or language impairment) on performance in English speech and nonspeech tests of auditory processing (AP) commonly used in the clinic.

Method

A clinical database concerning 133 multilingual children (mostly with English as an additional language) and 71 monolingual children (7- to 12-year-old native English speakers) with listening concerns was analyzed retrospectively.

Results

Language background had no significant effect on the 3 nonspeech AP tests, but the multilingual group performed worse in most of the speech tests. Children with LRDs generally performed more poorly than those without, except for the masking level difference.

Conclusions

Although language background affects performance in AP tasks that use speech, the effect of LRDs appears to be more wide-ranging insofar as the majority of the AP tests—speech and nonspeech—were significantly affected by their presence. The effects of language background are probably mediated directly through the effects of language expertise, whereas those associated with LRDs appear to arise from associated deficits in memory and attention. The vast majority of so-called AP tests tap abilities far beyond those typically thought of as specifically auditory; thus, they are poor measures of an AP disorder.

Speech Perception in Noise by Children With Cochlear Implants [Article]

Caldwell, A., Nittrouer, S. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

Common wisdom suggests that listening in noise poses disproportionately greater difficulty for listeners with cochlear implants (CIs) than for peers with normal hearing (NH). The purpose of this study was to examine phonological, language, and cognitive skills that might help explain speech-in-noise abilities for children with CIs.

Method

Three groups of kindergartners (NH, hearing aid wearers, and CI users) were tested on speech recognition in quiet and noise and on tasks thought to underlie the abilities that fit into the domains of phonological awareness, general language, and cognitive skills. These last measures were used as predictor variables in regression analyses with speech-in-noise scores as dependent variables.

Results

Compared to children with NH, children with CIs did not perform as well on speech recognition in noise or on most other measures, including recognition in quiet. Two surprising results were that (a) noise effects were consistent across groups and (b) scores on other measures did not explain any group differences in speech recognition.

Conclusions

Limitations of implant processing take their primary toll on recognition in quiet and account for poor speech recognition and language/phonological deficits in children with CIs. Implications are that teachers/clinicians need to teach language/phonology directly and maximize signal-to-noise levels in the classroom.

Auditory Brainstem Response to Complex Sounds Predicts Self-Reported Speech-in-Noise Performance [Article]

Anderson, S., Parbery-Clark, A., White-Schwoch, T., Kraus, N. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

To compare the ability of the auditory brainstem response to complex sounds (cABR) to predict subjective ratings of speech understanding in noise on the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ; Gatehouse & Noble, 2004) relative to the predictive ability of the Quick Speech-in-Noise test (QuickSIN; Killion, Niquette, Gudmundsen, Revit, & Banerjee, 2004) and pure-tone hearing thresholds.

Method

Participants included 111 middle- to older-age adults (range = 45–78) with audiometric configurations ranging from normal hearing levels to moderate sensorineural hearing loss. In addition to using audiometric testing, the authors also used such evaluation measures as the QuickSIN, the SSQ, and the cABR.

Results

Multiple linear regression analysis indicated that the inclusion of brainstem variables in a model with QuickSIN, hearing thresholds, and age accounted for 30% of the variance in the Speech subtest of the SSQ, compared with significantly less variance (19%) when brainstem variables were not included.

Conclusion

The authors' results demonstrate the cABR's efficacy for predicting self-reported speech-in-noise perception difficulties. The fact that the cABR predicts more variance in self-reported speech-in-noise (SIN) perception than either the QuickSIN or hearing thresholds indicates that the cABR provides additional insight into an individual's ability to hear in background noise. In addition, the findings underscore the link between the cABR and hearing in noise.

The Effect of Talker and Intonation Variability on Speech Perception in Noise in Children With Dyslexia [Article]

Hazan, V., Messaoud-Galusi, S., Rosen, S. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors aimed to determine whether children with dyslexia (hereafter referred to as "DYS children") are more affected than children with average reading ability (hereafter referred to as "AR children") by talker and intonation variability when perceiving speech in noise.

Method

Thirty-four DYS and 25 AR children were tested on their perception of consonants in naturally produced CV tokens in multitalker babble. Twelve CVs were presented for identification in four conditions varying in the degree of talker and intonation variability. Consonant place (/bi/-/di/) and voicing (/bi/-/pi/) discrimination were investigated with the same conditions.

Results

DYS children made slightly more identification errors than AR children but only for conditions with variable intonation. Errors were more frequent for a subset of consonants, generally weakly encoded for AR children, for tokens with intonation patterns (steady and rise-fall) that occur infrequently in connected discourse. In discrimination tasks, which have a greater memory and cognitive load, DYS children scored lower than AR children across all conditions.

Conclusions

Unusual intonation patterns had a disproportionate (but small) effect on consonant intelligibility in noise for DYS children, but adding talker variability did not. DYS children do not appear to have a general problem in perceiving speech in degraded conditions, which makes it unlikely that they lack robust phonological representations.

Using Different Criteria to Diagnose (Central) Auditory Processing Disorder: How Big a Difference Does It Make? [Article]

Wilson, W. J., Arnott, W. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

To quantify how 9 different diagnostic criteria affected potential (central) auditory processing disorder ([C]APD) diagnoses in a large sample of children referred for (central) auditory processing ([C]AP) assessment.

Method

A file review was conducted on 150 children (94 boys and 56 girls; ages 7.0–15.6 years) with normal peripheral hearing who had completed a (C)AP assessment involving low-pass filtered speech, competing sentences, 2-pair dichotic digits, and frequency patterns with linguistic and nonlinguistic report. Each child was classified as having or not having (C)APD based on 9 different sets of diagnostic criteria drawn from published technical reports, position statements, and selected research.

Results

The rates of potential (C)APD diagnosis ranged from 7.3% for the strictest criteria to 96.0% for the most lenient criteria.

Conclusions

Until greater consensus is reached, any diagnosis of (C)APD should be qualified by an explicit statement of the criteria used. Calls to abandon the use of (C)APD as a global label should also be supported.

Factors Affecting the Processing of Intensity in School-Aged Children [Article]

Buss, E., Hall, J. W., Grose, J. H. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

Thresholds of school-aged children are elevated relative to those of adults for intensity discrimination and amplitude modulation (AM) detection. It is unclear how these findings are related or what role stimulus gating and dynamic envelope cues play in these results. Two experiments assessed the development of sensitivity to intensity increments in different stimulus contexts.

Method

Thresholds for detecting an increment in level were estimated for normal-hearing children (5- to 10-year-olds) and adults. Experiment 1 compared intensity discrimination for gated and continuous presentation of a 1-kHz tone, with a 65-dB-SPL standard level. Experiment 2 compared increment detection and 16-Hz AM detection introduced into a continuous 1-kHz tone, with either 35- or 75-dB-SPL standard levels.

Results

Children had higher thresholds than adults overall. All listeners were more sensitive to increments in the continuous than the gated stimulus and performed better at the 75- than at the 35-dB-SPL standard level. Both effects were comparable for children and adults. There was some evidence that children's AM detection was more adultlike than increment detection.

Conclusion

These results imply that memory for loudness across gated intervals is not responsible for children's poor performance but that multiple dynamic envelope cues may benefit children more than adults.

The Effects of Short-Term Computerized Speech-in-Noise Training on Postlingually Deafened Adult Cochlear Implant Recipients [Research Note]

Ingvalson, E. M., Lee, B., Fiebig, P., Wong, P. C. M. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

To determine if short-term computerized speech-in-noise training can produce significant improvements in speech-in-noise perception by cochlear implant (CI) recipients on standardized audiologic testing measures.

