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PubMed1981

The nondeviant nature of deviant phonological systems.

Few studies of children with defective speech or deviant phonologies have gone beyond the level of phonetic representation in limited environments. The Lorentz (1976) study of Joe, a 4.5-yr-old child with a phonological disorder, is exceptional inasmuch as underlying phonemic representations and phonological rules are posited in addition to the surface phonetic representations. However, his analysis crucially depends on morphosyntactic information that cannot be independently justified. A reanalysis of Joe's data within Kahn's (1976) syllable-based model of generative phonology reveals that the child's phonological rules are syllabically conditioned exclusively. In particular, the application of certain rules is found to depend on whether or not an internal syllable boundary is present within a polysyllabic word. In the course of the reanalysis, issues concerning naturalness of individual phonological rules, ordering relations between pairs of rules, feature systems, the phonological representation of double-articulated consonants, and the role of the syllable as element in phonological descriptions are discussed. Paradoxically, Joe's phonological system is found to be "normal," as measured in terms of the above-mentioned linguistic parameters, yet his speech output is "abnormal," as measured against the adult norm.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1989

Nasal airflows in parkinsonian speakers.

Velopharyngeal control in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) was studied by obtaining rates of nasal airflow during syllable repetitions. Nasal airflows were described with respect to disease progression, phonetic context, and speaking rate. Significant differences in nasal airflows were obtained for disease progression and phonetic context. The data suggested that velopharyngeal control deteriorates systematically with disease progression. Parkinson's patients at mild and moderate levels of disease progression differentiated the nasal consonant from the oral consonants with increased nasal airflow associated with the nasal consonant. Differences, while not significant, were also observed in nasal flow rate values when the PD patients increased speaking rate from 1 to 5 syllables per second.

Aged↗
PubMed1989

Effects of listener sophistication on judgements of tracheoesophageal talker intelligibility.

The purpose of this project was to provide preliminary data on comparative judgments of tracheoesophageal (TE) speech intelligibility by two groups of listeners who varied in their listening sophistication. Four highly proficient TE talkers produced the stimuli for the study. Stimuli represented all consonant manner classes in both pre- and postvocalic contexts. The two listener groups were composed of 10 naive listeners and 10 experienced speech pathologists. Data from each listener group was analyzed for overall intelligibility and intelligibility by pre- and postvocalic phonetic position. Scores were also quantified by phonetic manner class. Statistically significant differences were identified between judgments of the two listener groups for prevocalic stops and fricatives. Experienced listeners did, however, generally judge talkers to exhibit higher intelligibility compared to naive listeners. The potential clinical implications of these data are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Voice onset time production in French-speaking aphasics.

VOT productions were compared for 5 Broca's aphasics and 5 Wernicke's aphasics to those for a group of 5 normal subjects of similar age. Phonetic errors were produced by both types of aphasic patients, but not by normal controls. Although previous studies have found significantly more phonetic errors in VOT production for Broca's aphasics, this study did not. Both Broca aphasics and Wernicke aphasics had somewhat less overall average difference in VOT between voiced and voiceless consonant pairs than normal speakers. Standard deviations associated with the VOT productions were also greater for both aphasic groups than for normal subjects. The results of this study are considered in light of the previous literature.

Aged↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Enhancing stimulability: a treatment program.

Recent research on stimulability and generalization suggests that treatment of nonstimulable sounds results in maximum treatment gains (Powell, Elbert, & Dinnsen, 1991). It has also been suggested, however, that nonstimulable sounds are more difficult to teach, especially to young children with very small phonetic inventories. In this article, we describe a treatment program designed to increase the size of the phonetic inventory by "teaching" stimulability. Application of the treatment approach is demonstrated in a case study.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1983

Speech perception and memory coding in relation to reading ability.

