Visual-motor ability of children with articulation disorders

The present study was done to assess differences between children with diagnosed functional articulation disorders and a control group on the variable of visual-motor ability. A group of 34 elementary children with articulation problems were matched with a control group of 34 for sex, age, and grade. Both groups were administered the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation and the Minnesota Percepto-Diagnostic Test--Revised. Analysis indicated that children with articulation problems performed significantly lower on visual-motor skills.     

Language and motor abilities of preschool children who stutter: Evidence from behavioral and kinematic indices of nonword repetition performance

Stuttering is a disorder of speech production that typically arises in the preschool years, and many accounts of its onset and development implicate language and motor processes as critical underlying factors. There have, however, been very few studies of speech motor control processes in preschool children who stutter. Hearing novel nonwords and reproducing them engages multiple neural networks, including those involved in phonological analysis and storage and speech motor programming and execution. We used this task to explore speech motor and language abilities of 31 children aged 4–5 years who were diagnosed as stuttering. We also used sensitive and specific standardized tests of speech and language abilities to determine which of the children who stutter had concomitant language and/or phonological disorders. Approximately half of our sample of stuttering children had language and/or phonological disorders. As previous investigations would suggest, the stuttering children with concomitant language or speech sound disorders produced significantly more errors on the nonword repetition task compared to typically developing children. In contrast, the children who were diagnosed as stuttering, but who had normal speech sound and language abilities, performed the nonword repetition task with equal accuracy compared to their normally fluent peers. Analyses of interarticulator motions during accurate and fluent productions of the nonwords revealed that the children who stutter (without concomitant disorders) showed higher variability in oral motor coordination indices. These results provide new evidence that preschool children diagnosed as stuttering lag their typically developing peers in maturation of speech motor control processes.Educational objectives: The reader will be able to: (a) discuss why performance on nonword repetition tasks has been investigated in children who stutter; (b) discuss why children who stutter in the current study had a higher incidence of concomitant language deficits compared to several other studies; (c) describe how performance differed on a nonword repetition test between children who stutter who do and do not have concomitant speech or language deficits; (d) make a general statement about speech motor control for nonword production in children who stutter compared to controls.     

Testing the concurrent and predictive relations among articulation accuracy, speech perception, and phoneme awareness

The relations among articulation accuracy, speech perception, and phoneme awareness were examined in a sample of 97 typically developing children ages 48 to 66 months. Of these 97 children, 46 were assessed twice at ages 4 and 5 years. Children completed two tasks for each of the three skills, assessing these abilities for the target phoneme /r/ and the control phoneme /m/ in the word-initial position. Concurrent analyses revealed that phoneme-specific relations existed among articulation, awareness, and perception. Articulation accuracy of /r/ predicted speech perception and phoneme awareness for /r/ after controlling for age, vocabulary, letter-word knowledge, and speech perception or phoneme awareness for the control phoneme /m/. The longitudinal analyses confirmed the pattern of relations. The findings are consistent with a model whereby children's articulation accuracy affects preexisting differences in phonological representations and, consequently, affects how children perceive, discriminate, and manipulate speech sounds.     

Linguistic humor comprehension in children with articulation impairments

This study investigated the ability of children with articulation disorders to comprehend linguistic humor. It was hypothesized that children with articulation disorders would have more difficulty understanding humor based on phonological differences than humor based on lexical differences. A second hypothesis predicted that children with articulation disorders would have more difficulty understanding riddles in which the phoneme they misarticulated, either /s/ or /r/, was the source of ambiguity than riddles in which the source of ambiguity did not involve the phoneme they misarticulated. Results did not confirm the first hypothesis as there were no statistically significant differences between groups with regard to the children's ability to understand phonological vs lexical humor. The second hypothesis was supported. Children had significantly more difficulty understanding riddles in which the source of ambiguity related to the phoneme they misarticulated, either /s/ or /r/ than they did understanding phonological humor involving nonerror phonemes.     

