bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Quantitative Description of the Dysarthria in Women With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Authors: Kent Jane Finley , Kent Raymond D. , Rosenbek John C. , Weismer Gary , Martin Ruth , Sufit Robert , Brooks Benjamin R.
Published: July 2014

Speech intelligibility and its phonetic and acoustic correlates were studied in a group of 10 women with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Intelligibility assessment with a word-identification test indicated that the most disrupted phonetic features pertained to velopharyngeal valving, lingual function for consonant contrasts of place and manner, and syllable shape. An acoustic signature analysis based on trajectories of the first and second formants in selected monosyllabic test words revealed that the mean slope of the second formant (F
2
) was reduced compared with that of a normal geriatric control group. This F
2
slope reduction is interpreted to reflect loss of lingual motoneurons. Acoustic measures of phonatory function for sustained vowel prolongation demonstrated abnormalities in fundamental frequency, perturbations of frequency (jitter) and amplitude (shimmer), and signal-to-noise ratio. The data for women with ALS are compared with data for a normal geriatric control group of women and with data for a group of 25 men with ALS (Kent et al., 1990). Although the overall ranking of errors was similar for males and females with ALS, men were more likely to have impairments of voicing in syllable-initial position.
Detection and Recognition of Stop Consonants by Normal.Hearing and Hearing Impaired Listeners
Authors: Turner Christopher W. , Fabry David A. , Barrett Stephanie , Horwitz Amy R.
Published: July 2014

This study examined the possibility that hearing-impaired listeners, in addition to displaying poorer-than-normal recognition of speech presented in background noise, require a larger signal-to-noise ratio for the detection of the speech sounds. Psychometric functions for the detection and recognition of stop consonants were obtained from both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Expressing the speech levels in terms of their short-term spectra, the detection of consonants for both subject groups occurred at the same signal-to-noise ratio. In contrast, the hearing-impaired listeners displayed poorer recognition performance than the normal-hearing listeners. These results imply that the higher signal-to-noise ratios required for a given level of recognition by some subjects with hearing loss are not due in part to a deficit in detection of the signals in the masking noise, but rather are due exclusively to a deficit in recognition.
Speech Breathing in Senescent and Younger Women During Oral Reading
Authors: Sperry Elizabeth E. , Klich Richard J.
Published: July 2014

Breathing patterns in 20–30-year-old and 60–70-year-old women were recorded noninvasively during various nonspeech and oral reading tasks. On the nonspeech tasks, the only significant difference between groups was a smaller mean vital capacity for the older women. On oral reading, the older women had significantly greater means for absolute and relative inhalatory volumes, relative inhalatory airflow rates, absolute and relative volumes during nonphonatory exhalations, and relative exhalatory volumes. No significant mean differences between groups were found on absolute inhalatory airflow rates, absolute exhalatory volumes during speech, and absolute and relative exhalatory airflow rates. In both age groups, increases in sentence length were associated with significantly increased inhalatory and exhalatory volumes but mean airflow rates were not significantly affected by sentence length. Some differential effects of reading context on only the older group seemed to represent additional demands placed on their respiratory systems for speech breathing.
Contextual and Linguistic Correlates of Intelligibility in Children With Developmental Phonological Disorders
Authors: Weston Audrey D. , Shriberg Lawrence D.
Published: July 2014

Listeners' glosses of children's intended words provided data for two studies of the potential influence of selected contextual and linguistic variables on word intelligibility. Several regularities associated with the occurrence of unintelligible words were identified. In Study I, intelligibility outcomes were associated with utterance length and fluency, word position, intelligibility of adjacent words, phonological complexity, and grammatical form. In Study II, intelligibility outcomes were associated with phonological complexity, syllabic structure, and grammatical form. Discussion considers the implications of these and other regularities associated with the occurrence of unintelligible words for a comprehensive perspective on the utterance-to-utterance intelligibility deficits of children with phonological disorders of unknown origin.
Speech and Swallowing Function After Anterior Tongue and Floor of Mouth Resection With Distal Flap Reconstruction
Authors: Pauloski Barbara Roa , Logemann Jeri A. , Rademaker Alfred W. , McConnel Fred M. S. , Heiser Mary Anne , Cardinale Salvatore , Shedd Donald , Lewin Jan , Baker Shan R. , Graner Darlene , Cook Barbara , Milianti Frank , Collins Sharon , Baker Theresa
Published: July 2014

