Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

Normal auditory feedback contributes to moment-to-moment control of speech production. Effects of auditory feedback's absence on hearing-impaired individuals are widely documented, but auditory perturbation has not been investigated. Our objective was to evaluate the effect of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) and frequency altered feedback (FAF) on speech production among prelingual cochlear implant (CI) users and normal hearing (NH) individuals, to evaluate CI users' reliance on auditory feedback. Twenty young adults (10 CI, 10 NH), without developmental and cognitive impairments, participated in the study...

Mazes such as self-corrections during speech production are observed in all speakers at varying rates. One hypothesis is that mazes result from the challenge of speech planning when speakers experience linguistic uncertainty. The aim of the study was to examine mazes in 4- and 5-year old typically developing English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children's narratives when uncertainty was manipulated in narrative context. Three typically developing groups participated in this study: a Spanish-English bilingual group, an age-matched monolingual English-speaking group and a language-matched younger monolingual English-speaking group...

The present study reports the findings of a 10-day neuronavigated continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) over the right pars triangularis for two individuals with chronic aphasia after a single left hemispheric stroke. Baseline language and quality of life measures were collected prior to the treatment study, post-treatment and at 3-month follow up. Therapy was tolerated well by both participants and no side effects were noticed during and after treatment. Results from one individual showed potential for positive change in performance in comprehension and expressive language both post-treatment and at the follow-up stage...

It is virtually impossible for a speaker to produce identical articulatory movements across several repetitions of the same utterance. This study examined how kinematic endpoint variability, defined as the positional variability of an articulator at its positional extremum, changes in response to cued speech behavioral modifications. As a second step, this study examined the strength of association between articulator speed and kinematic endpoint variability. Seventeen speakers repeated the sentence "Buy Kaia a kite" 10 times under the following conditions: typical, loud, slow, and clear speech...

While cross-dialectal variations in nasalance have been investigated in previous studies, the influence of regional dialect on listeners' perceptual ratings of nasality has received limited research attention. This study explored cross-dialectal differences in the production of oral-nasal balance and the perception of nasality, with special emphasis on Inland North (IN) and Midland (M) dialects in the USA. Twenty-six adults representing the IN (n = 15) and M (n = 11) dialects participated in the study. Oral-nasal balance characteristics and nasality perception were compared between dialects using mean nasalance of various speech stimuli, measured via nasometry, and perceptual ratings of nasality of synthetic vowel stimuli, measured using direct magnitude estimation (DME)...

Even though there are documented benefits of direct intensive intervention for children with speech sound disorders (SSDs), the intensity given at Swedish Speech Language Pathology services rarely exceeds once a week. Also, indirect therapy approaches are commonly employed. The purpose of the present case study was to investigate the effects of an intensive specialist therapy, based on non-linear phonological analysis and motor learning principles. The participant was a boy aged 4:10 years with severe SSD, who previously had received indirect therapy from age 3 with, very limited results...

It is important to understand a child's language background, to ensure appropriate assessment, diagnosis and treatment of speech sound disorders. Singapore is home to various cultures and languages, and local speech norms are needed to provide an accurate reference for assessing phonological disorders in the local population. This study aims to establish normative data and better understand the English phonological development of English-Mandarin bilingual preschoolers in Singapore, aged 3; 6-4; 5 years. The Articulation and Phonology subtests of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology - UK were used to collect speech data from 146 preschoolers...

The lexical-grammatical divide has been a widely addressed topic in aphasia. Speech parts are generally classified as either belonging to a lexical or a grammatical category based on the frequency of acquisition of new members in their paradigms (open vs. closed classes), thus neglecting heterogeneity within categories. Such an approach has led to contradictory findings. First, prepositions form closed classes, but are classically taken as lexical items. Pronouns, also belonging to a closed class, are analyzed as grammatical elements...

Impaired production of prosody is considered a primary diagnostic criterion for apraxia of speech. In this study, we examined diagnostic relevance for five word-level prosody measures. Seven speakers with AOS, nine with aphasia and no AOS, and 19 age-matched neurotypical controls produced nine words consisting of three or four syllables. Lexical stress indices were computed based on relative values for duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity across pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables with varying intrinsic vowel duration contrast patterns...