Modification of articulation errors of pre-delinquents by their peers

Pre-delinquent peers in Achievement Place (a community based family style rehabilitation program based on a token economy) were given points (token reinforcement) to modify the articulation errors of two boys. In Experiment I, using a multiple baseline experimental design, error words involving the /l/, /r/, /th/, and /ting/ sounds were successfully treated by both a group of peers and by individual peers. Also, generalization occurred to words that were not trained. The speech correction procedure used by the peers involved a number of variables including modelling, peer approval, contingent points, and feedback. The individual role of each of these variables was not experimentally analyzed, but it was demonstrated that peers could function as speech therapists without instructions, feedback, or the presence of an adult. It was also found that payment of points to peers for detecting correct articulations produced closer agreement with the experimenter than when they were paid points for finding incorrect articulations. The results were replicated in a second experiment with another subject who had similar articulation errors. In addition, the second experiment showed that peer speech correction procedures resulted in some generalization to the correct use of target words in sentences and significant improvements on standard tests of articulation.     

Evaluating rate,accuracy, and fluency of young children's diadochokinetic productions: a preliminary investigation

Diadochokinetic (DDK) rates are commonly assessed in children with speech-language disorders, even though the implications of fast or slow DDK rates are not clear. This study explored the possibility that the accuracy and fluency of DDK productions may provide a meaningful supplement to traditional measures of DDK rate. Participants were 15 boys, age 3-7, with normal speech-language development, who were asked to produce "puh-tuh-kuh" or "pattycake" in a standard DDK task. Analyses revealed that normally developing children produce frequent articulation errors but few disfluencies during DDK tasks. Errors and disfluencies did not affect DDK rate, suggesting that the rate of DDKs may be a relatively insensitive measure of children's speaking abilities. Although an expected correlation was found between age and overall DDK rate, no correlations were found between age and the frequency of articulation errors or speech disfluencies. Findings suggest that measures of DDK accuracy and fluency may provide information about children's speech development that is independent of age and may be more closely related to oral motor development than rate. Overall, results underscore concerns with the interpretation of DDK rate and highlight ways that rate measures might be supplemented with measurement of accuracy and fluency in the evaluation of children's speaking abilities. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about a technique that may facilitate the evaluation of young children's oral DDK abilities. The reader will learn about the frequency and type of errors children produce on DDKs and how this information can be used in the assessment of children's oral motor abilities.     

Impaired Speech Perception in Poor Readers: Evidence from Hearing and Speech Reading

The performance of 14 poor readers on an audiovisual speech perception task was compared with 14 normal subjects matched on chronological age (CA) and 14 subjects matched on reading age (RA). The task consisted of identifying synthetic speech varying in place of articulation on an acoustic 9-point continuum between /ba/ and /da/ (Massaro & Cohen, 1983). The acoustic speech events were factorially combined with the visual articulation of /ba/, /da/, or none. In addition, the visual-only articulation of /ba/ or /da/ was presented. The results showed that (1) poor readers were less categorical than CA and RA in the identification of the auditory speech events and (2) that they were worse in speech reading. This convergence between the deficits clearly suggests that the auditory speech processing difficulty of poor readers is speech specific and relates to the processing of phonological information.     

Hearing speech in noise: seeing a loud talker is better

Seeing the talker improves the intelligibility of speech degraded by noise (a visual speech benefit). Given that talkers exaggerate spoken articulation in noise, this set of two experiments examined whether the visual speech benefit was greater for speech produced in noise than in quiet. We first examined the extent to which spoken articulation was exaggerated in noise by measuring the motion of face markers as four people uttered 10 sentences either in quiet or in babble-speech noise (these renditions were also filmed). The tracking results showed that articulated motion in speech produced in noise was greater than that produced in quiet and was more highly correlated with speech acoustics. Speech intelligibility was tested in a second experiment using a speech-perception-in-noise task under auditory-visual and auditory-only conditions. The results showed that the visual speech benefit was greater for speech recorded in noise than for speech recorded in quiet. Furthermore, the amount of articulatory movement was related to performance on the perception task, indicating that the enhanced gestures made when speaking in noise function to make speech more intelligible.     