Method

Five adult postlingually deafened CI recipients participated in 4 speech-in-noise training sessions using the Seeing and Hearing Speech program (Sensimetrics; Malden, MA). Each participant completed lessons concentrating on consonant and vowel recognition at word, phrase, and sentence levels. Speech-in-noise abilities were assessed using the QuickSIN (Killion, Niquette, Gudmundsen, Revit, & Banerjee, 2004) and the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT ( Nilsson, Soli & Sullivan, 1994)).

Results

All listeners significantly improved key word identification on the HINT after training, albeit only at the most favorable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Listeners also showed a significant reduction in the degree of SNR loss on the QuickSIN after training.

Conclusion

Short-term speech-in-noise training may improve speech-in-noise perception in postlingually deafened adult CI recipients.

Influences of Sentence Length and Syntactic Complexity on the Speech Motor Control of Children Who Stutter [Article]

MacPherson, M. K., Smith, A. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

To investigate the potential effects of increased sentence length and syntactic complexity on the speech motor control of children who stutter (CWS).

Method

Participants repeated sentences of varied length and syntactic complexity. Kinematic measures of articulatory coordination variability and movement duration during perceptually fluent speech were analyzed for 16 CWS and 16 typically developing children (CTD) between 4 and 6 years of age. Behavioral data from a larger pool of children were also examined.

Results

For both groups, articulatory coordination variability increased with sentence length. For syntactically simple sentences, CWS had higher coordination variability than CTD. There was no group difference in coordination variability for complex sentences. Coordination variability increased significantly with complexity for CTD, whereas that of CWS remained at the high level demonstrated for simple sentences. There was a trend for higher overall coordination variability in CWS compared with CTD. For both groups, movement duration was greater for syntactically complex, as compared with simple, sentences.

Conclusions

Results indicate more variable speech motor coordination during fluent speech production in many CWS as compared with CTD. Disproportionate effects of length and complexity on coordination variability and duration were not found for CWS. Considerable individual differences in performance were observed.

A Population Study of Children's Acquisition of Hong Kong Cantonese Consonants, Vowels, and Tones [Article]

To, C. K. S., Cheung, P. S. P., McLeod, S. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

This study investigated children's acquisition of Hong Kong Cantonese.

Method

Participants were 1,726 children ages 2;4 to 12;4 (years;months). Single-word speech samples were collected to examine 4 measures: initial consonants, final consonants, vowels/diphthongs, and lexical tones. A 2-way analysis of variance was performed to examine the effects of age and sex on phoneme acquisition.

Results

There was rapid acquisition of initial consonants from age 2;6 to age 4;6. All 19 initial consonants were acquired by age 6;0 (90% criterion): /p-/, /m-/, and /j-/ were acquired the earliest; the last were /ts ^h-/ and /s-/. Final consonants had a different acquisition time from their initial counterparts. Vowels were acquired by age 5;0 and diphthongs by age 4;0. All 9 tones were acquired by age 2;6. The main effect of age was significant for all 4 measures, whereas sex was significant for all measures except tone. Common phonological patterns (≥ 10%) for initial consonants were stopping, fronting, deaspiration, delabialization, affrication, and nasalization; patterns with 5.0%–9.9% occurrence were backing, deaffrication, gliding, and dentalization.

Conclusions

The acquisition of Cantonese showed similarities with English acquisition yet also had specific characteristics. Factors that contributed to the acquisition rate were functional load, articulatory ease, consonant–vowel interactions, phonetic variations, and the behavior of vowels and their allophones.

Indirect Estimates of Jaw Muscle Tension in Children With Suspected Hypertonia, Children With Suspected Hypotonia, and Matched Controls [Article]

Connaghan, K. P., Moore, C. A. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors compared indirect estimates of jaw-muscle tension in children with suspected muscle-tone abnormalities with age- and gender-matched controls.

Method

Jaw movement and muscle activation were measured in children (ages 3 years, 11 months, to 10 years) with suspected muscle-tone abnormalities (Down syndrome or spastic cerebral palsy; n = 10) and controls ( n = 11). Two measures were used to infer jaw tension: a kinematic index of mass-normalized stiffness and electromechanical delay (EMD). The kinematic index used video-based kinematics to obtain the slope of the peak velocity-displacement relationship. The EMD was derived from the interval between the onset of suprahyoid muscle activity and the onset of jaw depression.

Results

Neither measure differentiated the groups. The kinematic index revealed differences between stressed and unstressed syllables in 3-syllable productions by the participants with cerebral palsy and controls, but not in 2-syllable productions by the participants with Down syndrome and controls.

Conclusion

This preliminary investigation included the novel application of 2 measures to infer the jaw-muscle tension of children with suspected tone abnormalities. Although the results do not support the hypothesis that suspected muscle-tone abnormalities affect jaw movement sufficiently to influence speech production, considerations for interpreting the findings include methodological limitations and possible compensatory muscle coactivation.

The Effect of Anatomic Factors on Tongue Position Variability During Consonants [Article]

Rudy, K., Yunusova, Y. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

This study sought to investigate the effect of palate morphology and anthropometric measures of the head on positional variability of the tongue during consonants.

Method

An electromagnetic tracking system was used to record tongue movements of 21 adults. Each talker produced a series of symmetrical VCV syllables containing one of the consonants /t, d, s, z, esh, tesh, k, g, j/ and corner vowels /i, a, u/. Distributions of x, y, and z coordinates at maximum tongue elevation were used to represent tongue position variability across contexts. Anthropometric palate and head measures were also obtained.

Results

Positional variability of the tongue differed between the front (e.g., alveolar and post-alveolar) and back (velar) consonant groups. A correlational analysis showed that tongue position variability of the front consonants was explained, to a degree, by palate curvature and palate length. The variability of the back consonants was not explained by any structural measures.

Conclusion

Palate morphology needs to be taken into account when making observations regarding the extent of tongue position variability during consonants in research and in achieving clinical goals.

Pitch Variability in Patients With Parkinson's Disease: Effects of Deep Brain Stimulation of Caudal Zona Incerta and Subthalamic Nucleus [Article]

Karlsson, F., Olofsson, K., Blomstedt, P., Linder, J., van Doorn, J. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and the caudal zona incerta (cZi) pitch characteristics of connected speech in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD).

Method

The authors evaluated 16 patients preoperatively and 12 months after DBS surgery. Eight patients were implanted in the STN (ages 51–72 years; M = 63 years). Six received bilateral implantation and 2 unilateral (left) implantation. Eight patients were bilaterally implanted in the cZi (ages 49–71 years; M = 60.8 years). Preoperative assessments were made after a levodopa challenge (approximately 1.5 times the ordinary dose). All postoperative examinations were made off and on stimulation with a clinically optimized dose of levodopa. Measurements of pitch range and variability were obtained from each utterance in a recorded read speech passage.

Results

Pitch range and coefficient of variation showed an increase in patients under STN–DBS. Patients under cZi–DBS showed no significant effects of treatment on investigated pitch properties.

Conclusion

STN–DBS was shown to increase pitch variation and range. The results provided no evidence of cZi–DBS having a beneficial effect on PD patients' pitch variability.

Age-Related Changes to Spectral Voice Characteristics Affect Judgments of Prosodic, Segmental, and Talker Attributes for Child and Adult Speech [Article]

Dilley, L. C., Wieland, E. A., Gamache, J. L., McAuley, J. D., Redford, M. A. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

As children mature, changes in voice spectral characteristics co-vary with changes in speech, language, and behavior. In this study, spectral characteristics were manipulated to alter the perceived ages of talkers' voices while leaving critical acoustic–prosodic correlates intact, to determine whether perceived age differences were associated with differences in judgments of prosodic, segmental, and talker attributes.

