Motor Speech Phenotypes of Frontotemporal Dementia, Primary Progressive Aphasia, and Progressive Apraxia of Speech

Purpose

Our purpose was to create a comprehensive review of speech impairment in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and progressive apraxia of speech in order to identify the most effective measures for diagnosis and monitoring, and to elucidate associations between speech and neuroimaging.

Method

Speech and neuroimaging data described in studies of FTD and PPA were systematically reviewed. A meta-analysis was conducted for speech measures that were used consistently in multiple studies.

Results

The methods and nomenclature used to describe speech in these disorders varied between studies. Our meta-analysis identified 3 speech measures which differentiate variants or healthy control-group participants (e.g., nonfluent and logopenic variants of PPA from all other groups, behavioral-variant FTD from a control group). Deficits within the frontal-lobe speech networks are linked to motor speech profiles of the nonfluent variant of PPA and progressive apraxia of speech. Motor speech impairment is rarely reported in semantic and logopenic variants of PPA. Limited data are available on motor speech impairment in the behavioral variant of FTD.

Conclusions

Our review identified several measures of speech which may assist with diagnosis and classification, and consolidated the brain–behavior associations relating to speech in FTD, PPA, and progressive apraxia of speech.

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The Effects of Parent-Focused Slow Relaxed Speech Intervention on Articulation Rate, Response Time Latency, and Fluency in Preschool Children Who Stutter

Purpose

This study investigated the effects of an intervention to reduce caregivers' articulation rates with children who stutter on (a) disfluency, (b) caregiver and child's articulation rates, and (c) caregiver and child's response time latency (RTL).

Method

Seventeen caregivers and their preschool children who stuttered participated in a group study of treatment outcomes. One speech sample was collected as a baseline, and 2 samples were collected after treatment. Posttreatment samples were of caregivers speaking as they typically would and using reduced articulation rates.

Results

Caregivers reduced articulation rates significantly in the 2 posttreatment samples, and a significant decrease of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD) was found in the children in those 2 samples. No direct relationship was found between the caregiver's articulation rate and RTL, and there was a small correlation of RTL with the lower levels of SLD found postintervention. No significant relationships were found between the reduced levels of SLD and articulation rates for either caregivers or children.

Conclusions

Results suggest caregivers can be trained to slow their speech, and children increased their fluency at the end of a program designed to slow caregiver articulation. The intentionally slower rate of the caregivers, however, was not significantly related to fluency.

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Delayed Early Vocabulary Development in Children at Family Risk of Dyslexia

Purpose

This study aimed to gain more insight into the relation between vocabulary and reading acquisition by examining early growth trajectories in the vocabulary of children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia longitudinally.

Method

The sample included 212 children from the Dutch Dyslexia Program with and without an FR. Parents reported on their children's receptive and expressive vocabulary size at ages 17, 23, 29, and 35 months using the Dutch MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. Dyslexia status at the end of Grade 2 (8 years) rendered 3 groups: FR-dyslexic (n = 51), FR-nondyslexic (n = 92), and typically developing–nondyslexic (TD) children (n = 69).

Results

Repeated measures analyses showed that FR-dyslexic children had lower receptive vocabulary scores from 23 months onward and lower expressive scores from 17 months onward than FR-nondyslexic children. Latent growth curve modeling showed lower initial growth rates in FR-dyslexic children, followed by partial recovery, indicating a delayed increase in receptive and expressive vocabulary. FR-nondyslexic and TD children did not differ.

Conclusions

Early deficits in receptive and expressive vocabulary are associated with later reading. Early vocabulary growth of FR-dyslexic children is characterized by a delay but not deviance of growth. Vocabulary can be considered an additional risk factor for dyslexia.

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Motor Speech Phenotypes of Frontotemporal Dementia, Primary Progressive Aphasia, and Progressive Apraxia of Speech

Purpose

Our purpose was to create a comprehensive review of speech impairment in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and progressive apraxia of speech in order to identify the most effective measures for diagnosis and monitoring, and to elucidate associations between speech and neuroimaging.

Method

Speech and neuroimaging data described in studies of FTD and PPA were systematically reviewed. A meta-analysis was conducted for speech measures that were used consistently in multiple studies.

Results

The methods and nomenclature used to describe speech in these disorders varied between studies. Our meta-analysis identified 3 speech measures which differentiate variants or healthy control-group participants (e.g., nonfluent and logopenic variants of PPA from all other groups, behavioral-variant FTD from a control group). Deficits within the frontal-lobe speech networks are linked to motor speech profiles of the nonfluent variant of PPA and progressive apraxia of speech. Motor speech impairment is rarely reported in semantic and logopenic variants of PPA. Limited data are available on motor speech impairment in the behavioral variant of FTD.

Conclusions

Our review identified several measures of speech which may assist with diagnosis and classification, and consolidated the brain–behavior associations relating to speech in FTD, PPA, and progressive apraxia of speech.

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The Effects of Parent-Focused Slow Relaxed Speech Intervention on Articulation Rate, Response Time Latency, and Fluency in Preschool Children Who Stutter

Purpose

This study investigated the effects of an intervention to reduce caregivers' articulation rates with children who stutter on (a) disfluency, (b) caregiver and child's articulation rates, and (c) caregiver and child's response time latency (RTL).

Method

Seventeen caregivers and their preschool children who stuttered participated in a group study of treatment outcomes. One speech sample was collected as a baseline, and 2 samples were collected after treatment. Posttreatment samples were of caregivers speaking as they typically would and using reduced articulation rates.

Results

Caregivers reduced articulation rates significantly in the 2 posttreatment samples, and a significant decrease of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD) was found in the children in those 2 samples. No direct relationship was found between the caregiver's articulation rate and RTL, and there was a small correlation of RTL with the lower levels of SLD found postintervention. No significant relationships were found between the reduced levels of SLD and articulation rates for either caregivers or children.

Conclusions

Results suggest caregivers can be trained to slow their speech, and children increased their fluency at the end of a program designed to slow caregiver articulation. The intentionally slower rate of the caregivers, however, was not significantly related to fluency.

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Delayed Early Vocabulary Development in Children at Family Risk of Dyslexia

Purpose

This study aimed to gain more insight into the relation between vocabulary and reading acquisition by examining early growth trajectories in the vocabulary of children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia longitudinally.

Method

The sample included 212 children from the Dutch Dyslexia Program with and without an FR. Parents reported on their children's receptive and expressive vocabulary size at ages 17, 23, 29, and 35 months using the Dutch MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. Dyslexia status at the end of Grade 2 (8 years) rendered 3 groups: FR-dyslexic (n = 51), FR-nondyslexic (n = 92), and typically developing–nondyslexic (TD) children (n = 69).

Results

Repeated measures analyses showed that FR-dyslexic children had lower receptive vocabulary scores from 23 months onward and lower expressive scores from 17 months onward than FR-nondyslexic children. Latent growth curve modeling showed lower initial growth rates in FR-dyslexic children, followed by partial recovery, indicating a delayed increase in receptive and expressive vocabulary. FR-nondyslexic and TD children did not differ.

Conclusions

Early deficits in receptive and expressive vocabulary are associated with later reading. Early vocabulary growth of FR-dyslexic children is characterized by a delay but not deviance of growth. Vocabulary can be considered an additional risk factor for dyslexia.

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Motor Speech Phenotypes of Frontotemporal Dementia, Primary Progressive Aphasia, and Progressive Apraxia of Speech

Purpose

Our purpose was to create a comprehensive review of speech impairment in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and progressive apraxia of speech in order to identify the most effective measures for diagnosis and monitoring, and to elucidate associations between speech and neuroimaging.

Method

Speech and neuroimaging data described in studies of FTD and PPA were systematically reviewed. A meta-analysis was conducted for speech measures that were used consistently in multiple studies.

Results

The methods and nomenclature used to describe speech in these disorders varied between studies. Our meta-analysis identified 3 speech measures which differentiate variants or healthy control-group participants (e.g., nonfluent and logopenic variants of PPA from all other groups, behavioral-variant FTD from a control group). Deficits within the frontal-lobe speech networks are linked to motor speech profiles of the nonfluent variant of PPA and progressive apraxia of speech. Motor speech impairment is rarely reported in semantic and logopenic variants of PPA. Limited data are available on motor speech impairment in the behavioral variant of FTD.

Conclusions

Our review identified several measures of speech which may assist with diagnosis and classification, and consolidated the brain–behavior associations relating to speech in FTD, PPA, and progressive apraxia of speech.

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The Effects of Parent-Focused Slow Relaxed Speech Intervention on Articulation Rate, Response Time Latency, and Fluency in Preschool Children Who Stutter

Purpose

This study investigated the effects of an intervention to reduce caregivers' articulation rates with children who stutter on (a) disfluency, (b) caregiver and child's articulation rates, and (c) caregiver and child's response time latency (RTL).

Method

Seventeen caregivers and their preschool children who stuttered participated in a group study of treatment outcomes. One speech sample was collected as a baseline, and 2 samples were collected after treatment. Posttreatment samples were of caregivers speaking as they typically would and using reduced articulation rates.