The purpose of this study was to assess the postoperative functioning of oral cancer patients with resections of the anterior tongue and floor of mouth, reconstructed with distal flap closure. Speech and swallowing performance was assessed for 11 men and 5 women preoperatively and at 1 and 3 months postoperatively following a standardized protocol. Speech tasks included an audio recording of a brief conversation and of a standard articulation test; swallowing function was examined using videofluoroscopy. Data were also collected on the number and duration of speech/swallowing treatment sessions, as well as the amount and duration of radiation therapy. Statistical analyses revealed that patients demonstrated a significant and severe impairment in speech and swallow functioning after surgery, with no recovery of function by 3 months post-healing. The degree of impairment in these patients may be related to the adynamic character of the distal flap used for reconstruction. Lack of improvement at the 3-month evaluation may be related to either the timing of postoperative radiation therapy or the low rate (44%) and amount of speech/swallowing treatment provided to these patients.
Loudness Matching of Signals Spectrally Shaped by a Simulated Hearing Aid
Authors: Punch Jerry , Rakerd Brad
Published: July 2014

A hearing aid with multiple frequency responses was simulated by programming an equalizer to produce spectral tilt factors of -6, 0, and +6 dB/octave over the frequency range from 0.25 kHz to 4 kHz. Listeners with normal hearing matched the loudness of signals (speech and white noise) that were shaped by these different equalizer settings and delivered via an insert earphone. All signals with spectra that were tilted, either negatively or positively, were perceived as louder than untilted signals. The general pattern of loudness matching was similar across subjects, and intrasubject judgments were found to be highly transitive. A measure of signal power was found to account only moderately well for the individual data. Preliminary evidence from a follow-up study using tilt factors less severe than those used in the main experiment suggests that loudness differences are roughly proportional to the degree of spectral tilt. The incorporation of level corrections approximating those necessary to achieve equal loudness is recommended in the fitting of programmable hearing aids.
Auditory Processing in Children's Speech Perception
Authors: Sussman Joan E.
Published: July 2014

Five- to six-year-old children and adults participated in discrimination and selective adaptation speech perception tasks using a synthetic consonant-vowel continuum ranging from [bal to Ida]. In one condition of selective adaptation, attention was focused on the adapting stimulus, the continuum-endpoint ba], with a whispering task. In another condition, attention was focused away from the continuum-endpoint [da] adaptor to contralaterally presented syllables "
she
" and "
see
." Results, compared with two more typical adaptation conditions, indicated that focused attention did not augment selective adaptation effects, particularly for children who showed smaller effects with focused attention on the adaptor. In contrast to adults, children did not significantly change labeling responses after exposure to endpoint-[ba] adaptors, results matching those of Sussman and Carney (1989). However, children did significantly change labeling following exposure to endpoint-[da] adaptors. Discrimination findings with five-formant consonant-vowel and single-formant stimuli supported the importance of acoustic processing for the selective adaptation tasks performed. Together, results support hypotheses of sensory processing differences in younger, normally developing children compared with adults and show that such abilities appear to be related to speech perception skills.
Effects of Age on Serial Recall of Natural and Synthetic Speech
Authors: Humes Larry E. , Nelson Kathleen J. , Pisoni David B. , Lively Scott E.
Published: July 2014

The present study addressed the effects of aging on auditory serial-recall performance for natural and synthetic words. Word difficulty, measured in terms of frequency of occurrence and phonological similarity, and rate of presentation were also manipulated in an effort to determine which processes underlying serial-recall performance, if any, were affected by aging. Results indicated that age per se had little effect on short-term (working) memory as measured by the serial recall of monosyllabic words. Rate of presentation had little effect on recall for either subject group. Word difficulty, on the other hand, affected recall for both groups, with easy words being more readily recalled than hard words.
Speech Breathing in Young Adults
Authors: Manifold Julie A. Y. , Murdoch Bruce E.
Published: July 2014

Chest wall kinematic records were obtained from 60 healthy young adults aged 18 to 23 years using a strain-gauge belt pneumograph transduction system. Recordings were taken with the subjects seated in an upright position for measurement of general respiratory function and speech breathing. The 30 males and 30 females also underwent analysis of body type and spirometric assessment. The present study aimed to investigate normative variations in speech breathing kinematics as a function of body type. Measurements of lung volume levels were referenced to two kinematic respiratory points (the 0% limit and resting-end expiratory level) and relative volume displacement of the rib cage and abdomen. Various other assessments of connected speech were analyzed for each subject. Results gathered from four speech tasks (vowel prolongation, syllable repetition, counting, and reading) indicated that an analysis of the three major subdivisions of body type (endomorphy, mesomorphy, ectomorphy) did not show any between-group differences. Further analysis of six subdivisions from the three major subdivisions of body type groups showed few between-group differences. The present investigation provides clinicians and researchers with a comprehensive analysis of the speech breathing characteristics of the young adult population. The need for comparative studies and research into the different methods of assessing chest wall kinematic behavior during speech breathing is highlighted.
Pragmatics and SLI
Authors: Craig Holly K. , Evans Julia L.
Published: July 2014

