1,721,257 research outputs found
Pitch properties of infant-directed speech specific to word-learning contexts: A cross-linguistic investigation of Mandarin Chinese and Dutch
Full text linkThis study investigates the pitch properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) specific to word-learning contexts in which mothers introduce unfamiliar words to children. Using a semi-spontaneous story-book telling task, we examined (1) whether mothers made distinctions between unfamiliar and familiar words with pitch in IDS compared to adult directed speech (ADS); (2) whether pitch properties change when mothers address children from 18 to 24 months; and (3) how Mandarin Chinese and Dutch IDS differ in their pitch properties in word-learning contexts. Results show that the mean pitch of Mandarin Chinese IDS was already ADS-like when children were 24 months, but Dutch IDS remained exaggerated in pitch at the same age. Crucially, Mandarin Chinese mothers used a higher pitch and a larger pitch range in IDS when introducing unfamiliar words, while Dutch mothers used a higher pitch specifically for familiar words. These findings contribute to the language-specificity of prosodic input in early lexical development
Automatic Recognition of Target Words in Infant-Directed Speech
Full text linkThis study assesses the performance of a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) system at extracting target words in two different speech registers: infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS). We used the Kaldi-NL ASR-service, developed by the Dutch Foundation of Open Speech Technology. The results indicate that the accuracy of the tool is much lower in IDS than in ADS. There are differences between IDS and ADS which negatively affect the performance of the existing ASR system. Therefore, new tools need to be developed for the automatic annotation of IDS. Nevertheless, the ASR system can already find more than half of the target words, which is promising
The Perfect in dialogue: Evidence from Dutch
Full text linkWe investigate the use of the PERFECT in dialogue in Dutch and – for comparison – report on data from Dutch narrative discourse as well as on data from both registers in English. Our approach is corpus-based with data drawn from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and its translation to Dutch. Our data reveal that the Dutch PERFECT is sensitive to the dialogue/narrative discourse distinction and competes with the PAST in dialogue along the event/state distinction. This is in line with earlier findings by Boogaart (1999) and de Swart (2007) and lays the foundation for an analysis of the PERFECT in which we bridge the gap between the English/dialogue oriented literature (Portner 2003; Nishiyama & Koenig 2010) and the variationist/narrative discourse oriented literature (de Swart 2007; Schaden 2009)
A Standardized Protocol for Maximum Repetition Rate Assessment in Children
Full text linkBACKGROUND/AIMS: Maximum repetition rate (MRR) is often used in the assessment of speech motor performance in older children and adults. The present study aimed to evaluate a standardized protocol for MRR assessment in young children in Dutch.METHODS: The sample included 1,524 children of 2-7 years old with no hearing difficulties and Dutch spoken in their nursery or primary school and was representative for children in the Netherlands. The MRR protocol featured mono-, tri-, and bisyllabic sequences and was computer-implemented to maximize standardization.RESULTS: Less than 50% of the 2-year-olds could produce >1 monosyllabic sequence correctly. Children who could not correctly produce ≥2 monosyllabic sequences could not produce any of the multisyllabic sequences. The effect of instruction ("faster" and "as fast as possible") was small, and multiple attempts yielded a faster MRR in only 20% of the cases. MRRs did not show clinically relevant differences when calculated over different numbers of repeated syllables.CONCLUSIONS: The MRR protocol is suitable for children of 3 years and older. If children cannot produce at least 2 of the monosyllabic sequences, the multisyllabic tasks should be omitted. Furthermore, all fast attempts of each sequence should be analyzed to determine the fastest MRR.</p
Collaboration between parents and SLTs produces optimal outcomes forchildren attending speech and language therapy: Gathering the evidence
Full text linkBackground: Collaboration between parents and speech and language therapists is seen as a key element in family-centred models. Collaboration can have positive impacts on parental and children’s outcomes. However, collaborative practice has not been well described and researched in speech and language therapy for children and may not be easy to achieve. It is important that we gain a deeper understanding of collaborative practice with parents, how it can be achieved, and how it can impact on outcomes. This understanding could support practitioners in daily practice with regard to achieving collaborative practice with parents in different contexts. Aims: The aim of this paper was to set a research agenda on collaborative practice between parents and speech and language therapists, in order to generate evidence regarding what works, how, for whom, in what circumstances, and to what extent. Methods: A realist evaluation approach