Results

Caregivers reduced articulation rates significantly in the 2 posttreatment samples, and a significant decrease of stuttering-like disfluencies (SLD) was found in the children in those 2 samples. No direct relationship was found between the caregiver's articulation rate and RTL, and there was a small correlation of RTL with the lower levels of SLD found postintervention. No significant relationships were found between the reduced levels of SLD and articulation rates for either caregivers or children.

Conclusions

Results suggest caregivers can be trained to slow their speech, and children increased their fluency at the end of a program designed to slow caregiver articulation. The intentionally slower rate of the caregivers, however, was not significantly related to fluency.

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Delayed Early Vocabulary Development in Children at Family Risk of Dyslexia

Purpose

This study aimed to gain more insight into the relation between vocabulary and reading acquisition by examining early growth trajectories in the vocabulary of children at family risk (FR) of dyslexia longitudinally.

Method

The sample included 212 children from the Dutch Dyslexia Program with and without an FR. Parents reported on their children's receptive and expressive vocabulary size at ages 17, 23, 29, and 35 months using the Dutch MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. Dyslexia status at the end of Grade 2 (8 years) rendered 3 groups: FR-dyslexic (n = 51), FR-nondyslexic (n = 92), and typically developing–nondyslexic (TD) children (n = 69).

Results

Repeated measures analyses showed that FR-dyslexic children had lower receptive vocabulary scores from 23 months onward and lower expressive scores from 17 months onward than FR-nondyslexic children. Latent growth curve modeling showed lower initial growth rates in FR-dyslexic children, followed by partial recovery, indicating a delayed increase in receptive and expressive vocabulary. FR-nondyslexic and TD children did not differ.

Conclusions

Early deficits in receptive and expressive vocabulary are associated with later reading. Early vocabulary growth of FR-dyslexic children is characterized by a delay but not deviance of growth. Vocabulary can be considered an additional risk factor for dyslexia.

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SLHS students present their work at the American Auditory Society Conference!

Congratulations to our students who presented their work with the Recreational Noise Exposure and Hearing Lab at the annual conference of the American Auditory Society last weekend!

See the photos!

[See image gallery at slhs.sdsu.edu]

 

 

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SLHS well-represented at SDSU Student Research Symposium!

Our SLHS students did a wonderful job at their poster and oral presentations at the SDSU Student Research Symposium this year!

See the photos!

[See image gallery at slhs.sdsu.edu]

 

 

 

 

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SLHS students present their work at the American Auditory Society Conference!

Congratulations to our students who presented their work with the Recreational Noise Exposure and Hearing Lab at the annual conference of the American Auditory Society last weekend!

See the photos!

[See image gallery at slhs.sdsu.edu]

 

 

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SLHS well-represented at SDSU Student Research Symposium!

Our SLHS students did a wonderful job at their poster and oral presentations at the SDSU Student Research Symposium this year!

See the photos!

[See image gallery at slhs.sdsu.edu]

 

 

 

 

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SLHS students present their work at the American Auditory Society Conference!

Congratulations to our students who presented their work with the Recreational Noise Exposure and Hearing Lab at the annual conference of the American Auditory Society last weekend!

See the photos!

[See image gallery at slhs.sdsu.edu]

 

 

from #Audiology via xlomafota13 on Inoreader http://ift.tt/2mkVqeP
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SLHS well-represented at SDSU Student Research Symposium!

Our SLHS students did a wonderful job at their poster and oral presentations at the SDSU Student Research Symposium this year!

See the photos!

[See image gallery at slhs.sdsu.edu]

 

 

 

 

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Nonword Repetition and Vocabulary Knowledge as Predictors of Children's Phonological and Semantic Word Learning

Purpose

This study examined the unique and shared variance that nonword repetition and vocabulary knowledge contribute to children's ability to learn new words. Multiple measures of word learning were used to assess recall and recognition of phonological and semantic information.

Method

Fifty children, with a mean age of 8 years (range 5–12 years), completed experimental assessments of word learning and norm-referenced assessments of receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge and nonword repetition skills. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses examined the variance in word learning that was explained by vocabulary knowledge and nonword repetition after controlling for chronological age.

Results

Together with chronological age, nonword repetition and vocabulary knowledge explained up to 44% of the variance in children's word learning. Nonword repetition was the stronger predictor of phonological recall, phonological recognition, and semantic recognition, whereas vocabulary knowledge was the stronger predictor of verbal semantic recall.

Conclusions

These findings extend the results of past studies indicating that both nonword repetition skill and existing vocabulary knowledge are important for new word learning, but the relative influence of each predictor depends on the way word learning is measured. Suggestions for further research involving typically developing children and children with language or reading impairments are discussed.

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Lipreading Ability and Its Cognitive Correlates in Typically Developing Children and Children With Specific Language Impairment

Purpose

Lipreading and its cognitive correlates were studied in school-age children with typical language development and delayed language development due to specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

Forty-two children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI were tested by using a word-level lipreading test and an extensive battery of standardized cognitive and linguistic tests.

Results

Children with SLI were poorer lipreaders than their typically developing peers. Good phonological skills were associated with skilled lipreading in both typically developing children and in children with SLI. Lipreading was also found to correlate with several cognitive skills, for example, short-term memory capacity and verbal motor skills.

Conclusions

Speech processing deficits in SLI extend also to the perception of visual speech. Lipreading performance was associated with phonological skills. Poor lipreading in children with SLI may be, thus, related to problems in phonological processing.

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Speaking Tongues Are Actively Braced

Purpose

Bracing of the tongue against opposing vocal-tract surfaces such as the teeth or palate has long been discussed in the context of biomechanical, somatosensory, and aeroacoustic aspects of tongue movement. However, previous studies have tended to describe bracing only in terms of contact (rather than mechanical support), and only in limited phonetic contexts, supporting a widespread view of bracing as an occasional state, peculiar to specific sounds or sound combinations.

Method

The present study tests the pervasiveness and effortfulness of tongue bracing in continuous English speech passages using electropalatography and 3-D biomechanical simulations.

Results

The tongue remains in continuous contact with the upper molars during speech, with only rare exceptions. Use of the term bracing (rather than merely contact) is supported here by biomechanical simulations showing that lateral bracing is an active posture requiring dedicated muscle activation; further, loss of lateral contact for onset /l/ allophones is found to be consistently accompanied by contact of the tongue blade against the anterior palate. In the rare instances where direct evidence for contact is lacking (only in a minority of low vowel and postvocalic /l/ tokens), additional biomechanical simulations show that lateral contact is maintained against pharyngeal structures dorsal to the teeth.

Conclusion

Taken together, these results indicate that tongue bracing is both pervasive and active in running speech and essential in understanding tongue movement control.

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The Impact of Clinical History on the Threshold Estimation of Auditory Brainstem Response Results for Infants

Purpose

This study assesses the impact of patient clinical history on audiologists' performance when interpreting auditory brainstem response (ABR) results.

Method

Fourteen audiologists' accuracy in estimating hearing threshold for 16 infants through interpretation of ABR traces was compared on 2 occasions at least 5 months apart. On the 1st occasion, ABR traces were presented to the audiologists with no clinical information except for the age of the child. On the 2nd occasion, audiologists were given a full clinical history for the ABR cases.

Results

The addition of clinical history information had no statistically significant impact on sensitivity, specificity, or accuracy of diagnosis. Although the mean numbers of true-negative and true-positive diagnoses were higher when audiologists were given clinical information, the difference was again not statistically significant.

Conclusion

This study suggests that if there are circumstances in which case material is incomplete or unavailable, audiologists have no cause for concern regarding the accuracy of their interpretation of ABR traces. In a clinical manner, this may help audiologists with large caseloads or audiologists who need to provide a diagnosis of hearing loss in a short time by allowing them to focus on conducting ABR without the need for case history information.

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Laryngeal Aerodynamics in Healthy Older Adults and Adults With Parkinson's Disease

Purpose

The present study compared laryngeal aerodynamic function of healthy older adults (HOA) to adults with Parkinson's disease (PD) while speaking at a comfortable and increased vocal intensity.

Method

Laryngeal aerodynamic measures (subglottal pressure, peak-to-peak flow, minimum flow, and open quotient [OQ]) were compared between HOAs and individuals with PD who had a diagnosis of hypophonia. Increased vocal intensity was elicited via monaurally presented multitalker background noise.

Results

At a comfortable speaking intensity, HOAs and individuals with PD produced comparable vocal intensity, rates of vocal fold closure, and minimum flow. HOAs used smaller OQs, higher subglottal pressure, and lower peak-to-peak flow than individuals with PD. Both groups increased speaking intensity when speaking in noise to the same degree. However, HOAs produced increased intensity with greater driving pressure, faster vocal fold closure rates, and smaller OQs than individuals with PD.

Conclusions

Monaural background noise elicited equivalent vocal intensity increases in HOAs and individuals with PD. Although both groups used laryngeal mechanisms as expected to increase sound pressure level, they used these mechanisms to different degrees. The HOAs appeared to have better control of the laryngeal mechanism to make changes to their vocal intensity.