Selected discourse behaviors of children with specific language impairment (SU) presenting expressive (E:SLI) or combined expressive-receptive deficits (E-R:SLI) were compared to each other and to chronological age-mates and younger mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched children with normal-language skills. The two SLI subgroups varied from each other on specific measures of tum-taking and cohesion. These findings imply the need for future normative work with SLI subgroups differing in receptive skill, and indicate that, in the interim, pragmatic research with this population will need to consider potential effects of receptive language status when interpreting variations in outcomes for discourse-based variables.
Comparison of Two Methods for Promoting Productive Vocabulary in Late Talkers
Authors: Weismer Susan Ellis , Murray-Branch Jamie , Miller Jon F.
Published: July 2014

This investigation compared the effectiveness of two language treatment methods, modeling versus modeling plus evoked production, in promoting productive vocabulary in three toddlers identified as late talkers. A single-subject alternating treatments design was employed in this study in which different sets of words were taught under the two treatment methods during group and individual instruction. Some evidence of differential patterns of response to the treatment types was found for two subjects, but the subjects differed as to which particular treatment method was associated with better performance. Neither treatment method was effective for the third subject. Dynamic assessment measures were only marginally useful in predicting overall lexical learning potential in these subjects, and did not predict response to the two teaching methods. Implications of these results are discussed with regard to the role of language intervention for late talkers.
Auditory Stroop Effects in Children With Hearing Impairment
Authors: Jerger Susan , Stout Gayle , Kent Marilyn , Albritton Elizabeth , Loiselle Louise , Blondeau Rebecca , Jorgenson Sheryl
Published: July 2014

The accurate perception of speech involves the processing of multidimensional information. The aim of this study was to determine the influence of the semantic dimension on the processing of the auditory dimension of speech by children with hearing impairment. The processing interactions characterizing the semantic and auditory dimensions were assessed with a pediatric auditory Stroop task. The subjects, 20 children with hearing impairment and 60 children with normal hearing, were instructed to attend selectively to the voice-gender of speech targets while ignoring the semantic content. The type of target was manipulated to represent conflicting, neutral, and congruent relations between dimensions (e.g., the male voice saying "Mommy," "ice cream," or "Daddy" respectively). The normal-hearing listeners could not ignore the irrelevant semantic content. Instead, reaction times were slower to the conflict targets (Stroop interference) and faster to the congruent targets (Stroop congruency). The subjects with hearing impairment showed prominent Stroop congruency, but minimal Stroop interference. Reduced Stroop interference was not associated with chronological age, a speed-accuracy tradeoff, a non-neutral baseline, or relatively poorer discriminability of the word input. The present results suggest that the voice-gender and semantic dimensions of speech were not processed independently by these children, either those with or those without hearing loss. However, the to-be-ignored semantic dimension exerted a less consistent influence on the processing of the voice-gender dimension in the presence of childhood hearing loss. The overall pattern of results suggests that speech processing by children with hearing impairment is carried out in a less stimulus-bound manner.
The Emergence of Mature Gestural Patterns Is Not Uniform
Authors: Nittrouer Susan
Published: July 2014

Previous studies investigating the organization of articulatory gestures present conflicting accounts of age-related differences in the execution of the articulatory gestures themselves and in the organization of those gestures. Several methodological differences may help to explain these contradictions: First, different studies have used different measures, all of which reflect vocal-tract activity to varying extents; second, the articulatory gestures being analyzed differed across studies; third, the phonetic composition of syllables has varied; and finally, utterance length, and therefore complexity, has varied across studies. The purpose of this study was to investigate the possibility that the reason these methodological differences have led to contradictory results is because the emergence of mature gestural patterns in children’s speech is not uniform. To accomplish this goal, detailed acoustic analyses were performed on schwa-stop-vowel utterances from adults and from children (3, 5, and 7 years of age). Temporal measures showed that some acoustic segments were longer in children’s than in adults’ samples, whereas others were similar in duration. Formant frequencies indicated that vocal-tract opening and closing achieve adult-like patterns of movement by the age of 3 years, but children’s tongue gestures are constrained by phonetic context more than those of adults until at least the age of 7 years. Taken together, these results suggest that the pace of development for leading to produce and to coordinate articulatory gestures is not uniform. Thus, the contradictions in findings among earlier studies may very well reflect differences in choices of measurement and utterances to be analyzed, both of which may lead to evaluations of different aspects of gestural patterning.
Auditory Lexical Decisions in Children and Adults
Authors: Edwards Jan , Lahey Margaret
Published: July 2014