Method

Speech was modified by lowering formants and fundamental frequency, for 5-year-old children's utterances, or raising them, for adult caregivers' utterances. Next, participants differing in awareness of the manipulation (Experiment 1A) or amount of speech-language training (Experiment 1B) made judgments of prosodic, segmental, and talker attributes. Experiment 2 investigated the effects of spectral modification on intelligibility. Finally, in Experiment 3, trained analysts used formal prosody coding to assess prosodic characteristics of spectrally modified and unmodified speech.

Results

Differences in perceived age were associated with differences in ratings of speech rate, fluency, intelligibility, likeability, anxiety, cognitive impairment, and speech-language disorder/delay; effects of training and awareness of the manipulation on ratings were limited. There were no significant effects of the manipulation on intelligibility or formally coded prosody judgments.

Conclusion

Age-related voice characteristics can greatly affect judgments of speech and talker characteristics, raising cautionary notes for developmental research and clinical work.

Speech Impairment in Down Syndrome: A Review [Review]

Kent, R. D., Vorperian, H. K. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

This review summarizes research on disorders of speech production in Down syndrome (DS) for the purposes of informing clinical services and guiding future research.

Method

Review of the literature was based on searches using MEDLINE, Google Scholar, PsycINFO, and HighWire Press, as well as consideration of reference lists in retrieved documents (including online sources). Search terms emphasized functions related to voice, articulation, phonology, prosody, fluency, and intelligibility.

Conclusions

The following conclusions pertain to four major areas of review: voice, speech sounds, fluency and prosody, and intelligibility. The first major area is voice. Although a number of studies have reported on vocal abnormalities in DS, major questions remain about the nature and frequency of the phonatory disorder. Results of perceptual and acoustic studies have been mixed, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions or even to identify sensitive measures for future study. The second major area is speech sounds. Articulatory and phonological studies show that speech patterns in DS are a combination of delayed development and errors not seen in typical development. Delayed (i.e., developmental) and disordered (i.e., nondevelopmental) patterns are evident by the age of about 3 years, although DS-related abnormalities possibly appear earlier, even in infant babbling. The third major area is fluency and prosody. Stuttering and/or cluttering occur in DS at rates of 10%–45%, compared with about 1% in the general population. Research also points to significant disturbances in prosody. The fourth major area is intelligibility. Studies consistently show marked limitations in this area, but only recently has the research gone beyond simple rating scales.

Audiovisual Speech Perception in Children With Developmental Language Disorder in Degraded Listening Conditions [Article]

Meronen, A., Tiippana, K., Westerholm, J., Ahonen, T. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

The effect of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the perception of audiovisual speech in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) was investigated by varying the noise level and the sound intensity of acoustic speech. The main hypotheses were that the McGurk effect (in which incongruent visual speech alters the auditory speech percept) would be weaker for children with DLD than for controls and that it would get stronger with decreasing SNR in both groups.

Method

The participants were 8-year-old children with DLD and a sample of children with normal language development. In the McGurk stimuli, the consonant uttered by the voice differed from that articulated by the face. Three sound intensities (24, 36, and 48 dB) and noise levels (–12, 0, and +6 dB) were used. Perception of unisensory visual speech was also measured.

Results

The children with DLD experienced a weak McGurk effect, that is, a weak influence of visual speech on audiovisual speech perception, which remained rather constant across SNR levels. The children with DLD were inaccurate at lipreading.

Conclusions

Children with DLD have problems in perceiving spoken consonants presented audiovisually and visually. The weaker McGurk effect could be accounted for by the poorer lipreading ability of children with DLD.

What Do Children With Specific Language Impairment Do With Multiple Forms of DO? [Article]

Rice, M. L., Blossom, M. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

This study was designed to examine the early usage patterns of multiple grammatical functions of DO in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Children's use of this plurifunctional form is informative for evaluation of theoretical accounts of the deficit in SLI.

Method

Spontaneous uses of multiple functions of DO were analyzed in language samples from 89 children: 37 children with SLI, ages 5;0–5;6 (years;months); 37 age-equivalent children; and 15 language-equivalent children, ages 2;8–4;10. Proportion correct and types of errors produced were analyzed for each function of DO.

Results

Children with SLI had significantly lower levels of proportion correct auxiliary DO use compared to both control groups, with omissions of the DO form as the primary error type. Children with SLI had near-ceiling performance on lexical DO and elliptical DO, similar to both control groups.

Conclusions

Plurifunctionality is not problematic: Children acquire each function of DO separately. Grammatical properties of the function, rather than surface properties of the form, dictate whether children with SLI will have difficulty using the word. Overall, these results support the extended optional infinitive account of SLI and the use of auxiliary DO omissions as part of a clinical marker for SLI.

Further Evidence of Auditory Extinction in Aphasia [Article]

Marshall, R. S., Basilakos, A., Love-Myers, K. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

Preliminary research ( Shisler, 2005) suggests that auditory extinction in individuals with aphasia (IWA) may be connected to binding and attention. In this study, the authors expanded on previous findings on auditory extinction to determine the source of extinction deficits in IWA.

Method

Seventeen IWA (M_age = 53.19 years) and 17 neurologically intact controls (M_age = 55.18 years) participated. Auditory stimuli were spoken letters presented in a free-field listening environment. Stimuli were presented in single-stimulus stimulation (SSS) or double-simultaneous stimulation (DSS) trials across 5 conditions designed to determine whether extinction is related to binding, inefficient attention resource allocation, or overall deficits in attention. All participants completed all experimental conditions.

Results

Significant extinction was demonstrated only by IWA when sounds were different, providing further evidence of auditory extinction. However, binding requirements did not appear to influence the IWA's performance.

Conclusions

Results indicate that, for IWA, auditory extinction may not be attributed to a binding deficit or inefficient attention resource allocation because of equivalent performance across all 5 conditions. Rather, overall attentional resources may be influential. Future research in aphasia should explore the effect of the stimulus presentation in addition to the continued study of attention treatment.

Electrophysiological Indices of Phonological Impairments in Dyslexia [Article]

Desroches, A. S., Newman, R. L., Robertson, E. K., Joanisse, M. F. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

A range of studies have shown difficulties in perceiving acoustic and phonetic information in dyslexia; however, much less is known about how such difficulties relate to the perception of individual words. The authors present data from event-related potentials (ERPs) examining the hypothesis that children with dyslexia have difficulties with processing phonemic information within spoken words compared to age-matched readers with typical development.

Method

The authors monitored ERPs to auditory words during a simple picture-word matching task. The key manipulation was the inclusion of both matching stimuli and three types of mismatches (cohort, CONE- comb; rhyme, CONE- bone; and unrelated, CONE- fox).

Results

Children with dyslexia showed atypical N400 ERP waveforms to both types of phonological mismatches, but not to phonologically unrelated mismatches, reflecting a relative insensitivity to phonological overlap among auditory words.

Conclusion

The data suggest that children with dyslexia have impairments in integrating phonological information into word-level representations. The results suggest that speech perception difficulties in dyslexia might have consequences for processing auditory words.

The Impact of Dual Tasking on Sentence Comprehension in Children With Specific Language Impairment [Article]

Leclercq, A.-L., Majerus, S., Prigent, G., Maillart, C. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors assessed the hypothesis of a limitation in attentional allocation capacity as underlying poor sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

Fifteen children with SLI, 15 age-matched controls, and 15 grammar-matched controls participated in the study. Sixty sentences were presented in isolation, and 60 sentences were presented with a concurrent choice reaction time task in which colored stimuli randomly appeared at the center of the computer screen.