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Sensitivity to Morphosyntactic Information in 3-Year-Old Children With Typical Language Development: A Feasibility Study

Purpose

This study tested the feasibility of a method designed to assess children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., Are the nice little dogs running?). We expected that a group of children who were proficient in auxiliary use would show this sensitivity, indicating an awareness of the relation between the subject–verb sequence (e.g., dogs running) and preceding information (e.g., are). Failure to grasp this relation is proposed to play a role in the protracted inconsistency in auxiliary use in children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

Fifteen 3-year-old typically developing children who demonstrated proficiency in auxiliary use viewed pairs of pictures showing a single agent and multiple agents while hearing questions with or without an agreeing fronted auxiliary. Proportion looking to the target was measured.

Results

Children showed anticipatory looking on the basis of the number information contained in the auxiliary (is or are).

Conclusions

The children tested in this study represent a group that frequently serves as a comparison for older children with SLI. Because the method successfully demonstrated their sensitivity to tense/agreement information in questions, future research that involves direct comparisons of these 2 groups is warranted.

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A Cross-Language Study of Laryngeal-Oral Coordination Across Varying Prosodic and Syllable-Structure Conditions

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to use prosodic and syllable-structure variation to probe the underlying representation of laryngeal kinematics in languages traditionally considered to differ in voicing typology (German vs. Dutch and French).

Method

Transillumination and videofiberendoscopic filming were used to investigate the devoicing gesture in German, Dutch, and French for material that compared, first, a strong versus weak prosodic condition and, second, singletons versus clusters (stop + /r/ and /l/).

Results

The results showed strengthening of the devoicing gesture in the strong prosodic condition and in the segmental context stop + /r/ for German and French but not for Dutch. In terms of timing (duration of oral occlusion, voice onset time, timing of peak glottal opening relative to stop release), French was intermediate between German and Dutch.

Conclusions

(a) The representation of French voiceless plosives requires an active specification for glottal spreading just as in German. (b) Static features are not well suited to capturing cross-language differences in voicing typology and changes in voicing specification over time.

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Literacy Outcomes for Primary School Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing: A Cohort Comparison Study

Purpose

In this study, we compared the language and literacy of two cohorts of children with severe–profound hearing loss, recruited 10 years apart, to determine if outcomes had improved in line with the introduction of newborn hearing screening and access to improved hearing aid technology.

Method

Forty-two children with deafness, aged 5–7 years with a mean unaided loss of 102 DB, were assessed on language, reading, and phonological skills. Their performance was compared with that of a similar group of 32 children with deafness assessed 10 years earlier and also a group of 40 children with normal hearing of similar single word reading ability.

Results

English vocabulary was significantly higher in the new cohort although it was still below chronological age. Phonological awareness and reading ability had not significantly changed over time. In both cohorts, English vocabulary predicted reading, but phonological awareness was only a significant predictor for the new cohort.

Conclusions

The current results show that vocabulary knowledge of children with severe–profound hearing loss has improved over time, but there has not been a commensurate improvement in phonological skills or reading. They suggest that children with severe–profound hearing loss will require continued support to develop robust phonological coding skills to underpin reading.

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The Quantal Larynx: The Stable Regions of Laryngeal Biomechanics and Implications for Speech Production

Purpose

Recent proposals suggest that (a) the high dimensionality of speech motor control may be reduced via modular neuromuscular organization that takes advantage of intrinsic biomechanical regions of stability and (b) computational modeling provides a means to study whether and how such modularization works. In this study, the focus is on the larynx, a structure that is fundamental to speech production because of its role in phonation and numerous articulatory functions.

Method

A 3-dimensional model of the larynx was created using the ArtiSynth platform (http://ift.tt/2lPoHkZ). This model was used to simulate laryngeal articulatory states, including inspiration, glottal fricative, modal prephonation, plain glottal stop, vocal–ventricular stop, and aryepiglotto–epiglottal stop and fricative.

Results

Speech-relevant laryngeal biomechanics is rich with “quantal” or highly stable regions within muscle activation space.

Conclusions

Quantal laryngeal biomechanics complement a modular view of speech control and have implications for the articulatory–biomechanical grounding of numerous phonetic and phonological phenomena.

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Exploring Use of the Coordinate Response Measure in a Multitalker Babble Paradigm

Purpose

Three experiments examined the use of competing coordinate response measure (CRM) sentences as a multitalker babble.

Method

In Experiment I, young adults with normal hearing listened to a CRM target sentence in the presence of 2, 4, or 6 competing CRM sentences with synchronous or asynchronous onsets. In Experiment II, the condition with 6 competing sentences was explored further. Three stimulus conditions (6 talkers saying same sentence, 1 talker producing 6 different sentences, and 6 talkers each saying a different sentence) were evaluated with different methods of presentation. Experiment III examined the performance of older adults with hearing impairment in a subset of conditions from Experiment II.

Results

In Experiment I, performance declined with increasing numbers of talkers and improved with asynchronous sentence onsets. Experiment II identified conditions under which an increase in the number of talkers led to better performance. In Experiment III, the relative effects of the number of talkers, messages, and onset asynchrony were the same for young and older listeners.

Conclusions

Multitalker babble composed of CRM sentences has masking properties similar to other types of multitalker babble. However, when the number of different talkers and messages are varied independently, performance is best with more talkers and fewer messages.

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Rhythm Perception and Its Role in Perception and Learning of Dysrhythmic Speech

Purpose

The perception of rhythm cues plays an important role in recognizing spoken language, especially in adverse listening conditions. Indeed, this has been shown to hold true even when the rhythm cues themselves are dysrhythmic. This study investigates whether expertise in rhythm perception provides a processing advantage for perception (initial intelligibility) and learning (intelligibility improvement) of naturally dysrhythmic speech, dysarthria.

Method

Fifty young adults with typical hearing participated in 3 key tests, including a rhythm perception test, a receptive vocabulary test, and a speech perception and learning test, with standard pretest, familiarization, and posttest phases. Initial intelligibility scores were calculated as the proportion of correct pretest words, while intelligibility improvement scores were calculated by subtracting this proportion from the proportion of correct posttest words.

Results

Rhythm perception scores predicted intelligibility improvement scores but not initial intelligibility. On the other hand, receptive vocabulary scores predicted initial intelligibility scores but not intelligibility improvement.

Conclusions

Expertise in rhythm perception appears to provide an advantage for processing dysrhythmic speech, but a familiarization experience is required for the advantage to be realized. Findings are discussed in relation to the role of rhythm in speech processing and shed light on processing models that consider the consequence of rhythm abnormalities in dysarthria.

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Increased Response to Altered Auditory Feedback in Dyslexia: A Weaker Sensorimotor Magnet Implied in the Phonological Deficit

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to examine whether developmental dyslexia (DD) is characterized by deficiencies in speech sensory and motor feedforward and feedback mechanisms, which are involved in the modulation of phonological representations.

Method

A total of 42 adult native speakers of Dutch (22 adults with DD; 20 participants who were typically reading controls) were asked to produce /bep/ while the first formant (F1) of the /e/ was not altered (baseline), increased (ramp), held at maximal perturbation (hold), and not altered again (after-effect). The F1 of the produced utterance was measured for each trial and used for statistical analyses. The measured F1s produced during each phase were entered in a linear mixed-effects model.

Results

Participants with DD adapted more strongly during the ramp phase and returned to baseline to a lesser extent when feedback was back to normal (after-effect phase) when compared with the typically reading group. In this study, a faster deviation from baseline during the ramp phase, a stronger adaptation response during the hold phase, and a slower return to baseline during the after-effect phase were associated with poorer reading and phonological abilities.

Conclusion

The data of the current study are consistent with the notion that the phonological deficit in DD is associated with a weaker sensorimotor magnet for phonological representations.

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Compensatory Strategies in the Developmental Patterns of English /s/: Gender and Vowel Context Effects

Purpose

The developmental trajectory of English /s/ was investigated to determine the extent to which children's speech productions are acoustically fine-grained. Given the hypothesis that young children have adultlike phonetic knowledge of /s/, the following were examined: (a) whether this knowledge manifests itself in acoustic spectra that match the gender-specific patterns of adults, (b) whether vowel context affects the spectra of /s/ in adults and children similarly, and (c) whether children adopt compensatory production strategies to match adult acoustic targets.

Method

Several acoustic variables were measured from word-initial /s/ (and /t/) and the following vowel in the productions of children aged 2 to 5 years and adult controls using 2 sets of corpora from the Paidologos database.

Results

Gender-specific patterns in the spectral distribution of /s/ were found. Acoustically, more canonical /s/ was produced before vowels with higher F₁ (i.e., lower vowels) in children, a context where lingual articulation is challenging. Measures of breathiness and vowel intrinsic F₀ provide evidence that children use a compensatory aerodynamic mechanism to achieve their acoustic targets in articulatorily challenging contexts.

Conclusion

Together, these results provide evidence that children's phonetic knowledge is acoustically detailed and gender specified and that speech production goals are acoustically oriented at early stages of speech development.