This study examined the influence of nonlexical response factors on the speed of auditory lexical decisions in children and adults. Two groups of children (6- and 7-year-olds, 8- and 9-year-olds) and adults participated in three tasks: a real-word lexical decision task in which subjects were asked to say "yes" as quickly as possible to real words; a nonword lexical decision task in which subjects were asked to say "no" as quickly as possible to nonwords; and an auditory-vocal reaction time task in which subjects were asked to say "yes" or "no" to a tone. Response times on all tasks decreased with age. However, the age-related differences on the real-word lexical decision task disappeared when differences in auditory-vocal reaction times were taken into account. This result suggests that a large part of developmental differences in the speed of lexical processing may be due to nonlexical response factors.
Issues Raised by Facilitated Communication for Theorizing and Research on Autism
Authors: Duchan Judith Felson
Published: July 2014

There is considerable disagreement in the literature and among clinicians about the success of facilitated communication, a new method of augmentative communication being used with people diagnosed autistic. Some claim almost everyone exposed to it achieves success, basing their claims upon their observations and experiences of naturally occurring facilitated interactions. Others claim minimal or no success, basing their claims on their observations of facilitated interactions under controlled experimental conditions. I argue here that both claims can be valid and that FC users with autism are sometimes competent and other times incompetent, depending upon the conditions under which they are evaluated. I support my argument by offering a collaborative view of communication in place of the commonly held view that communication involves passing messages over an invisible conduit. Given the assumption that facilitated communication does allow for the expression of unexpected competence for many with autism, I describe various unusual phenomena being revealed by facilitation and FC users and offer some theoretical approaches for explaining these phenomena. I then propose some research ideas for studying the phenomena associated with FC and offer them as suggestions for how we might proceed in our efforts to develop our understanding of when and how it works for people with autism.
Plural Acquisition in Children With Specific Language Impairment
Authors: Oetting Janna B. , Rice Mabel L.
Published: July 2014

A plural elicitation task and a nominal compounding task were administered to a group of children with SLI and two groups of normally developing children, an age-equivalent group (CA) and a language-equivalent group (MLU). Across tasks, differences between the CA and SLI groups were significant, but differences between the MLU and SLI groups were not. These findings suggest that by 5 years of age, children with SLI demonstrate a productive and differentiated plural system. However, unlike the normally developing children, the pluralization skills of the children with SLI were affected by input frequency, with nouns that are frequently pluralized in everyday conversation more readily inflected than ones that are infrequently pluralized. Three explanations within a model of linguistic normalcy are proposed to account for the frequency effect. These include (a) delayed independence of rule use, (b) linguistic vulnerability, and (c) a faulty lexicon.
Perception of Formant Transition Cues to Place of Articulation in Children With Language Impairments
Authors: Sussman Joan E.
Published: July 2014

Discrimination and phonetic identification abilities of 5- to 6-year-old children with language impairments were compared to those of 4-year-olds with normally developing language and to previous findings from 5- to 6-year-olds and adults for synthetic stimuli ranging from [ba] to da]. Results showed similar discrimination sensitivity to the second- and third-formant transition cues of stimuli by all children, with poorest sensitivity by the youngest. Phonetic categorization by children with language impairments was most different from the groups with normal language abilities, evidenced by a difference in the percent of tokens labeled as "BA" and by greater variability in labeling and in placement of phonetic category boundaries. Results support hypotheses by Gathercole and Baddeley (1990) suggesting that the phonological component of working memory may be disordered in children with language impairments. Results are also suggestive of specific difficulties with left-hemisphere processing associated with language learning rather than with problems related to sensitivity to formant transitions of the speech tokens.
Duration of Sound Prolongation and Sound/Syllable Repetition in Children Who Stutter
Authors: Zebrowski Patricia M.
Published: July 2014

The purpose of this study was to measure the duration of sound prolongations and sound/syllable repetitions (stutterings) in the conversational speech of school-age children who stutter. The relationships between duration and (a) frequency and type of speech disfluency, (b) number and rate of repeated units per instance of sound/syllable repetition, (c) overall speech rate, and (d) articulatory rate were also examined. Results indicated that for the children in this study the average duration of stuttering was approximately three-quarters of a second, and was not significantly correlated with age, length of post-onset interval, or frequency of speech disfluency. In addition, findings can be taken to suggest that part of the clinical significance of stuttering duration for children who stutter might lie in its relationship to the amount of sound prolongations these children produce, as well as their articulatory rate during fluent speech.
The Reliability of Observational Data
Authors: Cordes Anne K. , Ingham Roger J.
Published: July 2014

Much attention has been directed recently toward the problem of measuring occurrences of stuttering with satisfactory levels of interjudge agreement. This paper reviews the prominent concepts of the stuttering event, arguing that they may be one cause of the stuttering measurement problem. The evidence that has led to concerns about the reliability of stuttering event measurements is also reviewed. Reliability and measurement issues that were discussed in the first paper of this series (Cordes, 1994) emerge as basic to the interpretation of much stuttering research, and it is argued that the stuttering measurement problem is not confined to research on stuttering judgments but actually permeates other important stuttering research areas. Some recent attempts to resolve the stuttering measurement problem are reviewed, and the implications of developing an improved measurement system for this disorder are discussed.
The Counting Abilities of Children With Specific Language Impairment
Authors: Fazio Barbara B.
Published: July 2014