was used to make explicit what collaborative practice with parents entails. The steps suggested by the RAMESES II project were used to draft a preliminary programme theory about collaborative practice between parents and speech and language therapists. This process generates explicit hypotheses which form a potential research agenda. Discussion and conclusion: A preliminary programme theory of collaborative practice with parents was drafted using a realist approach. Potential contextual factors (C), mechanisms (M) and outcomes (O) were presented which could be configured into causal mechanisms to help explain what works for whom in what circumstances. CMO configurations were drafted, based on relevant literature, which serve as exemplars to illustrate how this methodology could be used. In order to debate, test and expand our hypothesised programme theory for collaborative practice with parents, further testing against a broader literature is required alongside research to explore the functionality of the configurations across contexts. This paper highlights the importance of further research on collaborative practice with parents and the potential value of realist evaluation methodology. What this paper adds: Current policy in education, health and social care advocates for family-centred care and collaborative practice with parents. Thereby, collaborative practice is the preferred practice for speech and language therapists and parents. In this paper, we explored collaborative practice and used a realist evaluation approach to achieve the aim of setting a research agenda in this area. Researchers use realist evaluation, a methodology originally developed by Pawson and Tilley in the 1990s (Pawson and Tilley, 1997), to explore the causal link between interventions and outcomes, summarised as “what works, how, for whom, in what circumstances and to what extent” (Wong et al., 2014, p1). Realist evaluation provides a framework to explore configurations between contexts (C), mechanisms (M) and outcomes (O). We used this methodology to take a first step in making explicit what collaborative practice is and how it might be achieved in different contexts. We did this by drafting a preliminary programme theory about collaborative practice, where we made explicit what context factors and mechanisms might influence outcomes in collaborative practice between parents and SLTs. Based on this programme theory, we argue for the need to develop a research agenda on collaborative practice with parents of children with speech, language and communication needs. The steps between a programme theory and a research agenda could entail exploring each CMO, or step in the programme theory, and evaluating it against the existing literature – both within and beyond speech and language therapy - to see how far it stands up. In this way, gaps could be identified that could be converted into research questions which would stimulate debate about a research agenda on collaborative practice. Understanding how collaborative practice can be achieved in different contexts could support SLTs to use mechanisms to optimise collaborative practice intentionally and tailor interventions to the specific needs of families, thereby enhancing collaborative practice between parents and SLTs
Assessing Visual Statistical Learning in Early-School-Aged Children: The Usefulness of an Online Reaction Time Measure
Full text linkVisual statistical learning (VSL) was traditionally tested through offline two-alternative forced choice (2-AFC) questions. More recently, online reaction time (RT) measures and alternative offline question types have been developed to further investigate learning during exposure and more adequately assess individual differences in adults (Siegelman et al., 2017b, 2018). We assessed the usefulness of these measures for investigating VSL in early-school-aged children. Secondarily, we examined the effect of introducing a cover task, potentially affecting attention, on children's VSL performance. Fifty-three children (aged 5-8 years) performed a self-paced VSL task containing triplets, in which participants determine the presentation speed and RTs to each stimulus are recorded. Half of the participants performed a cover task, while the other half did not. Online sensitivity to the statistical structure was measured by contrasting RTs to unpredictable versus predictable elements. Subsequently, participants completed 2-AFC (choose correct triplet) and 3-AFC (fill blank to complete triplet) offline questions. RTs were significantly longer for unpredictable than predictable elements, so we conclude that early-school-aged children are sensitive to the statistical structure during exposure, and that the RT task can measure that. We found no evidence as to whether children can perform above chance on offline 2-AFC or 3-AFC questions, or whether the cover task affects children's VSL performance. These results show the feasibility of using an online RT task when assessing VSL in early-school-aged children. This task therefore seems suitable for future studies that aim to investigate VSL across development or in clinical populations, perhaps together with behavioral tasks
Developmental pathway of phonetic fine-tuning of phonological contrast in reference to information structure: The case of three-way contrastive stops in Korean.