Previous work has demonstrated that children who are poor readers have short-term memory deficits in tasks in which the stimuli lend themselves to phonetic coding. The aim of the present study was to explore whether the poor readers' memory deficit may have its origin in perception with the encoding of the stimuli. Three experiments were conducted with third grade good and poor readers. As in earlier experiments, the poor readers were found to perform less well on recall of random word strings and to be less affected by the phonetic characteristics (rhyming or not rhyming) of the items (Experiment 1). In addition, the poor readers produced more errors of transposition (in the nonrhyming strings) than did the good readers, a further indication of the poor readers' problems with memory for order. The subjects were tested on two auditory perception tasks, one employing words (Experiment 2) and the other nonspeech environmental sounds (Experiment 3). Each was presented under two conditions: with a favorable signal-to-noise ratio and with masking. The poor readers made significantly more errors than the good readers when listening to speech in noise, but did not differ in perception of speech without noise or in perception of nonspeech environmental sounds, whether noise-masked or not. Together, the results of the perception studies suggest that poor readers have a perceptual difficulty that is specific to speech. It is suggested that the short-term memory deficits characteristic of poor readers may stem from material-specific problems of perceptual processing.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed1978

Rest vertical dimension determined by electromyography with biofeedback as compared to conventional methods.

This study was undertaken to determine if electromyography with biofeedback can be utilized to produce a more reliable determination of rest vertical dimension than conventional methods such as phonetics and swallowing. It was found that: 1. Electromyography with biofeedback appeared to produce a more consistently reliable determination of rest vertical dimension than conventional methods when used with edentulous subjects. 2. Determinations of rest vertical dimension by individual dentists using phonetics and swallowing had wide variations in two of the five patients in a range of up to 6 mm. An error of this magnitude could easily cause an intrusion upon the interocclusal distance and resultant failure of treatment. Since this study was limited to five patients, a more expanded study is necessary to determine the validity of electromyography vs. conventional methods for determining rest vertical dimension. Both methods have questionable aspects in relation to the time of day, patient's understanding of each technique, and past dental history. However, the most critical problem of the electromyographic technique is the feasibility of its use in a private practice in light of the excessive cost of the required equipment.

Biofeedback, Psychology↗
PubMed1985

The perception of stress and lateralization of prosody.

Three separate dichotic listening tasks were run to determine ear superiority for stress identification. When subjects were asked to identify stress placement in real word minimal stress pairs (hótdog vs. hot dóg), they demonstrated a right ear superiority. When these tokens were filtered so that phonetic and semantic information was eliminated and only the stress pattern remained, a different group of subjects showed a left ear advantage. Finally, with nonsense word counterparts to word stress pairs (bótgog vs. bot góg) preserving phonetic information but lacking semantic content, no ear asymmetry was found. These results suggest that as the linguistic significance of the stimuli is reduced, thereby lessening the linguistic function of stress, there is a less dominant involvement of the left hemisphere in stress processing. Results are discussed in relation to a theory of a functional integration of prosodic and segmental speech components that is paralleled by a working partnership of left and right hemisphere.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Phonological processing and lexical access in aphasia.

This study explored the relationship between on-line processing of phonological information and lexical access in aphasic patients. A lexical decision paradigm was used in which subjects were presented auditorily with pairs of words or word-like stimuli and were asked to make a lexical decision about the second stimulus in the pair. The initial phonemes of the first word primes, which were semantically related to the real word targets, were systematically changed by one or more than one phonetic feature, e.g., cat-dog, gat-dog, wat-dog. Each of these priming conditions was compared to an unrelated word baseline condition, e.g., nurse-dog. Previous work with normals showed that even a nonword stimulus receives a lexical interpretation if it shares a sufficient number of phonetic features with an actual word in the listener's lexicon. Results indicated a monotonically decreasing degree of facilitation as a function of phonological distortion. In contrast, fluent aphasics showed priming in all phonological distortion conditions relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nonfluent aphasics showed priming only in the undistorted, related word condition relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nevertheless, in a secondary task requiring patients to make a lexical decision on the nonword primes presented singly, all aphasics showed phonological feature sensitivity. These results suggest deficits for aphasic patients in the various processes contributing to lexical access, rather than impairments at the level of lexical organization or phonological organization.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Effects of speech rate on the absolute and relative timing of apraxic and conduction aphasic sentence production.

The purpose of this investigation was to provide a constructive replication of the Kent and McNeil (1987, In Phonetic approaches to speech production in aphasia and related disorders. San Diego: College-Hill Press) study of the speech timing characteristics of apraxic and conduction aphasic speakers. Acoustic analysis was used to obtain absolute utterance durations, segment durations, and vowel formant trajectories from utterances produced under control, fast, and slow rate conditions. Segment-to-whole ratios and slope values were calculated. Results support the hypothesis presented by Kent and McNeil (1987) that there is a phonetic-motoric component contributing to the speech patterns of both the apraxic and conduction aphasic speakers sampled. Theories of rate control in normal and disordered speakers are discussed.