This study examined the counting abilities of preschool children with specific language impairment compared to language-matched and mental-age-matched peers. In order to determine the nature of the difficulties SLI children exhibited in counting, the subjects participated in a series of oral counting tasks and a series of gestural tasks that used an invented counting system based on pointing to body parts. Despite demonstrating knowledge of many of the rules associated with counting, SLI preschool children displayed marked difficulty in counting objects. On oral counting tasks, they showed difficulty with rote counting, displayed a limited repertoire of number terms, and miscounted sets of objects. However, on gestural counting tasks, SLI children’s performance was significantly better. These findings suggest that SLI children have a specific difficulty with the rote sequential aspect of learning number words.
Relation Between Phonologic Difficulty and the Occurrence of Disfluencies in the Early Stage of Stuttering
Authors: Throneburg Rebecca Niermann , Yairi Ehud , Paden Elaine P.
Published: July 2014

People who stutter, especially children, have often been reported to exhibit a wide range of concomitant communication problems including articulation and phonologic deficiencies. This study investigated the relation between the phonologic difficulty of words and the point at which stuttering-like disfluencies occurred in the speech of preschool children identified as having a stuttering problem (
n
=24). The children were divided into subgroups according to stuttering severity and phonologic ability. A spontaneous speech sample of approximately 1,000 words was tape-recorded from each child, and perceived disfluencies were identified. The phonologic difficulty of each word on which there was a stuttering-like disfluency and of each fluent word immediately following such a disfluency was categorized. The proportion of words in each child’s speech sample that contained each category of phonologic difficulty was determined. The data showed that the proportion of disfluent and immediately following words in each type of phonologic difficulty closely resembled the proportion of words in the speech sample of the same type of difficulty. There were no significant differences between the subgroups of stutterers. We concluded, therefore, that the phonologic difficulty of the disfluent word, and the fluent word following it, did not contribute to fluency breakdown regardless of the childrens’ stuttering severity or phonologic ability.
Variability and Consistency in Speech Breathing During Reading
Authors: Winkworth Alison L. , Davis Pamela J. , Ellis Elizabeth , Adams Roger D.
Published: July 2014

Lung volumes during reading and associated factors such as speech intensity and linguistic influences were studied in six healthy young women over 7 to 10 sessions, using respiratory inductive plethysmography. Intrasubject variability of lung volumes over the sessions was almost as great as the intersubject variability. Some of the intrasubject variability was associated with natural variations of speech intensity within a “comfortable loudness” range. The lung volume variability during reading is contrasted with high degrees of both inter- and intrasubject consistency in the location of inspirations, which occurred almost exclusively at grammatically appropriate places in the texts (paragraph, sentence, clause, and phrase boundaries). Within each reading passage, lung volumes were significantly increased for (a) louder utterances, (b) inspirations at sentence and paragraph boundaries compared to inspirations at other locations within sentences, (c) longer utterances compared to shorter utterances, and (d) initial breaths compared to final breaths. The implications of these findings for the neural control of breathing during speech are considered.
Communication of Lexical Tones in Cantonese Alaryngeal Speech
Authors: Ching Teresa Y. C. , Williams Rhys , Hasselt Andrew Van
Published: July 2014

Cantonese is a tone language with six lexical tones. Each word has a distinctive tone, signaled by fundamental frequency variations at the syllable level. We investigated the relative efficiency of alaryngeal Cantonese speakers in conveying tonal variations in words in citation form. Isolated tone tokens were produced by three esophageal speakers, two tracheoesophageal speakers, two pneumatic artificial laryngeal speakers, and two electrolaryngeal speakers for perceptual tests. The correct responses from 22 listeners were highest for the pneumatic artificial laryngeal speakers, and could be graded in order of proficiency as esophageal, tracheoesophageal, and electrolaryngeal speakers. These results provide a linguistic perspective for guiding voice rehabilitation and the choice of voice in alaryngeal patients who speak a tone language.
Is There a Decline in Picture Naming With Advancing Age?
Authors: Goulet Pierre , Ska Bernadette , Kahn Helen J.
Published: July 2014

This review of 25 studies of the picture-naming accuracy of normal aging individuals shows that an age-related decline in picture naming is an inconsistent finding. Naming performance of older adults varied throughout the studies reviewed in this paper. This variability is attributed to the research methods used and to subject characteristics. To date, there are no studies that have considered all “nuisance factors” (e.g., health status, medication) in such a way that would allow support for a decrease in picture-naming accuracy associated with primary aging.
Modulation Detection Interference (MDI) in Listeners With Cochlear Hearing Loss
Authors: Grose John H. , Hall Joseph W.
Published: July 2014