Behavioral treatment of children with phonological disorder: the efficacy of vocal imitation and sufficient-response-exemplar training

This study examined whether sufficient-response-exemplar training of vocal imitation would result in improved articulation in children with phonological disorder, and whether improved articulation established in the context of vocal imitation would transfer to other verbal classes such as object naming and conversational speech. Participant 1 was 6 years old and attended first grade in a regular public school. Participant 2 was 5 years 4 months old and attended a public kindergarten. Both participants had normal hearing and no additional handicaps. A multiple baseline design across behaviors (target sounds or blends) was employed to examine whether the vocal imitation training resulted in improved articulation. Results showed that both participants improved articulation once training was implemented, and that the improved articulation transferred from vocal imitation to more natural speech such as object naming and conversational speech. Improvement established during training was maintained posttraining and at a 6-month follow-up.     

Oral Motor Abilities Are Task Dependent: A Factor Analytic Approach to Performance Rate

Measures of performance rates in speech-like or volitional nonspeech oral motor tasks are frequently used to draw inferences about articulation rate abnormalities in patients with neurologic movement disorders. The study objective was to investigate the structural relationship between rate measures of speech and of oral motor behaviors different from speech. A total of 130 patients with neurologic movement disorders and 130 healthy subjects participated in the study. Rate data was collected for oral reading (speech), rapid syllable repetition (speech-like), and rapid single articulator movements (nonspeech). The authors used factor analysis to determine whether the different rate variables reflect the same or distinct constructs. The behavioral data were most appropriately captured by a measurement model in which the different task types loaded onto separate latent variables. The data on oral motor performance rates show that speech tasks and oral motor tasks such as rapid syllable repetition or repetitive single articulator movements measure separate traits.     

Neural correlates of phonological processing in speech sound disorder: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Speech sound disorders (SSD) are the largest group of communication disorders observed in children. One explanation for these disorders is that children with SSD fail to form stable phonological representations when acquiring the speech sound system of their language due to poor phonological memory (PM). The goal of this study was to examine PM in individuals with histories of SSD employing functional MR imaging (fMRI). Participants were six right-handed adolescents with a history of early childhood SSD and seven right-handed matched controls with no history of speech and language disorders. We performed an fMRI study using an overt non-word repetition (NWR). Right lateralized hypoactivation in the inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus was observed. The former suggests a deficit in the phonological processing loop supporting PM, while the later may indicate a deficit in speech perception. Both are cognitive processes involved in speech production. Bilateral hyperactivation observed in the pre and supplementary motor cortex, inferior parietal, supramarginal gyrus and cerebellum raised the possibility of compensatory increases in cognitive effort or reliance on the other components of the articulatory rehearsal network and phonologic store. These findings may be interpreted to support the hypothesis that individuals with SSD may have a deficit in PM and to suggest the involvement of compensatory mechanisms to counteract dysfunction of the normal network.     

How the components of speaking rate influence perception of phonetic segments

In two studies we investigated the way in which the components of speaking rate, articulation rate and pause rate, combine to influence processing of the silence-duration cue for the voicing distinction in medial stop consonants. First, we replicated the finding that the articulation rate of a carrier sentence, that is, the rate at which the speech itself is produced, influences how the duration information is used to assign voicing values. Second, and more importantly, the assignment of voicing values was also influenced by the pause rate of the sentence. Thus, the listener adjusts for both articulation rate and pause rate when processing the phonetically relevant information. Finally, the two rate components did not function in an equivalent manner, since changes in articulation rate had considerably more effect on phonetic judgments than did changes in pause rate. Alternative explanations fo the relative weighting of the two variables are discussed.     