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The German Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS-G): Reliability and Validity of a Novel Assessment of Communicative Participation

Purpose

Our purpose was to explore the validity and reliability of the German Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS-G; Thomas-Stonell, Oddson, Robertson, & Rosenbaum, 2010, 2012), which is an authorized adaptation of the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (Thomas-Stonell et al., 2010) tool, which measures communicative participation in preschool children.

Method

Parents of typically developing children (TDC) and of children with speech impairment (CSI) completed the FOCUS-G and the Questionnaire for Measuring Health-Related Quality of Life in Children (KiddyKINDL; Ravens-Sieberer & Bullinger, 2000). To determine test–retest reliability, the FOCUS-G was readministered to a subsample of parents 1 week later.

Results

The FOCUS-G had high values for internal consistency (α = .959, Ω = .941), test–retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = .974), and split–half reliability (r = .832). Total scores on the FOCUS-G and KiddyKINDL demonstrated significant associations. FOCUS-G total scores and subdomain scores for both samples showed significant correlations, indicating good construct validity. The discriminatory ability of the FOCUS-G was indicated by significantly higher mean scores for TDC (M = 6.03, SD = 0.65) than CSI (M = 5.47, SD = 1.02).

Conclusion

The overall good psychometric properties of this novel assessment of communicative participation support its use by speech-language pathologists for clinical and research purposes with German-speaking children.

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Research to Establish the Validity, Reliability, and Clinical Utility of a Comprehensive Language Assessment of Mandarin

Purpose

With no existing gold standard for comparison, challenges arise for establishing the validity of a new standardized Mandarin language assessment normed in mainland China.

Method

A new assessment, Diagnostic Receptive and Expressive Assessment of Mandarin (DREAM), was normed with a stratified sample of 969 children ages 2;6 (years;months) to 7;11 in multiple urban and nonurban regions in northern and southern China. In this study of 230 children, the sensitivity and specificity of DREAM were examined against an a priori judgment of disorders. External validity was assessed using 2 indices of language production for different age groups.

Results

External validity was assessed against spontaneous language indices (correlation range: r = .6–.7; all ps r = .45, p Conclusion

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Nonadjacent Dependency Learning in Cantonese-Speaking Children With and Without a History of Specific Language Impairment

Purpose

This study investigated nonadjacent dependency learning in Cantonese-speaking children with and without a history of specific language impairment (SLI) in an artificial linguistic context.

Method

Sixteen Cantonese-speaking children with a history of SLI and 16 Cantonese-speaking children with typical language development (TLD) were tested with a nonadjacent dependency learning task using artificial languages that mimic Cantonese.

Results

Children with TLD performed above chance and were able to discriminate between trained and untrained nonadjacent dependencies. However, children with a history of SLI performed at chance and were not able to differentiate trained versus untrained nonadjacent dependencies.

Conclusions

These findings, together with previous findings from English-speaking adults and adolescents with language impairments, suggest that individuals with atypical language development, regardless of age, diagnostic status, language, and culture, show difficulties in learning nonadjacent dependencies. This study provides evidence for early impairments to statistical learning in individuals with atypical language development.

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Late Talkers: A Population-Based Study of Risk Factors and School Readiness Consequences

Purpose

This study was designed to (a) identify sociodemographic, pregnancy and birth, family health, and parenting and child care risk factors for being a late talker at 24 months of age; (b) determine whether late talkers continue to have low vocabulary at 48 months; and (c) investigate whether being a late talker plays a unique role in children's school readiness at 60 months.

Method

We analyzed data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a population-based sample of 9,600 children. Data were gathered when the children were 9, 24, 48, and 60 months old.

Results

The risk of being a late talker at 24 months was significantly associated with being a boy, lower socioeconomic status, being a nonsingleton, older maternal age at birth, moderately low birth weight, lower quality parenting, receipt of day care for less than 10 hr/week, and attention problems. Being a late talker increased children's risk of having low vocabulary at 48 months and low school readiness at 60 months. Family socioeconomic status had the largest and most profound effect on children's school readiness.

Conclusions

Limited vocabulary knowledge at 24 and 48 months is uniquely predictive of later school readiness. Young children with low vocabularies require additional supports prior to school entry.

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Prosody and Spoken Word Recognition in Early and Late Spanish–English Bilingual Individuals

Purpose

This study was conducted to compare the influence of word properties on gated single-word recognition in monolingual and bilingual individuals under conditions of native and nonnative accent and to determine whether word-form prosody facilitates recognition in bilingual individuals.

Method

Word recognition was assessed in monolingual and bilingual participants when English words were presented with English and Spanish accents in 3 gating conditions: onset only, onset plus prosody/word length only, and onset plus prosody. Word properties were quantified to assess their influence on word recognition in the onset-only condition.

Results

Word recognition speed was proportional to language experience. In the onset-only condition, only word frequency facilitated word recognition across groups. Addition of duration information or prosodic word form did not facilitate word recognition in bilingual individuals the way it did in monolingual individuals. For the bilingual groups, Spanish accent significantly facilitated recognition in the presence of prosodic information. Word attributes were far more consequential in the English accent than in the Spanish accent condition.

Conclusions

Word rhyme information, word properties, and accent affect gated word recognition differently in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Top-down strategies emanating from word properties that may facilitate single-word recognition are experience and context dependent and become less available in the presence of a nonnative accent.

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Semantic Processing of Sentences in Preschoolers With Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From the N400 Effect

Purpose

Given the complexity of sentence processing and the specific problems that children with specific language impairment (SLI) experience, we investigated the time course and characteristics of semantic processing at the sentence level in Dutch preschoolers with SLI.

Method

We measured N400 responses to semantically congruent and incongruent spoken sentences (e.g., “My father is eating an apple/*blanket”) in a group of 37 Dutch preschoolers with SLI and in a group of 25 typically developing (TD) peers. We compared the time course and amplitude of the N400 effect between the two groups.

Results

The TD group showed a strong posterior N400 effect in time windows 300–500 ms and 500–800 ms. In contrast, the SLI group demonstrated only a reliable N400 effect in the later time window, 500–800 ms, and did not show a stronger presence at posterior electrodes.

Conclusion

The findings suggest that the neuronal processing of semantic information at sentence level is atypical in preschoolers with SLI compared with TD children.

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Measuring Sound-Processor Threshold Levels for Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients Using Conditioned Play Audiometry via Telepractice

Purpose

This study evaluated the use of telepractice for measuring cochlear implant (CI) behavioral threshold (T) levels in children using conditioned play audiometry (CPA). The goals were to determine whether (a) T levels measured via telepractice were not significantly different from those obtained in person, (b) response probability differed between remote and in-person conditions, and (c) the remote visit required more time than the in-person condition.

Method

An ABBA design (A, in-person; B, remote) was split across 2 visits. Nineteen children aged 2.6–7.1 years participated. T levels were measured using CPA for 3 electrodes per session. A “hit” rate was calculated to determine whether the likelihood of obtaining responses differed between conditions. Test time was compared across conditions. A questionnaire was administered to assess parent/caregiver attitudes about telepractice.

Results

Results indicated no significant difference in T levels between conditions. Hit rates were not significantly different between in-person and remote conditions (98% vs. 97%, respectively). Test time was similar between conditions. Questionnaire results revealed that 100% of caregivers would use telepractice for CI appointments either some or all of the time.

Conclusion

Telepractice is a viable option for routine pediatric programming appointments for children using CPA to set behavioral thresholds.

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Nonword Repetition and Vocabulary Knowledge as Predictors of Children's Phonological and Semantic Word Learning

Purpose

This study examined the unique and shared variance that nonword repetition and vocabulary knowledge contribute to children's ability to learn new words. Multiple measures of word learning were used to assess recall and recognition of phonological and semantic information.

Method

Fifty children, with a mean age of 8 years (range 5–12 years), completed experimental assessments of word learning and norm-referenced assessments of receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge and nonword repetition skills. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses examined the variance in word learning that was explained by vocabulary knowledge and nonword repetition after controlling for chronological age.

Results

Together with chronological age, nonword repetition and vocabulary knowledge explained up to 44% of the variance in children's word learning. Nonword repetition was the stronger predictor of phonological recall, phonological recognition, and semantic recognition, whereas vocabulary knowledge was the stronger predictor of verbal semantic recall.

Conclusions

These findings extend the results of past studies indicating that both nonword repetition skill and existing vocabulary knowledge are important for new word learning, but the relative influence of each predictor depends on the way word learning is measured. Suggestions for further research involving typically developing children and children with language or reading impairments are discussed.

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Lipreading Ability and Its Cognitive Correlates in Typically Developing Children and Children With Specific Language Impairment

Purpose

Lipreading and its cognitive correlates were studied in school-age children with typical language development and delayed language development due to specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

Forty-two children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI were tested by using a word-level lipreading test and an extensive battery of standardized cognitive and linguistic tests.

Results

Children with SLI were poorer lipreaders than their typically developing peers. Good phonological skills were associated with skilled lipreading in both typically developing children and in children with SLI. Lipreading was also found to correlate with several cognitive skills, for example, short-term memory capacity and verbal motor skills.