This study compared Modulation Detection Interference (MDI) in listeners with cochlear hearing loss and in listeners with normal hearing. The study was motivated by questions of temporal resolution in the listeners with cochlear hearing loss as well as by their general difficulty in monitoring target sounds in the presence of competing background noise. The first experiment was similar to the MDI paradigm of Yost and Sheft (1989) and showed an equivalence in performance between the two groups of listeners: MDI brought about by an interfering tone comodulated with the target tone at 10 Hz was about 11 dB in both groups. There was also no difference in MDI magnitude when the modulation rate of the interferer changed to 25 Hz, indicating a lack of tuning to differential modulation rate in the gated paradigm employed here. The second experiment was analogous in concept to the measurement of a psychophysical tuning curve; the depth of modulation of the interfering carrier was adjusted to just interfere with the detection of a suprathreshold degree of modulation on the target carrier. The listeners with cochlear hearing loss performed quite similarly to the normal group, and the general lack of a frequency effect for the carrier tones suggested that MDI was relatively insensitive to presumed differences in auditory filter bandwidth between listeners. Because the basis of MDI has been hypothesized to be the fusion of the interfering tone with the target tone, the results of this study suggest that the auditory grouping factors presumed to underlie MDI are intact in listeners with hearing loss of cochlear origin.
The Effect of Sampling Condition on Children’s Productions of Consonant Clusters
Authors: McLeod Sharynne , Hand Linda , Rosenthal Joan B. , Hayes Brett
Published: July 2014

An investigation was conducted to compare the effects of single word and connected speech sampling conditions on the production of consonant clusters. Speech samples were obtained from 40 children with speech sound impairments who were aged 3 years: 6 months to 5 years. The children’s productions of 36 commonly occurring consonant clusters were compared across the two sampling conditions. Overall, children’s productions were more similar than different. Differences between the sampling conditions were apparent for three of the eight phonological processes studied, namely, cluster reduction, final consonant deletion, and epenthesis. Of 12 fine phonetic variations, only aspirated stops showed a significant difference between the sampling conditions. There was a wide range of individual variation.
Changes in the Generativity and Use of Semantic Relationships Concurrent With Milieu Language Intervention
Authors: Warren Steven F. , Gazdag Gail E. , Bambara Linda M. , Jones Hazel A.
Published: July 2014

Changes associated with a milieu language intervention implemented to teach productive semantic relationships (e.g., action-object combinations) were investigated. Subjects were 11 young children with borderline to moderate levels of mental retardation, all in the early stages of language development. Following a baseline period, each subject received three to four training sessions per week in a small group interactive play situation. Measures of generativity were analyzed via pre/post group comparisons. Concurrent with the intervention subjects showed substantial gains in their ability to generatively produce semantic relationships in the intervention context and across settings, adults, and interaction styles. Subjects also correctly responded to an increasing proportion of target probe questions in both the intervention and generalization settings. The results suggest that, for most of the subjects, milieu teaching was associated with enhanced generativity and use of semantic relationships.
Perception of Coarticulatory Cues in the Speech of Children With Profound Hearing Loss and Children With Normal Hearing
Authors: Waldstein Robin S. , Baum Shari R.
Published: July 2014

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues in the speech of children with profound hearing loss and children with normal hearing. To examine anticipatory coarticulation, five repetitions of the syllables [∫i ∫u ti tu ki ku] produced by nine children with hearing loss and nine children with normal hearing were edited to include only the aperiodic consonantal portion. To explore perseveratory coarticulation, comparable segments were excised from the syllables [i∫ u∫ it ut ik uk]. The stimuli had been analyzed previously in two acoustic studies of coarticulation (Baum & Waldstein, 1991; Waldstein & Baum, 1991). Ten listeners were presented with the aperiodic segment and were asked to identify the missing vowel. Overall, listeners’ vowel identification was better for the productions by children with normal hearing than for those by children with hearing loss. In anticipatory contexts, listeners were able to identify the absent vowel with better-than-chance accuracy for all productions by both groups except the [i] tokens following [∫] produced by children with hearing loss. In perseveratory contexts, identification accuracy was significantly above chance for all except the [i] tokens preceding [t] produced by children with normal hearing, but only for [u] tokens produced by children with hearing loss. Identification accuracy was better in anticipatory than in perseveratory contexts for both speaker groups’ productions. The patterning of vowel identification, however, differed for the two speaker groups in anticipatory but not perseveratory contexts.
Human Perioral Muscle Activation Patterns
Authors: Wohlert Amy B. , Goffman Lisa
Published: July 2014