Oral and Hand Movement Speeds are Associated with Expressive Language Ability in Children with Speech Sound Disorder

This study tested the hypothesis that children with speech sound disorder have generalized slowed motor speeds. It evaluated associations among oral and hand motor speeds and measures of speech (articulation and phonology) and language (receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence imitation), in 11 children with moderate to severe SSD and 11 controls. Syllable durations from a syllable repetition task served as an estimate of maximal oral movement speed. In two imitation tasks, nonwords and clapped rhythms, unstressed vowel durations and quarter-note clap intervals served as estimates of oral and hand movement speed, respectively. Syllable durations were significantly correlated with vowel durations and hand clap intervals. Sentence imitation was correlated with all three timed movement measures. Clustering on syllable repetition durations produced three clusters that also differed in sentence imitation scores. Results are consistent with limited movement speeds across motor systems and SSD subtypes defined by motor speeds as a corollary of expressive language abilities.     

Speech sound articulation abilities of preschool-age children who stutter

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to assess the association between speech sound articulation and childhood stuttering in a relatively large sample of preschool-age children who do and do not stutter, using the Goldman–Fristoe Test of Articulation-2 (GFTA-2; Goldman & Fristoe, 2000).

Method

Participants included 277 preschool-age children who do (CWS; n = 128, 101 males) and do not stutter (CWNS; n = 149, 76 males). Generalized estimating equations (GEE) were performed to assess between-group (CWS versus CWNS) differences on the GFTA-2. Additionally, within-group correlations were performed to explore the relation between CWS’ speech sound articulation abilities and their stuttering frequency and severity, as well as their sound prolongation index (SPI; Schwartz & Conture, 1988).

Results

No significant differences were found between the articulation scores of preschool-age CWS and CWNS. However, there was a small gender effect for the 5-year-old age group, with girls generally exhibiting better articulation scores than boys. Additional findings indicated no relation between CWS’ speech sound articulation abilities and their stuttering frequency, severity, or SPI.

Conclusions

Findings suggest no apparent association between speech sound articulation—as measured by one standardized assessment (GFTA-2)—and childhood stuttering for this sample of preschool-age children (N = 277).Educational objectives: After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) discuss salient issues in the articulation literature relative to children who stutter; (2) compare/contrast the present study's methodologies and main findings to those of previous studies that investigated the association between childhood stuttering and speech sound articulation; (3) identify future research needs relative to the association between childhood stuttering and speech sound development; (4) replicate the present study's methodology to expand this body of knowledge.     

A randomized control trial to investigate the impact of the Lidcombe Program on early stuttering in German-speaking preschoolers

In order to investigate whether the Lidcombe Program effects a short-term reduction of stuttered speech beyond natural recovery, 46 German preschool children were randomly assigned to a wait-contrast group or to an experimental group which received the Lidcombe Program for 16 weeks. The children were between 3;0 and 5;11 years old, their and both of their parents’ native language was German, stuttering onset had been at least 6 months before, and their stuttering frequency was higher than 3% stuttered syllables. Spontaneous speech samples were recorded at home and in the clinic prior to treatment and after 4 months. Compared to the wait-contrast group, the treatment group showed a significantly higher decrease in stuttered syllables in home-measurements (6.9%SS vs. 1.6%SS) and clinic-measurements (6.8%SS vs. 3.6%SS), and the same increase in articulation rate. The program is considered an enrichment of currently applied early stuttering interventions in Germany.

Educational objectives: Readers will discuss and evaluate: (1) the short-term effects of the Lidcombe Program in comparison to natural recovery on stuttering; (2) the impact of the Lidcombe Program on early stuttering in German-speaking preschool children.     