Results

Sentence comprehension was affected by the dual-task condition to a greater extent in children with SLI relative to age controls but not relative to grammatical controls.

Conclusion

This study does not support limitations in attentional allocation capacity as representing a core deficit in SLI. Rather, the data show that these children show attentional allocation capacity comparable to that of younger children having similar language level, suggesting that SLI is characterized by a slowed development of both attentional and language domains.

Past Tense Production by English Second Language Learners With and Without Language Impairment [Article]

Blom, E., Paradis, J. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

This study investigated whether past tense use could differentiate children with language impairment (LI) from their typically developing (TD) peers when English is children's second language (L2) and whether L2 children's past tense profiles followed the predictions of Bybee's (2007) usage-based network model.

Method

A group of L2 children with LI (L2-LI) and a matched group of L2-TD peers were administered the past tense probe from the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment ( Rice & Wexler, 2001) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test ( Dunn & Dunn, 1997). A representative input corpus provided distributional information for each verb used. Background information was obtained via parent questionnaire.

Results

The L2-LI group used fewer tense-marked verbs than did the L2-TD group. In both groups, vocabulary size and word frequency predicted accuracy with regular and irregular verbs. Children omitted regular past tense marking most often after alveolar stops, dropping the allomorph / id/; L2-TD children omitted /t/ more often than /d/. Finally, first language typology predicted past tense accuracy.

Conclusions

Past tense use could potentially differentiate between English L2 children with and without LI. The impact of vocabulary, frequency, and phonological factors supported the network model and indicated profile differences between L2-LI and L2-TD children.

Parent-Implemented Enhanced Milieu Teaching With Preschool Children Who Have Intellectual Disabilities [Article]

Kaiser, A. P., Roberts, M. Y. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of enhanced milieu teaching (EMT) implemented by parents and therapists versus therapists only on the language skills of preschool children with intellectual disabilities (IDs), including children with Down syndrome and children with autism spectrum disorders.

Method

Seventy-seven children were randomly assigned to 2 treatments (parent + therapist EMT or therapist-only EMT) and received 36 intervention sessions. Children were assessed before, immediately after, 6 months after, and 12 months after intervention. Separate linear regressions were conducted for each standardized and observational measure at each time point.

Results

Parents in the parent + therapist group demonstrated greater use of EMT strategies at home than untrained parents in the therapist-only group, and these effects maintained over time. Effect sizes for observational measures ranged from d = 0.10 to d = 1.32 favoring the parent + therapist group, with the largest effect sizes found 12 months after intervention.

Conclusion

Findings from this study indicate generally that there are benefits to training parents to implement naturalistic language intervention strategies with preschool children who have ID and significant language impairments.

Implicit Statistical Learning and Language Skills in Bilingual Children [Article]

Yim, D., Rudoy, J. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

Implicit statistical learning in 2 nonlinguistic domains (visual and auditory) was used to investigate (a) whether linguistic experience influences the underlying learning mechanism and (b) whether there are modality constraints in predicting implicit statistical learning with age and language skills.

Method

Implicit statistical learning was examined in visual and auditory domains. One hundred twelve English native speaking monolinguals and Spanish–English bilinguals age 5–13 years participated in the study. Language skills were measured by standardized language tests.

Results

The overall results showed that all children implicitly learned statistical regularities above chance level in both modalities. However, there was no group difference between monolingual and bilingual children on either visual or auditory tasks. Lastly, a different tendency in predicting implicit statistical learning was observed for each group. In the monolingual group, both age and language scores significantly explained auditory statistical learning, whereas age explained visual statistical learning. In the bilingual group, age explained auditory statistical learning, and nothing was significant for visual statistical learning.

Conclusions

These findings are discussed in terms of the extent to which implicit statistical learning is influenced by internal and external factors and a consideration of important notions when testing bilingual children's language skills.

Real-Word and Nonword Repetition in Italian-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment: A Study of Diagnostic Accuracy [Article]

Dispaldro, M., Leonard, L. B., Deevy, P. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

Using 2 different scoring methods, the authors examined the diagnostic accuracy of both real-word and nonword repetition in identifying Italian-speaking children with and without specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

A total of 34 children ages 3;11–5;8 (years;months) participated—17 children with SLI and 17 typically developing children matched for age (TD–A children). Children completed real-word and nonword repetition tasks. The capacity of real-word and nonword repetition tasks to discriminate children with SLI from TD–A was examined through binary logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic curves.

Results

Both real-word and nonword repetition showed good (or excellent) sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing children with SLI from their TD peers.

Conclusions

Nonword repetition appears to be a useful diagnostic indicator for Italian, as in other languages. In addition, real-word repetition also holds promise. The contributions of each type of measure are discussed.

Enhancing Communication Through Gesture and Naming Therapy [Article]

Caute, A., Pring, T., Cocks, N., Cruice, M., Best, W., Marshall, J. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors investigated whether gesture, naming, and strategic treatment improved the communication skills of 14 people with severe aphasia.

Method

All participants received 15 hr of gesture and naming treatment (reported in a companion article [ Marshall et al., 2012]). Half the group received a further 15 hr of strategic therapy, whereas the remaining 7 participants received no further input. The effects of therapy on communication were assessed with 2 novel measures. These measures required each participant to convey simple messages and narratives to his or her communication partner. In both assessments, a subset of the stimuli featured items that had been targets in gesture or naming treatment.

Results

Performance on the communication measures was stable over 2 baseline assessments but improved after gesture and naming treatment. Those participants who received additional strategic therapy made further gains on the message but not on the narrative task. Communication gains were not specific to the stimuli featuring trained items.

Conclusions

This study suggests that gesture and naming treatments can benefit interactive communication. The additional benefits of strategic therapy were less clear-cut but did have an impact on the transmission of simple messages. Gains seem to reflect the development of general communication skills rather than the use of trained gestures and/or words.

Tense Marking and Spontaneous Speech Measures in Spanish Specific Language Impairment: A Discriminant Function Analysis [Article]

2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

To test the proposal that the tense deficit that has been demonstrated for children with specific language impairment (SLI) in other languages is also found in child Spanish and that low performance on tense-related measures can distinguish Spanish-speaking children with SLI from those without.

Method

The authors evaluated evidence from existing spontaneous production, elicited production, and grammaticality judgment studies of finiteness in child Spanish. They measured the relationship of 7 spontaneous speech measures with previous receptive and expressive measures of finiteness and performed a discriminant function analysis, using tense as the target variable, to classify monolingual child Spanish ( n = 55) as representing SLI or as typically developing (TD).

Results

Spontaneous speech measures correlated with the results of previous receptive and expressive measures of child Spanish that show a tense deficit. The SLI group was shown to have statistically lower scores than the TD group on 6 of 7 spontaneous speech measures. Multiple discriminant functions, including tense measures by themselves and in combination with spontaneous speech measures, were shown to provide fair to good sensitivity and specificity in the classification of children as having SLI vs. TD.

Conclusion

The findings support the contention that the tense-marking deficit is a plausible clinical marker of SLI for Spanish-speaking children.

Additive Effects of Lengthening on the Utterance-Final Word in Child-Directed Speech [Research Note]

Ko, E.-S., Soderstrom, M. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Purpose

The authors investigated lengthening effects in child-directed speech (CDS) across the sentence, testing the additive effects on duration of Word Position, Register, Focus, and Sentence Mode (statement/question).