Aged↗
PubMed1982

Visual-field differences in picture-word interference.

Picture-word interference refers to the fact that if a picture (i.e., line drawing) is presented centrally with a word superimposed, picture-naming latency is longer than if that same picture is presented alone. This phenomenon, like the Stroop phenomenon, seems to be strongly influenced by the nature of the to-be-ignored word. That is, if the word names a member of the picture's semantic category additional interference is observed; however, if the word is replaced by a phonetically unviable consonant string interference is reduced. In the present experiments these effects were examined in the situation where the picture-word stimuli were presented unilaterally in either the left or right visual field. For right-visual-field presentations, phonetic and semantic factors both influenced performance just as in central presentations. As such, these results can be satisfactorily explained in terms of response competition processes. However, the results for the left-visual-field presentations were quite different. Although substantial interference was observed for all types of stimuli, the amount of interference was essentially independent of the linguistic nature of the superimposed letter string. These results do not appear to be explainable in terms of response competition processes. Instead, it is suggested that the best way to explain these results is in terms of the perceptual capabilities of the right hemisphere.

Cerebral Cortex↗
PubMed2005

Spoken word recognition in context: evidence from Chinese ERP analyses.

Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments were conducted to investigate spoken word recognition in Chinese and the effect of contextual constraints on this process. In Experiment 1, three kinds of incongruous words were formed by altering the first, second or both syllables of the congruous disyllabic terminal words in high constraint spoken sentences. Results showed an increase of N400 amplitude in all three incongruous word conditions and a delayed N400 effect in the cohort incongruous condition as compared with the rhyme incongruous and plain incongruous condition. In addition, unlike results in English, we found that the N400 effect in the rhyme incongruous condition disappeared earlier than in the plain incongruous condition. In Experiment 2, three kinds of nonwords derived from sentence congruous words were constructed by altering few or many phonetic features of the onset or the whole of the first syllable, and the resulting nonwords appeared as disyllabic terminal forms in either high or low constraint sentences. All three nonword conditions elicited the N400 component. In addition, in high constraint sentences but not in low, the amplitude and duration of the N400 varied as a function of the degree of phonetic mismatch between the terminal nonword and the expected congruous word.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Towards an auditory account of speech rhythm: application of a model of the auditory 'primal sketch' to two multi-language corpora.

The world's languages display important differences in their rhythmic organization; most particularly, different languages seem to privilege different phonological units (mora, syllable, or stress foot) as their basic rhythmic unit. There is now considerable evidence that such differences have important consequences for crucial aspects of language acquisition and processing. Several questions remain, however, as to what exactly characterizes the rhythmic differences, how they are manifested at an auditory/acoustic level and how listeners, whether adult native speakers or young infants, process rhythmic information. In this paper it is proposed that the crucial determinant of rhythmic organization is the variability in the auditory prominence of phonetic events. In order to test this auditory prominence hypothesis, an auditory model is run on two multi-language data-sets, the first consisting of matched pairs of English and French sentences, and the second consisting of French, Italian, English and Dutch sentences. The model is based on a theory of the auditory primal sketch, and generates a primitive representation of an acoustic signal (the rhythmogram) which yields a crude segmentation of the speech signal and assigns prominence values to the obtained sequence of events. Its performance is compared with that of several recently proposed phonetic measures of vocalic and consonantal variability.

Humans↗
PubMed2005

Infants are sensitive to within-category variation in speech perception.

Previous research on speech perception in both adults and infants has supported the view that consonants are perceived categorically; that is, listeners are relatively insensitive to variation below the level of the phoneme. More recent work, on the other hand, has shown adults to be systematically sensitive to within category variation [McMurray, B., Tanenhaus, M., & Aslin, R. (2002). Gradient effects of within-category phonetic variation on lexical access, Cognition, 86 (2), B33-B42.]. Additionally, recent evidence suggests that infants are capable of using within-category variation to segment speech and to learn phonetic categories. Here we report two studies of 8-month-old infants, using the head-turn preference procedure, that examine more directly infants' sensitivity to within-category variation. Infants were exposed to 80 repetitions of words beginning with either /b/ or /p/. After exposure, listening times to tokens of the same category with small variations in VOT were significantly different than to both the originally exposed tokens and to the cross-category-boundary competitors. Thus infants, like adults, show systematic sensitivity to fine-grained, within-category detail in speech perception.