Fluency of conversational speech in children with unilateral brain lesions

The spontaneous conversational speech of 20 children with unilateral left hemisphere lesions and 13 with right lesions was compared to normally developing peers matched by age, sex, race, and social class for instances of stuttering type nonfluencies, normal nonfluencies, and rate of speech. Both left and right lesioned children provided quantitatively more and qualitatively different patterns of nonfluencies than their neurologically normal peers. Left and right lesioned children produced more stuttering types of nonfluencies than their controls, but neither lesioned group produced a greater number of normal nonfluencies than controls. Left lesioned children also had a slower rate of speech as measured by number of syllables per second during either stuttered or fluent speech. Considerable variability was observed among lesioned children. Implications for neurogenic theories of developmental fluency disorders are discussed.     

The role of production abilities in the perception of consonant category in infants

The influence of motor knowledge on speech perception is well established, but the functional role of the motor system is still poorly understood. The present study explores the hypothesis that speech production abilities may help infants discover phonetic categories in the speech stream, in spite of coarticulation effects. To this aim, we examined the influence of babbling abilities on consonant categorization in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants. Using an intersensory matching procedure, we investigated the infants’ capacity to associate auditory information about a consonant in various vowel contexts with visual information about the same consonant, and to map auditory and visual information onto a common phoneme representation. Moreover, a parental questionnaire evaluated the infants’ consonantal repertoire. In a first experiment using /b/–/d/ consonants, we found that infants who displayed babbling abilities and produced the /b/ and/or the /d/ consonants in repetitive sequences were able to correctly perform intersensory matching, while non‐babblers were not. In a second experiment using the /v/–/z/ pair, which is as visually contrasted as the /b/–/d/ pair but which is usually not produced at the tested ages, no significant matching was observed, for any group of infants, babbling or not. These results demonstrate, for the first time, that the emergence of babbling could play a role in the extraction of vowel‐independent representations for consonant place of articulation. They have important implications for speech perception theories, as they highlight the role of sensorimotor interactions in the development of phoneme representations during the first year of life.     

Auditory phonemic perception in dyslexia: Categorical identification and discrimination of stop consonants

The possibility that phonological confusions may underlie some difficulties in processing written language was investigated using four speech perception tasks. Twelve dyslexic and four normal-reading children identified and discriminated synthetic speech syllables which varied either in voice-onset time (signaling the feature of voicing) or direction of formant transitions (signaling place of articulation). Results indicate that, like normal-reading children and adults, dyslexic children perceive these sounds categorically. Discrimination of the stimuli was limited by their identifiability. It is suggested that linguistic disturbances at other stages of the grapheme to meaning transformation underlie misreading.     

A practical method for screening psychiatric disorder in children with speech and language disorders

Children with speech and language disorders have been found to have a prevalence rate of psychiatric disorder of 50%. The authors sought to develop an efficient screening procedure to distinguish such children who have psychiatric disorder and those who do not. Cutoff scores for easily administered parent and teacher behavior rating questionnaires were investigated in a population of 256 children with speech and language disorders and known presence or absence of psychiatric disorder. It was learned that when the questionnaires are used together, a cutoff score of 31 or greater on either questionnaire has a positive predictive value of 74.1 % and a negative predictive value of 76.1%. This screening method shows promise in assisting speech pathologists in comprehensive evaluation and treatment planning for children with speech and language disorders.     

Functional imaging during speech production

Physiological studies of speech production have demonstrated that even simple articulation involves a range of specialized motor and cognitive processes and the neural mechanisms responsible for speech reflect this complexity. Recently, a number of functional imaging techniques have contributed to our knowledge of the neuroanatomical and neurophysiological correlates of speech production. These new imaging approaches have the advantage of permitting study of large numbers of normal and disordered subjects but they bring with them a host of new methodological concerns. One of the challenges for understanding language production is the recording of articulation itself. The problems associated with measuring the vocal tract and measuring the neural activity during overt speech are reviewed. It is argued that advances in understanding fundamental questions such as what are the planning units of speech, what is the role of feedback during speech and what is the influence of learning, await the development of better methods for assessing task performance.