Conclusions

Speech processing deficits in SLI extend also to the perception of visual speech. Lipreading performance was associated with phonological skills. Poor lipreading in children with SLI may be, thus, related to problems in phonological processing.

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Speaking Tongues Are Actively Braced

Purpose

Bracing of the tongue against opposing vocal-tract surfaces such as the teeth or palate has long been discussed in the context of biomechanical, somatosensory, and aeroacoustic aspects of tongue movement. However, previous studies have tended to describe bracing only in terms of contact (rather than mechanical support), and only in limited phonetic contexts, supporting a widespread view of bracing as an occasional state, peculiar to specific sounds or sound combinations.

Method

The present study tests the pervasiveness and effortfulness of tongue bracing in continuous English speech passages using electropalatography and 3-D biomechanical simulations.

Results

The tongue remains in continuous contact with the upper molars during speech, with only rare exceptions. Use of the term bracing (rather than merely contact) is supported here by biomechanical simulations showing that lateral bracing is an active posture requiring dedicated muscle activation; further, loss of lateral contact for onset /l/ allophones is found to be consistently accompanied by contact of the tongue blade against the anterior palate. In the rare instances where direct evidence for contact is lacking (only in a minority of low vowel and postvocalic /l/ tokens), additional biomechanical simulations show that lateral contact is maintained against pharyngeal structures dorsal to the teeth.

Conclusion

Taken together, these results indicate that tongue bracing is both pervasive and active in running speech and essential in understanding tongue movement control.

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The Impact of Clinical History on the Threshold Estimation of Auditory Brainstem Response Results for Infants

Purpose

This study assesses the impact of patient clinical history on audiologists' performance when interpreting auditory brainstem response (ABR) results.

Method

Fourteen audiologists' accuracy in estimating hearing threshold for 16 infants through interpretation of ABR traces was compared on 2 occasions at least 5 months apart. On the 1st occasion, ABR traces were presented to the audiologists with no clinical information except for the age of the child. On the 2nd occasion, audiologists were given a full clinical history for the ABR cases.

Results

The addition of clinical history information had no statistically significant impact on sensitivity, specificity, or accuracy of diagnosis. Although the mean numbers of true-negative and true-positive diagnoses were higher when audiologists were given clinical information, the difference was again not statistically significant.

Conclusion

This study suggests that if there are circumstances in which case material is incomplete or unavailable, audiologists have no cause for concern regarding the accuracy of their interpretation of ABR traces. In a clinical manner, this may help audiologists with large caseloads or audiologists who need to provide a diagnosis of hearing loss in a short time by allowing them to focus on conducting ABR without the need for case history information.

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Laryngeal Aerodynamics in Healthy Older Adults and Adults With Parkinson's Disease

Purpose

The present study compared laryngeal aerodynamic function of healthy older adults (HOA) to adults with Parkinson's disease (PD) while speaking at a comfortable and increased vocal intensity.

Method

Laryngeal aerodynamic measures (subglottal pressure, peak-to-peak flow, minimum flow, and open quotient [OQ]) were compared between HOAs and individuals with PD who had a diagnosis of hypophonia. Increased vocal intensity was elicited via monaurally presented multitalker background noise.

Results

At a comfortable speaking intensity, HOAs and individuals with PD produced comparable vocal intensity, rates of vocal fold closure, and minimum flow. HOAs used smaller OQs, higher subglottal pressure, and lower peak-to-peak flow than individuals with PD. Both groups increased speaking intensity when speaking in noise to the same degree. However, HOAs produced increased intensity with greater driving pressure, faster vocal fold closure rates, and smaller OQs than individuals with PD.

Conclusions

Monaural background noise elicited equivalent vocal intensity increases in HOAs and individuals with PD. Although both groups used laryngeal mechanisms as expected to increase sound pressure level, they used these mechanisms to different degrees. The HOAs appeared to have better control of the laryngeal mechanism to make changes to their vocal intensity.

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Sensitivity to Morphosyntactic Information in 3-Year-Old Children With Typical Language Development: A Feasibility Study

Purpose

This study tested the feasibility of a method designed to assess children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., Are the nice little dogs running?). We expected that a group of children who were proficient in auxiliary use would show this sensitivity, indicating an awareness of the relation between the subject–verb sequence (e.g., dogs running) and preceding information (e.g., are). Failure to grasp this relation is proposed to play a role in the protracted inconsistency in auxiliary use in children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

Fifteen 3-year-old typically developing children who demonstrated proficiency in auxiliary use viewed pairs of pictures showing a single agent and multiple agents while hearing questions with or without an agreeing fronted auxiliary. Proportion looking to the target was measured.

Results

Children showed anticipatory looking on the basis of the number information contained in the auxiliary (is or are).

Conclusions

The children tested in this study represent a group that frequently serves as a comparison for older children with SLI. Because the method successfully demonstrated their sensitivity to tense/agreement information in questions, future research that involves direct comparisons of these 2 groups is warranted.

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A Cross-Language Study of Laryngeal-Oral Coordination Across Varying Prosodic and Syllable-Structure Conditions

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to use prosodic and syllable-structure variation to probe the underlying representation of laryngeal kinematics in languages traditionally considered to differ in voicing typology (German vs. Dutch and French).

Method

Transillumination and videofiberendoscopic filming were used to investigate the devoicing gesture in German, Dutch, and French for material that compared, first, a strong versus weak prosodic condition and, second, singletons versus clusters (stop + /r/ and /l/).

Results

The results showed strengthening of the devoicing gesture in the strong prosodic condition and in the segmental context stop + /r/ for German and French but not for Dutch. In terms of timing (duration of oral occlusion, voice onset time, timing of peak glottal opening relative to stop release), French was intermediate between German and Dutch.

Conclusions

(a) The representation of French voiceless plosives requires an active specification for glottal spreading just as in German. (b) Static features are not well suited to capturing cross-language differences in voicing typology and changes in voicing specification over time.

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Literacy Outcomes for Primary School Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing: A Cohort Comparison Study

Purpose

In this study, we compared the language and literacy of two cohorts of children with severe–profound hearing loss, recruited 10 years apart, to determine if outcomes had improved in line with the introduction of newborn hearing screening and access to improved hearing aid technology.

Method

Forty-two children with deafness, aged 5–7 years with a mean unaided loss of 102 DB, were assessed on language, reading, and phonological skills. Their performance was compared with that of a similar group of 32 children with deafness assessed 10 years earlier and also a group of 40 children with normal hearing of similar single word reading ability.

Results

English vocabulary was significantly higher in the new cohort although it was still below chronological age. Phonological awareness and reading ability had not significantly changed over time. In both cohorts, English vocabulary predicted reading, but phonological awareness was only a significant predictor for the new cohort.

Conclusions

The current results show that vocabulary knowledge of children with severe–profound hearing loss has improved over time, but there has not been a commensurate improvement in phonological skills or reading. They suggest that children with severe–profound hearing loss will require continued support to develop robust phonological coding skills to underpin reading.

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The Quantal Larynx: The Stable Regions of Laryngeal Biomechanics and Implications for Speech Production

Purpose

Recent proposals suggest that (a) the high dimensionality of speech motor control may be reduced via modular neuromuscular organization that takes advantage of intrinsic biomechanical regions of stability and (b) computational modeling provides a means to study whether and how such modularization works. In this study, the focus is on the larynx, a structure that is fundamental to speech production because of its role in phonation and numerous articulatory functions.

Method

A 3-dimensional model of the larynx was created using the ArtiSynth platform (http://ift.tt/2lPoHkZ). This model was used to simulate laryngeal articulatory states, including inspiration, glottal fricative, modal prephonation, plain glottal stop, vocal–ventricular stop, and aryepiglotto–epiglottal stop and fricative.

Results

Speech-relevant laryngeal biomechanics is rich with “quantal” or highly stable regions within muscle activation space.

Conclusions

Quantal laryngeal biomechanics complement a modular view of speech control and have implications for the articulatory–biomechanical grounding of numerous phonetic and phonological phenomena.

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Exploring Use of the Coordinate Response Measure in a Multitalker Babble Paradigm

Purpose

Three experiments examined the use of competing coordinate response measure (CRM) sentences as a multitalker babble.

Method

In Experiment I, young adults with normal hearing listened to a CRM target sentence in the presence of 2, 4, or 6 competing CRM sentences with synchronous or asynchronous onsets. In Experiment II, the condition with 6 competing sentences was explored further. Three stimulus conditions (6 talkers saying same sentence, 1 talker producing 6 different sentences, and 6 talkers each saying a different sentence) were evaluated with different methods of presentation. Experiment III examined the performance of older adults with hearing impairment in a subset of conditions from Experiment II.

Results

In Experiment I, performance declined with increasing numbers of talkers and improved with asynchronous sentence onsets. Experiment II identified conditions under which an increase in the number of talkers led to better performance. In Experiment III, the relative effects of the number of talkers, messages, and onset asynchrony were the same for young and older listeners.

Conclusions

Multitalker babble composed of CRM sentences has masking properties similar to other types of multitalker babble. However, when the number of different talkers and messages are varied independently, performance is best with more talkers and fewer messages.