Task-dependent human motor organization in the perioral region was examined in eight normal adults who performed oral tasks including lip protrusion, chewing, and speech. Zero phase-lag correlations among EMG signals recorded from quadrants surrounding the lips were calculated in order to determine patterns of motor coupling. Results indicated that the perioral musculature is flexible in output organization. Activv in all quadrants was highly positively correlated during the protrusion task. During the chewing task, correlations were moderate, with a stronger pattern bilaterally across the upper and lower lips. The speech tasks showed lower levels of correlation among the quadrants, but again the pattern was more highly correlated bilaterally than ipsilaterally. Results are compared to studies of oral muscle innervation in humans and animals and also are related to hypotheses of cortical control patterns for oral movement.
A Control/Experimental Trial of an Operant Treatment for Early Stuttering
Authors: Onslow Mark , Andrews Cheryl , Lincoln Michelle
Published: July 2014

A preliminary study (Onslow, Costa, & Rue, 1990) suggested that a parent-conducted program of verbal response-contingent stimulation would be an effective treatment for stuttering children younger than 5 years. The present study was designed to expand those preliminary findings by using a larger group of children and by comparing them to a control group of children. Twelve children in the experimental group achieved median percent syllables stuttered (%SS) scores below 1.0 for a 12-month posttreatment period. The children's treatments were completed in a median of 10.5 1-hour clinic sessions and a median of 84.5 days from the start of treatment. The majority of parents of the control children withdrew from the study and elected to have treatment begin for their child. These results suggest that the program may be a cost-effective method for managing a clinical caseload of stuttering children younger than 5 years. It is suggested that controlled clinical trials cannot be used validly or ethically to determine the number of cases of early stuttering who recover without formal intervention.
Speech Rates and Turn-Taking Behaviors of Children Who Stutter and Their Fathers
Authors: Kelly Ellen M.
Published: July 2014

Paralinguistic behaviors, including speech rates and turn-taking behaviors, of boys who stutter and boys who do not stutter and their fathers were investigated. Subjects were 11 boys who stutter (mean age=5:1) and their fathers and 11 age-matched (±3 months) nonstuttering boys (mean age=5:1) and their fathers. Spontaneous conversational speech was obtained from each father and son during approximately 45 minutes of videotaped free play in a clinic setting. Measures of overall, articulatory, and dyadic speaking rates, interruptions, response time latencies, and disfluency characteristics were derived using the videotapes and computer-assisted analyses of the acoustic signal from each conversational sample. Two-factor repeated measures ANOVAs were performed on each of the paralinguistic variables for the 11 sets of age-matched father-son pairs. Fathers produced faster speaking rates, higher frequencies of interruptions and shorter response time latencies than sons. No significant differences were found in comparisons of the two groups of fathers or of the two groups of children for any of the paralinguistic behaviors. A significant positive correlation was found between the SSI scores of children who stutter and the dyadic speaking rates of these children and their fathers. Results partially extend those of Kelly and Conture (1992) for mothers and children, but some potentially important differences emerge between fathers' and mothers' (para)linguistic behaviors in interaction with their children.
Time-Interval Measurement of Stuttering
Authors: Cordes Anne K. , Ingham Roger J.
Published: July 2014

This study required six groups of judges, three experimental groups and three control groups (all
n
=5), to categorize consecutive 5.0-sec speech intervals as Stuttered or Nonstuttered on four judgment occasions. Between the second and third occasions, each experimental group was trained to categorize correctly one of three sets of speech intervals: agreed intervals, which had been unanimously prejudged to be Stuttered or Nonstuttered; disagreed intervals, which had been prejudged to be Stuttered by approximately half of a large group of judges; or randomly selected intervals, including both agreed and disagreed intervals. Results replicated and extended an earlier finding of improved interjudge agreement for judges trained with highly agreed intervals (Ingham, Cordes, & Gow, 1993): Training with highly agreed intervals was shown to be more effective than equivalent exposure to those intervals without feedback, and training with highly agreed intervals was shown to be more effective than training with, or exposure to, poorly agreed or randomly selected intervals.
Learning and Generalization Components of Morphological Acquisition by Children With Specific Language Impairment
Authors: Swisher Linda , Snow David
Published: July 2014

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have particular difficulty acquiring bound morphemes. To determine whether these morphological deficits spring from impairments of rule-induction or memory (storage/access) skills, 25 preschool-age children with normal language (NL) and 25 age-matched children with SLI were presented with a novel vocabulary and novel bound-morpheme learning task. A chi square analysis revealed that the children with SLI had significantly lower vocabulary learning levels than NL children. In addition, there was tentative evidence that a dependency relationship existed in some children between success in vocabulary learning and proficiency in generalizing a trained bound morpheme to untrained vocabulary stems. These findings are predicted by the storage/access but not the rule-induction theory of specific language impairment. They suggest that intervention targeting bound-morpheme skills acquisition in children with SLI might include attention to vocabulary development.
Presence, Completeness, and Accuracy of Main Concepts in the Connected Speech of Non-Brain-Damaged Adults and Adults With Aphasia
Authors: Nicholas Linda E. , Brookshire Robert H.
Published: July 2014