Method

Five theater students produced 6 sentences containing 5 monosyllabic words in a simulated dialogue, varying in Register, Focus, and Sentence Mode. The authors segmented a total of 1,800 sentences using forced-alignment tools, and they analyzed the duration of each word.

Results

The results show significant effects of Register, Word Position, and their interactions. The simple effect of Register was significant in all 5 word positions, indicating a global elongation effect in CDS. Interestingly, there was no proportional increase of the final word in CDS. In addition, the 3-way interactions Register x Word Position x Focus and Register x Word Position x Sentence Mode were significant, which converge to the conclusion that the utterance-final word in CDS is additively elongated when it is focused and in a statement.

Conclusion

Elongation in CDS is a global effect, but the additive effects of duration demonstrated in the authors' data suggest that the effect of enhanced utterance-final lengthening in CDS in naturalistic samples may be a by-product of discourse characteristics of CDS.

Erratum [Errata]

Bouton, S., Serniclaes, W., Bertoncini, J., Cole, P. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Erratum [Errata]

Lee, S. A. S., Iverson, G. K. — 2013-02-26T08:52:32-08:00

Linguistic Pattern Analysis of Misspellings of Typically Developing Writers in Grades 1-9 [Article]

Bahr, R. H., Silliman, E. R., Berninger, V. W., Dow, M. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

A mixed-methods approach, evaluating triple word-form theory, was used to describe linguistic patterns of misspellings.

Method

Spelling errors were taken from narrative and expository writing samples provided by 888 typically developing students in Grades 1–9. Errors were coded by category (phonological, orthographic, and morphological) and specific linguistic feature affected. Grade-level effects were analyzed with trend analysis. Qualitative analyses determined frequent error types and how use of specific linguistic features varied across grades.

Results

Phonological, orthographic, and morphological errors were noted across all grades, but orthographic errors predominated. Linear trends revealed developmental shifts in error proportions for the orthographic and morphological categories between Grades 4 and 5. Similar error types were noted across age groups, but the nature of linguistic feature error changed with age.

Conclusions

Triple word-form theory was supported. By Grade 1, orthographic errors predominated, and phonological and morphological error patterns were evident. Morphological errors increased in relative frequency in older students, probably due to a combination of word-formation issues and vocabulary growth. These patterns suggest that normal spelling development reflects nonlinear growth and that it takes a long time to develop a robust orthographic lexicon that coordinates phonology, orthography, and morphology and supports word-specific, conventional spelling.

Cognitive, Environmental, and Linguistic Predictors of Syntax in Fragile X Syndrome and Down Syndrome [Article]

Estigarribia, B., Martin, G. E., Roberts, J. E. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

To examine which cognitive, environmental, and speech-language variables predict expressive syntax in boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS), boys with Down syndrome (DS), and typically developing (TD) boys, and whether predictive relationships differed by group.

Method

We obtained Index of Productive Syntax ( Scarborough, 1990) scores for 18 boys with FXS only, 20 boys with both FXS and an autism spectrum disorder, 27 boys with DS, and 25 younger TD boys of similar nonverbal mental age. Predictors included group (diagnosis), nonverbal cognition, phonological working memory (PWM), maternal education, speech intelligibility, and expressive vocabulary. The research questions were addressed via hierarchical linear regression.

Results

Diagnostic group, nonverbal cognition, and PWM predicted 56% of the variance in syntactic ability, with approximately three-fourths of the predicted variance explained by group membership alone. The other factors did not contribute any additional significant variance in this final model. There was no evidence that predictor effects differed by group.

Conclusions

Nonverbal cognition and PWM have an effect on expressive syntax beyond that of diagnostic group. These effects are estimated to be the same in boys with FXS, boys with DS, and TD boys. Explanations for residual variance and the relative role of different predictors are discussed.

Masked Priming Effects in Aphasia: Evidence of Altered Automatic Spreading Activation [Article]

Silkes, J. P., Rogers, M. A. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

Previous research has suggested that impairments of automatic spreading activation may underlie some aphasic language deficits. The current study further investigated the status of automatic spreading activation in individuals with aphasia as compared with typical adults.

Method

Participants were 21 individuals with aphasia (12 fluent, 9 nonfluent) and 31 typical adults. Reaction time data were collected on a lexical decision task with masked repetition primes, assessed at 11 different interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Masked primes were used to assess automatic spreading activation without the confound of conscious processing. The various ISIs were used to assess the time to onset and duration of priming effects.

Results

The control group showed maximal priming in the 200-ms ISI condition, with significant priming at a range of ISIs surrounding that peak. Participants with both fluent and nonfluent aphasia showed maximal priming effects in the 250-ms ISI condition and primed across a smaller range of ISIs than did the control group.

Conclusions

Results suggest that individuals with aphasia have slowed automatic spreading activation and impaired maintenance of activation over time, regardless of fluency classification. These findings have implications for understanding aphasic language impairment and for development of aphasia treatments designed to directly address automatic language processes.

Identification of Prelinguistic Phonological Categories [Article]

Ramsdell, H. L., Oller, D. K., Buder, E. H., Ethington, C. A., Chorna, L. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

The prelinguistic infant's babbling repertoire of syllables—the phonological categories that form the basis for early word learning—is noticed by caregivers who interact with infants around them. Prior research on babbling has not explored the caregiver's role in recognition of early vocal categories as foundations for word learning. In the present work, the authors begin to address this gap.

Method

The authors explored vocalizations produced by 8 infants at 3 ages (8, 10, and 12 months) in studies illustrating identification of phonological categories through caregiver report, laboratory procedures simulating the caregiver's natural mode of listening, and the more traditional laboratory approach (phonetic transcription).

Results

Caregivers reported small repertoires of syllables for their infants. Repertoires of similar size and phonetic content were discerned in the laboratory by judges who simulated the caregiver's natural mode of listening. However, phonetic transcription with repeated listening to infant recordings yielded repertoire sizes that vastly exceeded those reported by caregivers and naturalistic listeners.

Conclusions

The results suggest that caregiver report and naturalistic listening by laboratory staff can provide a new way to explore key characteristics of early infant vocal categories, a way that may provide insight into later speech and language development.

Age or Experience? The Influence of Age at Implantation and Social and Linguistic Environment on Language Development in Children With Cochlear Implants [Article]

Szagun, G., Stumper, B. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

The authors investigated the influence of social environmental variables and age at implantation on language development in children with cochlear implants.

Method

Participants were 25 children with cochlear implants and their parents. Age at implantation ranged from 6 months to 42 months ( M _age = 20.4 months, SD = 22.0 months). Linguistic progress was assessed at 12, 18, 24, and 30 months after implantation. At each data point, language measures were based on parental questionnaire and 45-min spontaneous speech samples. Children's language and parents' child-directed language were analyzed.

Results

On all language measures, children displayed considerable vocabulary and grammatical growth over time. Although there was no overall effect of age at implantation, younger and older children had different growth patterns. Children implanted by age 24 months made the most marked progress earlier on, whereas children implanted thereafter did so later on. Higher levels of maternal education were associated with faster linguistic progress; age at implantation was not. Properties of maternal language input, mean length of utterance, and expansions were associated with children's linguistic progress independently of age at implantation.

Conclusions

In children implanted within the sensitive period for language learning, children's home language environment contributes more crucially to their linguistic progress than does age at implantation.

Assessing the Effects of a Parent-Implemented Language Intervention for Children With Language Impairments Using Empirical Benchmarks: A Pilot Study [Article]

Roberts, M. Y., Kaiser, A. P. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which a parent-implemented language intervention improves language skills in toddlers at risk for persistent language impairment (LI) as compared with a group of typically developing toddlers.