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Rhythm Perception and Its Role in Perception and Learning of Dysrhythmic Speech

Purpose

The perception of rhythm cues plays an important role in recognizing spoken language, especially in adverse listening conditions. Indeed, this has been shown to hold true even when the rhythm cues themselves are dysrhythmic. This study investigates whether expertise in rhythm perception provides a processing advantage for perception (initial intelligibility) and learning (intelligibility improvement) of naturally dysrhythmic speech, dysarthria.

Method

Fifty young adults with typical hearing participated in 3 key tests, including a rhythm perception test, a receptive vocabulary test, and a speech perception and learning test, with standard pretest, familiarization, and posttest phases. Initial intelligibility scores were calculated as the proportion of correct pretest words, while intelligibility improvement scores were calculated by subtracting this proportion from the proportion of correct posttest words.

Results

Rhythm perception scores predicted intelligibility improvement scores but not initial intelligibility. On the other hand, receptive vocabulary scores predicted initial intelligibility scores but not intelligibility improvement.

Conclusions

Expertise in rhythm perception appears to provide an advantage for processing dysrhythmic speech, but a familiarization experience is required for the advantage to be realized. Findings are discussed in relation to the role of rhythm in speech processing and shed light on processing models that consider the consequence of rhythm abnormalities in dysarthria.

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Increased Response to Altered Auditory Feedback in Dyslexia: A Weaker Sensorimotor Magnet Implied in the Phonological Deficit

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to examine whether developmental dyslexia (DD) is characterized by deficiencies in speech sensory and motor feedforward and feedback mechanisms, which are involved in the modulation of phonological representations.

Method

A total of 42 adult native speakers of Dutch (22 adults with DD; 20 participants who were typically reading controls) were asked to produce /bep/ while the first formant (F1) of the /e/ was not altered (baseline), increased (ramp), held at maximal perturbation (hold), and not altered again (after-effect). The F1 of the produced utterance was measured for each trial and used for statistical analyses. The measured F1s produced during each phase were entered in a linear mixed-effects model.

Results

Participants with DD adapted more strongly during the ramp phase and returned to baseline to a lesser extent when feedback was back to normal (after-effect phase) when compared with the typically reading group. In this study, a faster deviation from baseline during the ramp phase, a stronger adaptation response during the hold phase, and a slower return to baseline during the after-effect phase were associated with poorer reading and phonological abilities.

Conclusion

The data of the current study are consistent with the notion that the phonological deficit in DD is associated with a weaker sensorimotor magnet for phonological representations.

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Compensatory Strategies in the Developmental Patterns of English /s/: Gender and Vowel Context Effects

Purpose

The developmental trajectory of English /s/ was investigated to determine the extent to which children's speech productions are acoustically fine-grained. Given the hypothesis that young children have adultlike phonetic knowledge of /s/, the following were examined: (a) whether this knowledge manifests itself in acoustic spectra that match the gender-specific patterns of adults, (b) whether vowel context affects the spectra of /s/ in adults and children similarly, and (c) whether children adopt compensatory production strategies to match adult acoustic targets.

Method

Several acoustic variables were measured from word-initial /s/ (and /t/) and the following vowel in the productions of children aged 2 to 5 years and adult controls using 2 sets of corpora from the Paidologos database.

Results

Gender-specific patterns in the spectral distribution of /s/ were found. Acoustically, more canonical /s/ was produced before vowels with higher F₁ (i.e., lower vowels) in children, a context where lingual articulation is challenging. Measures of breathiness and vowel intrinsic F₀ provide evidence that children use a compensatory aerodynamic mechanism to achieve their acoustic targets in articulatorily challenging contexts.

Conclusion

Together, these results provide evidence that children's phonetic knowledge is acoustically detailed and gender specified and that speech production goals are acoustically oriented at early stages of speech development.

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The German Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS-G): Reliability and Validity of a Novel Assessment of Communicative Participation

Purpose

Our purpose was to explore the validity and reliability of the German Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS-G; Thomas-Stonell, Oddson, Robertson, & Rosenbaum, 2010, 2012), which is an authorized adaptation of the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (Thomas-Stonell et al., 2010) tool, which measures communicative participation in preschool children.

Method

Parents of typically developing children (TDC) and of children with speech impairment (CSI) completed the FOCUS-G and the Questionnaire for Measuring Health-Related Quality of Life in Children (KiddyKINDL; Ravens-Sieberer & Bullinger, 2000). To determine test–retest reliability, the FOCUS-G was readministered to a subsample of parents 1 week later.

Results

The FOCUS-G had high values for internal consistency (α = .959, Ω = .941), test–retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = .974), and split–half reliability (r = .832). Total scores on the FOCUS-G and KiddyKINDL demonstrated significant associations. FOCUS-G total scores and subdomain scores for both samples showed significant correlations, indicating good construct validity. The discriminatory ability of the FOCUS-G was indicated by significantly higher mean scores for TDC (M = 6.03, SD = 0.65) than CSI (M = 5.47, SD = 1.02).

Conclusion

The overall good psychometric properties of this novel assessment of communicative participation support its use by speech-language pathologists for clinical and research purposes with German-speaking children.

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Research to Establish the Validity, Reliability, and Clinical Utility of a Comprehensive Language Assessment of Mandarin

Purpose

With no existing gold standard for comparison, challenges arise for establishing the validity of a new standardized Mandarin language assessment normed in mainland China.

Method

A new assessment, Diagnostic Receptive and Expressive Assessment of Mandarin (DREAM), was normed with a stratified sample of 969 children ages 2;6 (years;months) to 7;11 in multiple urban and nonurban regions in northern and southern China. In this study of 230 children, the sensitivity and specificity of DREAM were examined against an a priori judgment of disorders. External validity was assessed using 2 indices of language production for different age groups.

Results

External validity was assessed against spontaneous language indices (correlation range: r = .6–.7; all ps r = .45, p Conclusion

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Nonadjacent Dependency Learning in Cantonese-Speaking Children With and Without a History of Specific Language Impairment

Purpose

This study investigated nonadjacent dependency learning in Cantonese-speaking children with and without a history of specific language impairment (SLI) in an artificial linguistic context.

Method

Sixteen Cantonese-speaking children with a history of SLI and 16 Cantonese-speaking children with typical language development (TLD) were tested with a nonadjacent dependency learning task using artificial languages that mimic Cantonese.

Results

Children with TLD performed above chance and were able to discriminate between trained and untrained nonadjacent dependencies. However, children with a history of SLI performed at chance and were not able to differentiate trained versus untrained nonadjacent dependencies.

Conclusions

These findings, together with previous findings from English-speaking adults and adolescents with language impairments, suggest that individuals with atypical language development, regardless of age, diagnostic status, language, and culture, show difficulties in learning nonadjacent dependencies. This study provides evidence for early impairments to statistical learning in individuals with atypical language development.

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Late Talkers: A Population-Based Study of Risk Factors and School Readiness Consequences

Purpose

This study was designed to (a) identify sociodemographic, pregnancy and birth, family health, and parenting and child care risk factors for being a late talker at 24 months of age; (b) determine whether late talkers continue to have low vocabulary at 48 months; and (c) investigate whether being a late talker plays a unique role in children's school readiness at 60 months.

Method

We analyzed data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a population-based sample of 9,600 children. Data were gathered when the children were 9, 24, 48, and 60 months old.

Results

The risk of being a late talker at 24 months was significantly associated with being a boy, lower socioeconomic status, being a nonsingleton, older maternal age at birth, moderately low birth weight, lower quality parenting, receipt of day care for less than 10 hr/week, and attention problems. Being a late talker increased children's risk of having low vocabulary at 48 months and low school readiness at 60 months. Family socioeconomic status had the largest and most profound effect on children's school readiness.

Conclusions

Limited vocabulary knowledge at 24 and 48 months is uniquely predictive of later school readiness. Young children with low vocabularies require additional supports prior to school entry.

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Prosody and Spoken Word Recognition in Early and Late Spanish–English Bilingual Individuals

Purpose

This study was conducted to compare the influence of word properties on gated single-word recognition in monolingual and bilingual individuals under conditions of native and nonnative accent and to determine whether word-form prosody facilitates recognition in bilingual individuals.

Method

Word recognition was assessed in monolingual and bilingual participants when English words were presented with English and Spanish accents in 3 gating conditions: onset only, onset plus prosody/word length only, and onset plus prosody. Word properties were quantified to assess their influence on word recognition in the onset-only condition.

Results

Word recognition speed was proportional to language experience. In the onset-only condition, only word frequency facilitated word recognition across groups. Addition of duration information or prosodic word form did not facilitate word recognition in bilingual individuals the way it did in monolingual individuals. For the bilingual groups, Spanish accent significantly facilitated recognition in the presence of prosodic information. Word attributes were far more consequential in the English accent than in the Spanish accent condition.

Conclusions

Word rhyme information, word properties, and accent affect gated word recognition differently in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Top-down strategies emanating from word properties that may facilitate single-word recognition are experience and context dependent and become less available in the presence of a nonnative accent.