A standard rule-based system was used to evaluate the presence, accuracy, and completeness of main concepts in the connected speech of 20 non-brain-damaged adults and 20 adults with aphasia. Main concepts form a skeletal outline of the most important information (or "gist") in a message. The interjudge and intrajudge reliability of the main concept scoring system and the test-retest stability of scores were acceptable. The non-brain-damaged group produced significantly more
Accurate/complete
main concepts, and significantly fewer
Accurate/incomplete, Inaccurate
, and
Absent
main concepts than the group with aphasia. However, when the performance of individual subjects was evaluated, what best discriminated the performance of subjects with aphasia from that of non-brain-damaged subjects was not the number of main concepts they failed to mention but the accuracy and completeness of the main concepts they did produce. Measures of main concept production may be a clinically useful complement to other measures of communicative informativeness and efficiency.
Linking Visual and Kinesthetic Imagery in Lipreading Instruction
Authors: Filippo Carol Lee De , Sims Donald G. , Gottermeier Linda
Published: July 2014

The purpose of this study was to replicate van Uden’s (1983) finding that watching oneself speak improves lipreading of visually confusable nonsense words. Specifically, this replication focused on an older group of subjects whose educational experience varied widely in the emphasis given to spoken communication. Four groups of 12 young-adult subjects who are deaf participated in evaluating two aspects of training: (a) source of video feedback (self or trainer), and (b) timing of feedback (during speech production or after speech production). Mean posttest results indicated significantly increased accuracy in identifying items that had been trained. The group that viewed self-speech after speech-production practice also demonstrated generalization to test items that were not trained. On the combined list of both trained and untrained items, both groups that viewed their own speech achieved significant gains compared to pretest scores, but those that viewed the trainer’s speech did not. Response time (RT) during pre- and posttesting was measured using a computer-generated waveform display to calculate the interval between stimulus offset and response onset. Results are reported for 13 subjects with ≥ 50% speech intelligibility for words in sentences. Although there were no differences attributable to training conditions, there was an overall increase in the regularity of the identification responses after training (measured by the standard deviation of RTs) and a generalization of the improvement to the untrained items. The results of this study substantiate the beneficial effects of multisensory feedback by practicing lipreading of one’s own speech production. This finding appears to apply even to young-adult subjects who are deaf and whose habituated speech patterns may be quite distinct from those of talkers with normal hearing.
Perspectives on the Edinburgh Study of Speech Breathing
Authors: Hixon Thomas J. , Weismer Gary
Published: July 2014

This article offers critical perspectives on the Edinburgh study of speech breathing reported in this journal (Draper, Ladefoged, & Whitteridge, 1959) and elsewhere (Draper, Ladefoged, & Whitteridge, 1960; Ladefoged, Draper, & Whitteridge, 1958). These perspectives concern: (a) errors in establishing a backdrop of mechanical information; (b) discrepancies between data and statements about them; (c) counterpredictive features between data and other knowledge about breathing; and (d) inadequacies in acquiring, portraying, and interpreting electromyographic information relative to the muscular contributions of different parts of the breathing apparatus.
Time-Frequency Analyses of Thyroarytenoid Myoelectric Activity in Normal and Spasmodic Dysphonia Subjects
Authors: Roark Rick M. , Dowling Eric M. , DeGroat Ronald D. , Watson Ben C. , Schaefer Steven D.
Published: July 2014

Digital recordings of thyroarytenoid (TA) myoelectric activity (via percutaneous hooked-wire electrodes) were obtained for 10 normal control subjects and 10 subjects with spasmodic dysphonia during performance of five tasks of varying complexity: quiet breathing, Valsalva maneuver, whispered /
i
/, voiced /
i
/, and “beep beep went the heap.” Time-frequency power spectral density functions,
PSD
(
f
,
t
), were determined for a selected segment of the signals, and measures of median frequency, mean frequency, bandwidth, and center frequency of
PSD
(
f
,
t
) were derived for each sample point. Statistical median, mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, and mode of the power spectral density measures were computed to compose feature vectors for each TA myoelectric recording. Statistical pattern recognition procedures using maximum likelihood classification tests were applied to the feature space to discriminate disordered from normal speakers for each task. Findings indicate a high level of discriminability between subject groups for phonated speaking tasks in contrast to low levels of discriminability for whispered and nonspeech tasks. Graphical presentations of three-dimensional
PSD
(
f
,
t
) plots are given that illustrate changes in spectral characteristics of TA EMG at the onset of laryngospasm.