Method

Thirty-four children with LI between 24 and 42 months of age were randomly assigned to a treatment or nontreatment experimental condition. Participants in the treatment group received 24 biweekly 1-hr sessions for 3 months. An additional sample of 28 age- and gender-matched children with typically developing language (TL) was also included. Norm-referenced child assessments and observational measures were used to assess changes in children's language growth.

Results

Results from multilevel modeling indicate that children in the treatment group made greater gains than children in the control group on most language measures. Whereas children in the treatment group had lower language scores than children with TL at the end of intervention, the rate of language growth was not significantly different between groups. Child receptive language and parent use of matched turns predicted expressive language growth in both children with and without LI.

Conclusion

The results of this preliminary study indicate that parent-implemented interventions may be an effective treatment for children with expressive and receptive LI.

The Use and Productivity of Past Tense Morphology in Specific Language Impairment: An Examination of Danish [Article]

Vang Christensen, R., Hansson, K. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

The authors' primary goal was to investigate the potential of past tense inflection as a clinical marker of Danish specific language impairment (SLI). They also wished to test the predictions of the extended optional infinitive (EOI) account and processing based accounts of SLI on Danish.

Method

Using sentence completion and sentence repetition tasks, the authors investigated the use of past tense by 3 groups ( n = 11 in each group): (a) children with SLI whose ages ranged from 5;2 (years;months) to 7;11; (b) children with typical language development matched on chronological age; and (c) children with typical language development matched on vocabulary.

Results

Participants with SLI were less likely to produce past tense than were both typically developing control groups. In particular, only the children with SLI had difficulties with accurately producing past tense verbs during the sentence repetition task. Past tense accuracy was associated with children's productive vocabulary levels and proficiency with a nonword repetition task.

Conclusion

Past tense use is potentially a clinical marker of Danish SLI, but more research is needed to confirm this. Results provided mixed support for competing accounts of SLI.

Children With Specific Language Impairment and Resolved Late Talkers: Working Memory Profiles at 5 Years [Article]

Petruccelli, N., Bavin, E. L., Bretherton, L. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

The evidence of a deficit in working memory in specific language impairment (SLI) is of sufficient magnitude to suggest a primary role in developmental language disorder. However, little research has investigated memory in late talkers who recover from their early delay. Drawing on a longitudinal, community sample, this study compared the memory profiles of 3 groups of 5-year-olds: children with SLI who had been identified as late talkers, resolved late talkers (RLTs), and children with typical language development (TLD).

Method

Participants were 25 children with SLI, 45 RLTs, and 32 children with TLD. Subtests from the Working Memory Test Battery for Children and the Children's Memory Scale plus recalling sentences and nonword repetition tasks were administered to test the components of Baddeley's working memory model.

Results

The SLI group showed significantly poorer performance than the RLT and TLD groups on measures of the phonological loop and episodic buffer. The RLT and TLD groups scored similarly on all memory measures.

Conclusions

The results support previous findings that sentence recall and nonword repetition are markers of SLI. Although residual effects of late-talking status may emerge over time, RLTs do not necessarily show memory deficits at 5 years of age despite delayed early vocabulary development.

Finiteness Marking in Boys With Fragile X Syndrome [Article]

Sterling, A. M., Rice, M. L., Warren, S. F. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

The current study investigated finiteness marking (e.g., he walk s, he walk ed) in boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS); the boys were grouped based on receptive vocabulary (i.e., borderline, impaired).

Method

Twenty-one boys with the full mutation of fragile X, between the ages of 8 and 16 years participated. The boys completed probes from the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI; Rice & Wexler, 2001), a language sample, a nonverbal IQ test (Leiter–R; Roid & Miller, 1997), a receptive vocabulary test (the Pearson Picture Vocabulary Test—Fourth Edition [PPVT–IV]; Dunn & Dunn, 2007), and a measure of autistic symptoms (the Childhood Autism Rating Scale [CARS]; Schopler, Reichler, & Renner, 2002).

Results

There were group differences for finiteness responses on the 3rd person singular probe; the group with impaired vocabulary omitted markers with greater frequency compared to the borderline vocabulary group. There were not significant differences on the past tense probe, with both groups performing lower than expectations based on receptive vocabulary ability. Nonverbal IQ was not correlated with the measures of finiteness marking.

Conclusion

Boys with FXS demonstrate delays in finiteness marking, in particular, on past tense verbs. Boys with FXS show a unique profile, unlike children with SLI, in which their use of tense markers may exceed expectations benchmarked to clause length.

Developmental Trajectories of Verbal and Nonverbal Skills in Individuals With a History of Specific Language Impairment: From Childhood to Adolescence [Article]

Conti-Ramsden, G., St Clair, M. C., Pickles, A., Durkin, K. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

To investigate the longitudinal trajectories of verbal and nonverbal skills in individuals with a history of specific language impairment (SLI) from childhood to adolescence. This study focuses on SLI only and investigates within-participant measures across abilities.

Method

Verbal and nonverbal skills were assessed in 242 children with a history of SLI at ages 7, 8, 11, 14, 16, and 17. Discrete factor growth modeling was used to examine developmental trajectories for the whole group and to identify subgroups on the basis of a novel, developmental, multidimensional approach.

Results

When expressive language, receptive language, and nonverbal skills were scaled to a common metric, the group of individuals with a history of SLI as a whole had stable skills growth throughout the 10-year time frame. Seven language subgroups were identified, but these differed only in severity and did not display mutually distinctive patterns of growth development. In contrast, 6 nonverbal skills subgroups were identified, and their trajectories did differ significantly, with evidence of deceleration in around one third of the sample.

Conclusion

Individuals with a history of SLI show steady language growth from age 7. However, different patterns of growth of nonverbal skills are observed from childhood to adolescence.

Verb Comprehension and Use in Children and Adults With Down Syndrome [Article]

Michael, S. E., Ratner, N. B., Newman, R. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

Expressive syntax is a particular area of difficulty for individuals with Down syndrome (DS). In order to better understand the basis for sentence formulation deficits often observed in children and adults with DS, the authors explored the use and comprehension of verbs differing in argument structure.

Method

The authors examined verb and argument structure retrieval in 18 individuals, 9 with DS, age 11;11 (years;months) to 32;10 and 9 receptive vocabulary age-matched typically developing (TD) children, age 3;2 to 13;6. Participants completed verb and noun comprehension tasks, a working memory assessment, verb and noun naming tasks, grammaticality judgments, and narrative tasks.

Results

Neither single verb comprehension nor single verb naming differentiated the DS and TD groups. Individuals with DS performed significantly worse than individuals who are TD when asked to judge sentence grammaticality. Individuals with DS omitted verbs in elicited narratives significantly more often than individuals who are TD, specifically when productions of 2-place and 3-place verbs were attempted. Individuals with DS also omitted other necessary elements of argument structure, such as subjects, in sentences containing 2-place and 3-place verbs significantly more often than individuals who are TD. Performance was not related to working memory skills.

Conclusions

Results indicate that individuals with DS do display a specific expressive deficit in verb and argument structure retrieval (but not comprehension) that varies as a function of verb type (1 place, 2 place, and 3 place).

The Influence of Reduced Audible Bandwidth on Asynchronous Double-Vowel Identification [Article]

Valentine, S., Lentz, J. J. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors sought to determine whether reduced audible bandwidth associated with hearing loss contributes to difficulty benefiting from an onset asynchrony between sounds.