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Semantic Processing of Sentences in Preschoolers With Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From the N400 Effect

Purpose

Given the complexity of sentence processing and the specific problems that children with specific language impairment (SLI) experience, we investigated the time course and characteristics of semantic processing at the sentence level in Dutch preschoolers with SLI.

Method

We measured N400 responses to semantically congruent and incongruent spoken sentences (e.g., “My father is eating an apple/*blanket”) in a group of 37 Dutch preschoolers with SLI and in a group of 25 typically developing (TD) peers. We compared the time course and amplitude of the N400 effect between the two groups.

Results

The TD group showed a strong posterior N400 effect in time windows 300–500 ms and 500–800 ms. In contrast, the SLI group demonstrated only a reliable N400 effect in the later time window, 500–800 ms, and did not show a stronger presence at posterior electrodes.

Conclusion

The findings suggest that the neuronal processing of semantic information at sentence level is atypical in preschoolers with SLI compared with TD children.

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Measuring Sound-Processor Threshold Levels for Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients Using Conditioned Play Audiometry via Telepractice

Purpose

This study evaluated the use of telepractice for measuring cochlear implant (CI) behavioral threshold (T) levels in children using conditioned play audiometry (CPA). The goals were to determine whether (a) T levels measured via telepractice were not significantly different from those obtained in person, (b) response probability differed between remote and in-person conditions, and (c) the remote visit required more time than the in-person condition.

Method

An ABBA design (A, in-person; B, remote) was split across 2 visits. Nineteen children aged 2.6–7.1 years participated. T levels were measured using CPA for 3 electrodes per session. A “hit” rate was calculated to determine whether the likelihood of obtaining responses differed between conditions. Test time was compared across conditions. A questionnaire was administered to assess parent/caregiver attitudes about telepractice.

Results

Results indicated no significant difference in T levels between conditions. Hit rates were not significantly different between in-person and remote conditions (98% vs. 97%, respectively). Test time was similar between conditions. Questionnaire results revealed that 100% of caregivers would use telepractice for CI appointments either some or all of the time.

Conclusion

Telepractice is a viable option for routine pediatric programming appointments for children using CPA to set behavioral thresholds.

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Nonword Repetition and Vocabulary Knowledge as Predictors of Children's Phonological and Semantic Word Learning

Purpose

This study examined the unique and shared variance that nonword repetition and vocabulary knowledge contribute to children's ability to learn new words. Multiple measures of word learning were used to assess recall and recognition of phonological and semantic information.

Method

Fifty children, with a mean age of 8 years (range 5–12 years), completed experimental assessments of word learning and norm-referenced assessments of receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge and nonword repetition skills. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses examined the variance in word learning that was explained by vocabulary knowledge and nonword repetition after controlling for chronological age.

Results

Together with chronological age, nonword repetition and vocabulary knowledge explained up to 44% of the variance in children's word learning. Nonword repetition was the stronger predictor of phonological recall, phonological recognition, and semantic recognition, whereas vocabulary knowledge was the stronger predictor of verbal semantic recall.

Conclusions

These findings extend the results of past studies indicating that both nonword repetition skill and existing vocabulary knowledge are important for new word learning, but the relative influence of each predictor depends on the way word learning is measured. Suggestions for further research involving typically developing children and children with language or reading impairments are discussed.

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Lipreading Ability and Its Cognitive Correlates in Typically Developing Children and Children With Specific Language Impairment

Purpose

Lipreading and its cognitive correlates were studied in school-age children with typical language development and delayed language development due to specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

Forty-two children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI were tested by using a word-level lipreading test and an extensive battery of standardized cognitive and linguistic tests.

Results

Children with SLI were poorer lipreaders than their typically developing peers. Good phonological skills were associated with skilled lipreading in both typically developing children and in children with SLI. Lipreading was also found to correlate with several cognitive skills, for example, short-term memory capacity and verbal motor skills.

Conclusions

Speech processing deficits in SLI extend also to the perception of visual speech. Lipreading performance was associated with phonological skills. Poor lipreading in children with SLI may be, thus, related to problems in phonological processing.

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Speaking Tongues Are Actively Braced

Purpose

Bracing of the tongue against opposing vocal-tract surfaces such as the teeth or palate has long been discussed in the context of biomechanical, somatosensory, and aeroacoustic aspects of tongue movement. However, previous studies have tended to describe bracing only in terms of contact (rather than mechanical support), and only in limited phonetic contexts, supporting a widespread view of bracing as an occasional state, peculiar to specific sounds or sound combinations.

Method

The present study tests the pervasiveness and effortfulness of tongue bracing in continuous English speech passages using electropalatography and 3-D biomechanical simulations.

Results

The tongue remains in continuous contact with the upper molars during speech, with only rare exceptions. Use of the term bracing (rather than merely contact) is supported here by biomechanical simulations showing that lateral bracing is an active posture requiring dedicated muscle activation; further, loss of lateral contact for onset /l/ allophones is found to be consistently accompanied by contact of the tongue blade against the anterior palate. In the rare instances where direct evidence for contact is lacking (only in a minority of low vowel and postvocalic /l/ tokens), additional biomechanical simulations show that lateral contact is maintained against pharyngeal structures dorsal to the teeth.

Conclusion

Taken together, these results indicate that tongue bracing is both pervasive and active in running speech and essential in understanding tongue movement control.

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The Impact of Clinical History on the Threshold Estimation of Auditory Brainstem Response Results for Infants

Purpose

This study assesses the impact of patient clinical history on audiologists' performance when interpreting auditory brainstem response (ABR) results.

Method

Fourteen audiologists' accuracy in estimating hearing threshold for 16 infants through interpretation of ABR traces was compared on 2 occasions at least 5 months apart. On the 1st occasion, ABR traces were presented to the audiologists with no clinical information except for the age of the child. On the 2nd occasion, audiologists were given a full clinical history for the ABR cases.

Results

The addition of clinical history information had no statistically significant impact on sensitivity, specificity, or accuracy of diagnosis. Although the mean numbers of true-negative and true-positive diagnoses were higher when audiologists were given clinical information, the difference was again not statistically significant.

Conclusion

This study suggests that if there are circumstances in which case material is incomplete or unavailable, audiologists have no cause for concern regarding the accuracy of their interpretation of ABR traces. In a clinical manner, this may help audiologists with large caseloads or audiologists who need to provide a diagnosis of hearing loss in a short time by allowing them to focus on conducting ABR without the need for case history information.

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Laryngeal Aerodynamics in Healthy Older Adults and Adults With Parkinson's Disease

Purpose

The present study compared laryngeal aerodynamic function of healthy older adults (HOA) to adults with Parkinson's disease (PD) while speaking at a comfortable and increased vocal intensity.

Method

Laryngeal aerodynamic measures (subglottal pressure, peak-to-peak flow, minimum flow, and open quotient [OQ]) were compared between HOAs and individuals with PD who had a diagnosis of hypophonia. Increased vocal intensity was elicited via monaurally presented multitalker background noise.

Results

At a comfortable speaking intensity, HOAs and individuals with PD produced comparable vocal intensity, rates of vocal fold closure, and minimum flow. HOAs used smaller OQs, higher subglottal pressure, and lower peak-to-peak flow than individuals with PD. Both groups increased speaking intensity when speaking in noise to the same degree. However, HOAs produced increased intensity with greater driving pressure, faster vocal fold closure rates, and smaller OQs than individuals with PD.

Conclusions

Monaural background noise elicited equivalent vocal intensity increases in HOAs and individuals with PD. Although both groups used laryngeal mechanisms as expected to increase sound pressure level, they used these mechanisms to different degrees. The HOAs appeared to have better control of the laryngeal mechanism to make changes to their vocal intensity.

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Sensitivity to Morphosyntactic Information in 3-Year-Old Children With Typical Language Development: A Feasibility Study

Purpose

This study tested the feasibility of a method designed to assess children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., Are the nice little dogs running?). We expected that a group of children who were proficient in auxiliary use would show this sensitivity, indicating an awareness of the relation between the subject–verb sequence (e.g., dogs running) and preceding information (e.g., are). Failure to grasp this relation is proposed to play a role in the protracted inconsistency in auxiliary use in children with specific language impairment (SLI).

Method

Fifteen 3-year-old typically developing children who demonstrated proficiency in auxiliary use viewed pairs of pictures showing a single agent and multiple agents while hearing questions with or without an agreeing fronted auxiliary. Proportion looking to the target was measured.

Results

Children showed anticipatory looking on the basis of the number information contained in the auxiliary (is or are).

Conclusions

The children tested in this study represent a group that frequently serves as a comparison for older children with SLI. Because the method successfully demonstrated their sensitivity to tense/agreement information in questions, future research that involves direct comparisons of these 2 groups is warranted.

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A Cross-Language Study of Laryngeal-Oral Coordination Across Varying Prosodic and Syllable-Structure Conditions

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to use prosodic and syllable-structure variation to probe the underlying representation of laryngeal kinematics in languages traditionally considered to differ in voicing typology (German vs. Dutch and French).