Discrimination Learning↗
PubMed2005

MMN to natural Arabic CV syllables: 2 - cross language study.

Mismatch negativity response parameters; latency, amplitude, and duration - to natural Arabic and natural English CV syllables - were obtained from normal-hearing adult Egyptians, in two experiments. In the first experiment, MMN was obtained in response to English CV syllable paradigms (Ba-Wa) and (Ga-Da) differing in formant duration and start of third formant, respectively. In the second experiment, MMN response for Arabic paradigm (Baa-Waa), English paradigm (Ba-Wa), and for Arabic-English paradigm (Waa-Wa) was obtained. Results revealed that the three levels of speech representation; acoustic, phonetic and phonologic could be probed preattentatively by MMN. The acoustic properties of speech signal are processed earlier than the phonetic and phonologic properties.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Intelligibility of speech produced during simultaneous communication.

UNLABELLED: This study investigated the overall intelligibility of speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC). Four hearing, experienced sign language users were recorded under SC and speech alone (SA) conditions speaking Boothroyd's (1985) forced-choice phonetic contrast material designed for measurement of speech intelligibility. Twelve hearing-impaired listeners participated, with three of them randomly assigned to audit the speech sample provided by each one of the four speakers under the SC and SA conditions. Although results indicated longer sentence durations for SC than SA, results showed no difference in the overall intelligibility of speech produced during SC versus speech produced during SA, nor any difference in pattern of phonetic contrast recognition errors during SC. This conclusion is consistent with previous research indicating that temporal alterations produced by SC do not produce degradation of temporal or spectral cues in speech or disruption of the perception of specific English phoneme segments. LEARNING OUTCOMES: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to (1) describe simultaneous communication; (2) explain the role of simultaneous communication in communication with children who are deaf; (3) discuss methods of measuring speech intelligibility; and (4) specify the ability of listeners to perceive speech produced during simultaneous communication.

Communication↗
PubMed2004

Learning new sounds of speech: reallocation of neural substrates.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate changes in brain activity related to phonetic learning. Ten monolingual English-speaking subjects were scanned while performing an identification task both before and after five sessions of training with a Hindi dental-retroflex nonnative contrast. Behaviorally, training resulted in an improvement in the ability to identify the nonnative contrast. Imaging results suggest that the successful learning of a nonnative phonetic contrast results in the recruitment of the same areas that are involved during the processing of native contrasts, including the left superior temporal gyrus, insula-frontal operculum, and inferior frontal gyrus. Additionally, results of correlational analyses between behavioral improvement and the blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal obtained during the posttraining Hindi task suggest that the degree of success in learning is accompanied by more efficient neural processing in classical frontal speech regions, and by a reduction of deactivation relative to a noise baseline condition in left parietotemporal speech regions.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Articulation in Prader-Willi syndrome.

UNLABELLED: This study investigated articulation in 13 individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), chronological age from 7; 0 to 29; 5, total IQ from 38 to 83. To elicit a speech sample a picture-naming test was used. Pictures were chosen so that, when named correctly, they yield a sample containing instances of all Dutch single speech sounds and clusters in all permissible syllable positions. All samples were transcribed phonetically by a stringent transcription procedure, and reliability of the transcription was assessed both by an intra-observer and inter-observer reliability check. The transcribed speech samples were subjected to several analyses as to characterize articulation from different perspectives. It was found that articulation in persons with PWS is usually impaired. Results suggest that the overall error rate is a function of IQ, and that with increasing age, phonological problems gradually resolve while phonetic difficulties become more evident. LEARNING OUTCOMES: The reader will learn about (1) clinical characteristics, etiology, incidence, and prevalence of Prader-Willi syndrome; (2) speech and language difficulties in Prader-Willi syndrome; (3) articulation characteristics in Prader-Willi syndrome.

Adolescent↗