Method

Synthetic double-vowel identification was measured for normal-hearing listeners and listeners with hearing loss. One vowel (Target 2) was 250 ms in duration, and one (Target 1) varied in duration. The vowels had the same offset, and an onset asynchrony between the vowels ranged between 0 and 200 ms. Listeners identified both vowels in their perceived order. The scoring metrics used were as follows: Target 1 correctly identified in the correct position, Target 2 correctly identified in the correct position, ordered double-vowel identification, and unordered double-vowel identification. The same experiment was conducted with vowels low-pass filtered at 900 Hz simulating reduced audible bandwidth.

Results

For all scoring metrics, increases in onset asynchrony led to better vowel identification. Listeners with hearing loss benefited less from onset asynchrony than normal-hearing listeners only for Target 2 identification. Filtering the vowels reduced onset asynchrony benefit for all scoring categories and for both groups.

Conclusion

Results implicate reduced audible bandwidth in difficulties of listeners when using onset asynchrony for sound segregation. Therefore, listeners with a reduced audible bandwidth may have communication difficulties in natural environments.

Perceptual Acclimatization Post Nonlinear Frequency Compression Hearing Aid Fitting in Older Children [Article]

Glista, D., Scollie, S., Sulkers, J. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors evaluated the effect of frequency compression hearing aids on speech perception ability and the time course and magnitude of acclimatization-related changes.

Method

Participants included children ages 11–18 years. Speech perception ability was evaluated over well-controlled baseline, treatment, and withdrawal study phases. Study-worn hearing aids were individually fitted to all participants. The authors evaluated speech perception ability using outcomes of speech detection (/s/ and /esh/ sounds), /s–esh/ discrimination, and plural and consonant recognition.

Results

Indices of change were discussed on a case-by-case basis across all study phases. Significant treatment effects were measured for all cases, on at least one measure, with some listeners displaying significant acclimatization trends following a trial of frequency compression.

Conclusion

Findings suggest that frequency compression provided varying outcomes, both in benefit and acclimatization, across listeners. For some, a period of acclimatization was necessary before change could be measured. For others, performance remained stable over the time course under evaluation, suggesting that some but not all children will experience improved speech recognition ability after a period of frequency compression hearing aid use.

Audiovisual Perception of Congruent and Incongruent Dutch Front Vowels [Article]

Valkenier, B., Duyne, J. Y., Andringa, T. C., Baskent, D. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

Auditory perception of vowels in background noise is enhanced when combined with visually perceived speech features. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the influence of visual cues on vowel perception extends to incongruent vowels, in a manner similar to the McGurk effect observed with consonants.

Method

Identification of Dutch front vowels /i, y, e, Y/ that share all features other than height and lip-rounding was measured for congruent and incongruent audiovisual conditions. The audio channel was systematically degraded by adding noise, increasing the reliance on visual cues.

Results

The height feature was more robustly carried over through the auditory channel and the lip-rounding feature through the visual channel. Hence, congruent audiovisual presentation enhanced identification, while incongruent presentation led to perceptual fusions and thus decreased identification.

Conclusions

Visual cues influence the identification of congruent as well as incongruent audiovisual vowels. Incongruent visual information results in perceptual fusions, demonstrating that the McGurk effect can be instigated by long phonemes such as vowels. This result extends to the incongruent presentation of the visually less reliably perceived height. The findings stress the importance of audiovisual congruency in communication devices, such as cochlear implants and videoconferencing tools, where the auditory signal could be degraded.

The Consonant-Weighted Envelope Difference Index (cEDI): A Proposed Technique for Quantifying Envelope Distortion [Research Note]

Hoover, E. C., Souza, P. E., Gallun, F. J. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

The benefits of amplitude compression in hearing aids may be limited by distortion resulting from rapid gain adjustment. To evaluate this, it is convenient to quantify distortion by using a metric that is sensitive to the changes in the processed signal that decrease consonant recognition, such as the Envelope Difference Index (EDI; Fortune, Woodruff, & Preves, 1994). However, the EDI relies on the entire duration of the signal, including portions irrelevant to consonant recognition.

Method

This note describes a computationally efficient method of automatically segmenting speech in time according to the syllable structure. Our technique uses the 1st derivative of the envelope as a basis. Peaks located in the derivative were used to generate a weighting function for the computation of a metric of signal distortion.

Results

The weighting function significantly improved the variance explained in consonant recognition scores over previous methods. However, only 3.2% of the variance was explained in the revised model.

Conclusion

This technique was effective in focusing the analysis of distortion on specific segments of the signal. Use of the technique has implications for speech analysis. The difference in the amplitude envelope of consonants is not a robust model of the effect of hearing aid compression on consonant recognition.

Acoustics of Clear Speech: Effect of Instruction [Article]

Lam, J., Tjaden, K., Wilding, G. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

This study investigated how different instructions for eliciting clear speech affected selected acoustic measures of speech.

Method

Twelve speakers were audio-recorded reading 18 different sentences from the Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech ( Yorkston & Beukelman, 1984). Sentences were produced in habitual, clear, hearing impaired, and overenunciate conditions. A variety of acoustic measures were obtained.

Results

Relative to habitual, the clear, hearing impaired, and overenunciate conditions were associated with different magnitudes of acoustic change for measures of vowel production, speech timing, and vocal intensity. The overenunciate condition tended to yield the greatest magnitude of change in vowel spectral measures and speech timing, followed by the hearing impaired and clear conditions. SPL tended to be the greatest in the hearing impaired condition for half of the speakers studied.

Conclusions

Different instructions for eliciting clear speech yielded acoustic adjustments of varying magnitude. Results have implications for direct comparison of studies using different instructions for eliciting clear speech. Results also have implications for optimizing clear speech training programs.

Developmental Trajectory for Production of Prosody: Lexical Stress Contrastivity in Children Ages 3 to 7 Years and in Adults [Article]

Ballard, K. J., Djaja, D., Arciuli, J., James, D. G. H., van Doorn, J. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

Accurate production of lexical stress within English polysyllabic words is critical for intelligibility and is affected in many speech-language disorders. However, models of speech production remain underspecified with regard to lexical stress. In this study, the authors report a large-scale acoustic investigation of lexical stress production in typically developing Australian English–speaking children ages 3–7 years ( n = 73) compared with young adults ( n = 24).

Method

Participants named pictures of highly familiar strong–weak and weak–strong polysyllabic words. Of 388 productions, 325 met criteria for acoustic measurement. Relative vowel duration, peak intensity, and peak f ₀ over the first two syllables were measured.

Result

Lexical stress was marked consistently by duration and intensity but not f ₀. Lexical stress on strong–weak words was adultlike by 3 years. All 3 measures showed significant differences between adults and children for weak–strong words still present at 7 years.

Conclusion

Our findings suggest that protracted development of weak–strong stress production reflects physiological constraints on producing short articulatory durations and rising intensity contours. Findings validate treatment that is centered on strong–weak stress production for children ≥ 3 years with dysprosody. Although intervention for the production of weak–strong words may be initiated before age 7 years, reference to normative acoustic data is preferable to relying on perceptual judgments of accuracy.

Modifying Speech to Children Based on Their Perceived Phonetic Accuracy [Article]

Julien, H. M., Munson, B. — 2012-12-26T07:40:29-08:00

Purpose

The authors examined the relationship between adults' perception of the accuracy of children's speech and acoustic detail in their subsequent productions to children.

Method

Twenty-two adults participated in a task in which they rated the accuracy of 2- and 3-year-old children's word-initial /s/ and // using a visual analog scale (VAS), then produced a token of the same word as if they were responding to the child whose speech they had just rated.