Method

Transillumination and videofiberendoscopic filming were used to investigate the devoicing gesture in German, Dutch, and French for material that compared, first, a strong versus weak prosodic condition and, second, singletons versus clusters (stop + /r/ and /l/).

Results

The results showed strengthening of the devoicing gesture in the strong prosodic condition and in the segmental context stop + /r/ for German and French but not for Dutch. In terms of timing (duration of oral occlusion, voice onset time, timing of peak glottal opening relative to stop release), French was intermediate between German and Dutch.

Conclusions

(a) The representation of French voiceless plosives requires an active specification for glottal spreading just as in German. (b) Static features are not well suited to capturing cross-language differences in voicing typology and changes in voicing specification over time.

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Literacy Outcomes for Primary School Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing: A Cohort Comparison Study

Purpose

In this study, we compared the language and literacy of two cohorts of children with severe–profound hearing loss, recruited 10 years apart, to determine if outcomes had improved in line with the introduction of newborn hearing screening and access to improved hearing aid technology.

Method

Forty-two children with deafness, aged 5–7 years with a mean unaided loss of 102 DB, were assessed on language, reading, and phonological skills. Their performance was compared with that of a similar group of 32 children with deafness assessed 10 years earlier and also a group of 40 children with normal hearing of similar single word reading ability.

Results

English vocabulary was significantly higher in the new cohort although it was still below chronological age. Phonological awareness and reading ability had not significantly changed over time. In both cohorts, English vocabulary predicted reading, but phonological awareness was only a significant predictor for the new cohort.

Conclusions

The current results show that vocabulary knowledge of children with severe–profound hearing loss has improved over time, but there has not been a commensurate improvement in phonological skills or reading. They suggest that children with severe–profound hearing loss will require continued support to develop robust phonological coding skills to underpin reading.

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The Quantal Larynx: The Stable Regions of Laryngeal Biomechanics and Implications for Speech Production

Purpose

Recent proposals suggest that (a) the high dimensionality of speech motor control may be reduced via modular neuromuscular organization that takes advantage of intrinsic biomechanical regions of stability and (b) computational modeling provides a means to study whether and how such modularization works. In this study, the focus is on the larynx, a structure that is fundamental to speech production because of its role in phonation and numerous articulatory functions.

Method

A 3-dimensional model of the larynx was created using the ArtiSynth platform (http://ift.tt/2lPoHkZ). This model was used to simulate laryngeal articulatory states, including inspiration, glottal fricative, modal prephonation, plain glottal stop, vocal–ventricular stop, and aryepiglotto–epiglottal stop and fricative.

Results

Speech-relevant laryngeal biomechanics is rich with “quantal” or highly stable regions within muscle activation space.

Conclusions

Quantal laryngeal biomechanics complement a modular view of speech control and have implications for the articulatory–biomechanical grounding of numerous phonetic and phonological phenomena.

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Exploring Use of the Coordinate Response Measure in a Multitalker Babble Paradigm

Purpose

Three experiments examined the use of competing coordinate response measure (CRM) sentences as a multitalker babble.

Method

In Experiment I, young adults with normal hearing listened to a CRM target sentence in the presence of 2, 4, or 6 competing CRM sentences with synchronous or asynchronous onsets. In Experiment II, the condition with 6 competing sentences was explored further. Three stimulus conditions (6 talkers saying same sentence, 1 talker producing 6 different sentences, and 6 talkers each saying a different sentence) were evaluated with different methods of presentation. Experiment III examined the performance of older adults with hearing impairment in a subset of conditions from Experiment II.

Results

In Experiment I, performance declined with increasing numbers of talkers and improved with asynchronous sentence onsets. Experiment II identified conditions under which an increase in the number of talkers led to better performance. In Experiment III, the relative effects of the number of talkers, messages, and onset asynchrony were the same for young and older listeners.

Conclusions

Multitalker babble composed of CRM sentences has masking properties similar to other types of multitalker babble. However, when the number of different talkers and messages are varied independently, performance is best with more talkers and fewer messages.

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Rhythm Perception and Its Role in Perception and Learning of Dysrhythmic Speech

Purpose

The perception of rhythm cues plays an important role in recognizing spoken language, especially in adverse listening conditions. Indeed, this has been shown to hold true even when the rhythm cues themselves are dysrhythmic. This study investigates whether expertise in rhythm perception provides a processing advantage for perception (initial intelligibility) and learning (intelligibility improvement) of naturally dysrhythmic speech, dysarthria.

Method

Fifty young adults with typical hearing participated in 3 key tests, including a rhythm perception test, a receptive vocabulary test, and a speech perception and learning test, with standard pretest, familiarization, and posttest phases. Initial intelligibility scores were calculated as the proportion of correct pretest words, while intelligibility improvement scores were calculated by subtracting this proportion from the proportion of correct posttest words.

Results

Rhythm perception scores predicted intelligibility improvement scores but not initial intelligibility. On the other hand, receptive vocabulary scores predicted initial intelligibility scores but not intelligibility improvement.

Conclusions

Expertise in rhythm perception appears to provide an advantage for processing dysrhythmic speech, but a familiarization experience is required for the advantage to be realized. Findings are discussed in relation to the role of rhythm in speech processing and shed light on processing models that consider the consequence of rhythm abnormalities in dysarthria.

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Increased Response to Altered Auditory Feedback in Dyslexia: A Weaker Sensorimotor Magnet Implied in the Phonological Deficit

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to examine whether developmental dyslexia (DD) is characterized by deficiencies in speech sensory and motor feedforward and feedback mechanisms, which are involved in the modulation of phonological representations.

Method

A total of 42 adult native speakers of Dutch (22 adults with DD; 20 participants who were typically reading controls) were asked to produce /bep/ while the first formant (F1) of the /e/ was not altered (baseline), increased (ramp), held at maximal perturbation (hold), and not altered again (after-effect). The F1 of the produced utterance was measured for each trial and used for statistical analyses. The measured F1s produced during each phase were entered in a linear mixed-effects model.

Results

Participants with DD adapted more strongly during the ramp phase and returned to baseline to a lesser extent when feedback was back to normal (after-effect phase) when compared with the typically reading group. In this study, a faster deviation from baseline during the ramp phase, a stronger adaptation response during the hold phase, and a slower return to baseline during the after-effect phase were associated with poorer reading and phonological abilities.

Conclusion

The data of the current study are consistent with the notion that the phonological deficit in DD is associated with a weaker sensorimotor magnet for phonological representations.

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Compensatory Strategies in the Developmental Patterns of English /s/: Gender and Vowel Context Effects

Purpose

The developmental trajectory of English /s/ was investigated to determine the extent to which children's speech productions are acoustically fine-grained. Given the hypothesis that young children have adultlike phonetic knowledge of /s/, the following were examined: (a) whether this knowledge manifests itself in acoustic spectra that match the gender-specific patterns of adults, (b) whether vowel context affects the spectra of /s/ in adults and children similarly, and (c) whether children adopt compensatory production strategies to match adult acoustic targets.

Method

Several acoustic variables were measured from word-initial /s/ (and /t/) and the following vowel in the productions of children aged 2 to 5 years and adult controls using 2 sets of corpora from the Paidologos database.

Results

Gender-specific patterns in the spectral distribution of /s/ were found. Acoustically, more canonical /s/ was produced before vowels with higher F₁ (i.e., lower vowels) in children, a context where lingual articulation is challenging. Measures of breathiness and vowel intrinsic F₀ provide evidence that children use a compensatory aerodynamic mechanism to achieve their acoustic targets in articulatorily challenging contexts.

Conclusion

Together, these results provide evidence that children's phonetic knowledge is acoustically detailed and gender specified and that speech production goals are acoustically oriented at early stages of speech development.

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The German Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS-G): Reliability and Validity of a Novel Assessment of Communicative Participation

Purpose

Our purpose was to explore the validity and reliability of the German Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS-G; Thomas-Stonell, Oddson, Robertson, & Rosenbaum, 2010, 2012), which is an authorized adaptation of the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (Thomas-Stonell et al., 2010) tool, which measures communicative participation in preschool children.

Method

Parents of typically developing children (TDC) and of children with speech impairment (CSI) completed the FOCUS-G and the Questionnaire for Measuring Health-Related Quality of Life in Children (KiddyKINDL; Ravens-Sieberer & Bullinger, 2000). To determine test–retest reliability, the FOCUS-G was readministered to a subsample of parents 1 week later.

Results

The FOCUS-G had high values for internal consistency (α = .959, Ω = .941), test–retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = .974), and split–half reliability (r = .832). Total scores on the FOCUS-G and KiddyKINDL demonstrated significant associations. FOCUS-G total scores and subdomain scores for both samples showed significant correlations, indicating good construct validity. The discriminatory ability of the FOCUS-G was indicated by significantly higher mean scores for TDC (M = 6.03, SD = 0.65) than CSI (M = 5.47, SD = 1.02).

Conclusion

The overall good psychometric properties of this novel assessment of communicative participation support its use by speech-language pathologists for clinical and research purposes with German-speaking children.

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