As one of the Celtic languages, Irish is among the few languages in the world that employ word initial mutations (IMs) in order to express grammatical functions. IMs express grammatical information by a way of systematic alternation of minimal phonological contrasts, which closely links segmental phonology to grammatical morphology (Irish also employs final consonant palatalization as a grammatical marker, but this will not be the focus of our paper). The overwhelming majority of Irish speakers are bilingual (with English), and virtually all Irish-speaking children grow up with varying degrees of exposure to and use of English in the home...

The contribution of the phonological working memory to the Non-Word Repetition (NWR) task is well established, but growing evidence also suggests a valuable underlying role of oro-motor abilities. Assuming that NWR involves output implementation mediated by the speech motor system, the study aimed to develop a novel Italian NWR task of disyllabic and trisyllabic items. The task, for the first time, was composed using each Italian speech sound. The study also aimed to investigate the reliability proprieties of the task (test-retest, intra-rater, inter-rater), internal consistency, concurrent and construct validity, and to collect normative data for pre-school children...

Demonstratives (e.g. here, that, these) and personal pronouns are early developing components of language, which are often impaired in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Additionally, demonstrative and personal pronoun use are linked to joint attention and language ability early in life for individuals with ASD. Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a genetic disorder with a significant amount of overlap in its behavioural phenotype with ASD. The present study examined demonstrative and personal pronoun production during a conversation sample in adolescent boys with ASD and adolescent boys with FXS with a co-diagnosis of ASD (FXS+ASD)...

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Although much of the research on morphology and aphasia has focused specifically on the distinction between regular and irregular verb production, individuals with aphasia often present with differences in performance within these categories. While these within-category differences are relatively understudied, they have the potential to inform our understanding of the morphological processing system and treatment protocols for morphological impairment. The present study examines how morphophonological patterns in English impact past-tense production within the categories of regular and irregular verbs based on errors of an individual with acquired morphological impairment...

We aim at determining whether 7-year-old Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): (1) have problems with the production of wh- questions; (2) display a subject/object asymmetry in producing which- and who questions; (3) attempt to simplify questions, especially which- questions; (4) have difficulties with movement and verbal agreement in wh- questions. We elicited subject and object who and which NP questions in 10 children with SLI (M = 7;2), in 10 chronological age (CA)-matched controls (M = 7;2) and 10 language-matched controls (M = 5;2)...

Morphosyntax is one of the most impaired aspects of language development in children with Down syndrome. The present study aimed to assess the emergence of multiword utterances in this population. Sixteen Italian-speaking children with Down syndrome were followed from 36 to 48 months of age. Data derived from an analysis of their spontaneous productions showed that although the mean productivity of multiword utterances increased over the three time points (36, 42 and 48 months), different growth patterns of early syntactic development could be identified: (1) null or marginal development; (2) a gradual increase in multiword production over time; (3) an increase in the production of more complex multiword utterances and a decrease or inverted U-shaped profile in the production of simpler multiword productions; (4) an inverted U-shaped profile in multiword productions...

The aim of this research was to explore how preschool-aged children with phonological impairment (PI) realise grammatical morphemes across different phonological contexts (i.e. singleton consonant, consonant cluster, syllable), conditions of finiteness and individual morpheme types. Factors accounting for children's realisation of grammatical morphemes were also examined. Eighty-seven Australian English-speaking preschoolers (aged 4-5 years) with PI completed the Children's Assessment of Morphophonology (CHAMP)-an elicited response task-in addition to standardised tests of speech and receptive language...

There is continuing debate about the origins of productive morphological errors in children with speech sound disorders. This is the case for children with theorised phonetic and motor disorders, such as children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS, e.g., Ekelman & Aram, 1983; McNeill & Gillon, 2013 ). The morphological skills of children with CAS remain relatively unexplored in pre-schoolers. We investigated English morphology in a retrospective, cross-sectional design of 26 children aged 4-5 years who completed the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Preschool (2nd edition; Wiig, Secord & Semel, 2006)...

Speakers of North American English use variable tongue shapes for rhotic sounds. However, quantifying tongue shapes for rhotics can be challenging, and little is known about how tongue shape complexity corresponds to perceptual ratings of rhotic accuracy in children with residual speech sound errors (RSE). In this study, 16 children aged 9-16 with RSE and 14 children with typical speech (TS) development made multiple productions of 'Let Robby cross Church Street'. Midsagittal ultrasound images were collected once for children with TS and twice for children in the RSE group (once after 7 h of speech therapy, then again after another 7 h of therapy)...