Result

The duration of adults' fricatives varied as a function of their perception of the accuracy of children's speech: Longer fricatives were produced following productions that they rated as inaccurate. This tendency to modify duration in response to perceived inaccurate tokens was mediated by measures of self-reported experience interacting with children. However, speakers did not increase the spectral distinctiveness of their fricatives following the perception of inaccurate tokens.

Conclusion

These results suggest that adults modify temporal features of their speech in response to perceiving children's inaccurate productions. These longer fricatives are potentially both enhanced input to children and an error-corrective signal.

Aerodynamic and Nonlinear Dynamic Acoustic Analysis of Tension Asymmetry in Excised Canine Larynges [Article]

Devine, E. E., Bulleit, E. E., Hoffman, M. R., McCulloch, T. M., Jiang, J. J. — 2012-12-26T07:40:30-08:00

Purpose

To model tension asymmetry caused by superior laryngeal nerve paralysis (SLNP) in excised larynges and apply perturbation, nonlinear dynamic, and aerodynamic analyses.

Method

SLNP was modeled in 8 excised larynges using sutures and weights to mimic cricothyroid (CT) muscle function. Weights were removed from one side to create tension asymmetry, mimicking unilateral SLNP. Two sets of weights were used, 1 light and 1 heavy. Five conditions were evaluated: (a) no tension, (b) symmetrical light tension, (c) asymmetrical light tension, (d) symmetrical heavy tension, and (e) asymmetrical heavy tension.

Results

Perturbation parameters were not significantly different across conditions: percent jitter, ²(4) = 3.70, p = .451; percent shimmer, F(4) = 0.95, p = .321. In addition, many measurements were invalid (error values >10). Second-order entropy was significantly different across conditions, F(4) = 5.432, p = .002, whereas correlation dimension was not, F(4) = 0.99, p = .428. Validity of these nonlinear dynamic parameters was demonstrated by low standard deviations. Phonation threshold pressure, ²(4) = 22.50, p < .001, and power, ²(4) = 9.50, p = .05, differed significantly across conditions, whereas phonation threshold flow did not, ²(4) = 4.08, p = .396.

Conclusions

Nonlinear dynamic analysis differentiated between symmetrical and asymmetrical tension conditions, whereas traditional perturbation analysis was less useful in characterizing type 2 or 3 vocal signals. Supplementing acoustic with aerodynamic parameters may help distinguish among laryngeal disorders of neuromuscular origin.

The Effects of Concurrent Cognitive Load on Phonological Processing in Adults Who Stutter [Article]

Jones, R. M., Fox, R. A., Jacewicz, E. — 2012-12-26T07:40:30-08:00

Purpose

To determine whether phonological processing in adults who stutter (AWS) is disrupted by increased amounts of cognitive load in a concurrent attention-demanding task.

Method

Nine AWS and 9 adults who do not stutter (AWNS) participated. Using a dual-task paradigm, the authors presented word pairs for rhyme judgments and, concurrently, letter strings for memory recall. The rhyme judgment task manipulated rhyming type (rhyming/nonrhyming) and orthographic representation (similar/dissimilar). The memory recall task varied stimulus complexity (no letters, 3 letters, 5 letters). Rhyme judgment accuracy and reaction time (RT) were used to assess phonological processing, and letter recall accuracy was used to measure memory recall.

Results

For rhyme judgments, AWS were as accurate as AWNS, and the increase in the cognitive load did not affect rhyme judgment accuracy of either group. Significant group differences were found in RTs (delays by AWS were 241 ms greater). RTs of AWS were also slower in the most demanding rhyme condition and varied with the complexity of the memory task. Accuracy of letter recall of AWS was comparatively worse in the most demanding 5-letter condition.

Conclusion

Phonological and cognitive processing of AWS is more vulnerable to disruptions caused by increased amounts of cognitive load in concurrent attention-demanding tasks.

Maxillary Arch Dimensions and Spectral Characteristics of Children With Cleft Lip and Palate Who Produce Middorsum Palatal Stops [Article]

Zajac, D. J., Cevidanes, L., Shah, S., Haley, K. L. — 2012-12-26T07:40:30-08:00

Purpose

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to determine maxillary arch dimensions of children with repaired cleft lip and palate (CLP) who produced middorsum palatal stops and (b) to describe some spectral characteristics of middorsum palatal stops.

Method

Maxillary arch width, length, and height dimensions and first spectral moments of /t/-/k/ contrast words were determined for three groups of children ages 7–11 years: (a) with CLP who were clinically judged to produce middorsum palatal stops ( n = 5), (b) with CLP but without middorsum palatal stops ( n = 6), and (c) typically developing controls ( n = 8). Validity of clinical judgments of middorsum palatal stops was assessed by adult listeners via forced-choice identification of /t/-/k/ contrast words.

Results

Listeners confirmed production of middorsum palatal stops for 4 of 5 children with CLP. These children had (a) the narrowest anterior maxillary arch width relative to posterior arch width ( p = .011) and (b) the lowest first spectral moment for /t/ targets ( p = .001) and the lowest /t/-/k/ difference ( p = .010).

Conclusion

Middorsum palatal stops may occur in children with repaired CLP in response to limited anterior oral cavity space due to restricted (or collapsed) maxillary arches. First spectral moment characteristics of middorsum palatal stops are consistent with backed lingual placement during stop release.

The Relationship Between Perception of Vocal Effort and Relative Fundamental Frequency During Voicing Offset and Onset [Article]

Stepp, C. E., Sawin, D. E., Eadie, T. L. — 2012-12-26T07:40:30-08:00

Purpose

In this study, the authors aimed to determine the relationship between relative fundamental frequency (RFF) and listener perception of vocal effort in individuals with varying degrees of vocal hyperfunction.

Method

Thirty women diagnosed with voice disorders commonly associated with vocal hyperfunction and 10 healthy women provided speech samples that were used to obtain parameters of RFF. Twelve listeners judged the speech samples for overall severity and vocal effort (VE) using rating scales.

Results

Significant but relatively weak negative correlations were found between perceptual measures and offset RFF parameters. Although offset RFF was increased in healthy participants relative to speakers with voice disorders, no differences were seen in RFF as a function of severity of VE in individuals with voice disorders.

Conclusions

Although a statistically significant correlation between offset RFF and VE was found, examination of data as a function of both VE and health status indicated that RFF more accurately classifies the presence of a voice disorder than does severity of voice quality or VE. There is a need for further research to investigate the clinical utility of RFF measures for assessment of rehabilitation progress.

Spatiotemporal Coupling of the Tongue in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis [Article]

Kuruvilla, M. S., Green, J. R., Yunusova, Y., Hanford, K. — 2012-12-26T07:40:30-08:00

Purpose

The primary aim of the investigation was to identify deficits in spatiotemporal coupling between tongue regions in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The relations between disease-related changes in tongue movement patterns and speech intelligibility were also determined.

Methods

The authors recorded word productions from 11 individuals with ALS with mild, moderate, and severe dysarthria using an x-ray microbeam during word productions. A coupling index based on sliding window covariance was used to determine disease-related changes in the coupling between the tongue regions across each word.

Results

The results indicated decreased spatiotemporal coupling of mid-posterior tongue regions and reduced tongue speed in the ALS-moderate subgroup. Changes in the range of tongue coupling relations and speed of movement were highly correlated with speech intelligibility.

Conclusions

These results provide new insights into the loss of lingual motor control due to ALS and suggest that measures of tongue performance may provide useful indicators of bulbar disease severity and progression.