No full textThis study investigates the acquisition of three-way stop contrast (lenis, aspirated, fortis) in Korean and phonetic modulation of the phonological contrast driven by information structure. VOT and F0 of the stops produced by children (4-5, 7-8, 10-11 year-olds) and adults in broad, narrow, and contrastive focus conditions were measured. Results indicated that only the 7-8 year-olds showed the three-way distinction using VOT under (phonemic) contrastive focus, while the other two children groups and adults did not. As for F0, adults made a three-way distinction using F0 in all focus conditions, while the 7-8 and the 10-11 year-olds did so only under limited focus conditions. The 4-5 year-olds did not show the three-way distinction in any focus condition. The results suggest that children build up their phonological awareness and fine-tune phonetic realization in their developmental pathway in conjunction with different functions of information structur
Assessment of Childhood Apraxia of Speech:A Review/Tutorial of Objective Measurement Techniques
Full text linkBackground: With respect to the clinical criteria for diagnosing childhood apraxia of speech (commonly defined as a disorder of speech motor planning and/or programming), research has made important progress in recent years. Three segmental and suprasegmental speech characteristics-error inconsistency, lengthened and disrupted coarticulation, and inappropriate prosody-have gained wide acceptance in the literature for purposes of participant selection. However, little research has sought to empirically test the diagnostic validity of these features. One major obstacle to such empirical study is the fact that none of these features is stated in operationalized terms.Purpose: This tutorial provides a structured overview of perceptual, acoustic, and articulatory measurement procedures that have been used or could be used to operationalize and assess these 3 core characteristics. Methodological details are reviewed for each procedure, along with a short overview of research results reported in the literature.Conclusion: The 3 types of measurement procedures should be seen as complementary. Some characteristics are better suited to be described at the perceptual level (especially phonemic errors and prosody), others at the acoustic level (especially phonetic distortions, coarticulation, and prosody), and still others at the kinematic level (especially coarticulation, stability, and gestural coordination). The type of data collected determines, to a large extent, the interpretation that can be given regarding the underlying deficit. Comprehensive studies are needed that include more than 1 diagnostic feature and more than 1 type of measurement procedure.</p
Pauses matter: Rule-learning in Children
Full text linkLanguage learners have to both segment words and discover grammatical rules connecting those words in sentences. In adult listeners, the presence of a prosodic cue in the speech stream, for example, a pause, appears to facilitate rule-learning of non-adjacent dependencies of the form AiXCi (Peña et al., 2002). Only when listening to the artificial language containing pauses, could participants identify rule-words of the form AiAjCi or AiCjCi, where intervening syllables were moved from A- or C-positions. Frost and Monaghan (2016) found in a similar study that participants who were tested with novel, rather than moved, intervening syllables in AiXCi items showed rule-learning even when the familiarisation stream contained no pauses. The present study re-examines the facilitative effect of pauses in discovering structural rules in speech in a novel population: children aged 7-11. We used the same artificial speech stimuli as Peña et al. (2002) and tested children in both a moved-syllable and novel-syllable forced-choice task. The results of 140 children show that pauses provide a facilitative effect on rule-learning – also for young learners. Regardless of syllable types, only children who listened to the familiarisation stream containing pauses chose words following the rule above chance-level
Further development in measuring communicative participation: identifying items to extend the applicability of the communicative participation item bank
Full text linkBACKGROUND: The ability to communicate is a prerequisite for participation in today's society. To measure participation in adults with communication disorders, the Communicative Participation Item Bank (CPIB) was developed in 2006. Since then, several new PROMs have been developed to measure communication and the impact of communication disorders on participation. Moreover, the CPIB items do not all appear to be relevant to certain populations with communication problems and context of communicative participation is changing rapidly, given the increased use of digital communication forms. The purpose of this study was to identify new PROMs developed since 2006 that aim to measure (aspects of) communication, in order to select items that are suitable for expanding the Communicative Participation Item Bank to make the item bank more widely applicable (e.g., to the hearing-impaired population) and tailored to the current societal context. METHODS: Medline and Embase were used to search for PROMs that aim to measure (aspects of) communication. Each new PROM as well as the CPIB, was evaluated to determine to what extent it contains items that measure communicative participation and to what extent these items capture all communicative participation domains by linking each item to the ICF Activities and Participation domains. RESULTS: This study identified 31 new PROMs, containing 391 items that were labelled as measuring communicative participation. The majority of the 391 items measure aspects of ICF Activities and Participation domain 'communication', followed by the domain 'interpersonal interactions and relationships'. The other ICF Activity and Participation domains were less often addressed. Analysis of the CPIB showed that items do not cover all domains of participation as defined in the ICF, such as the 'major life areas' domain. CONCLUSIONS: We found a potential pool of 391 items measuring communicative participation that could be considered for extending the CPIB. We found items in domains that are already present in the CPIB, but also items that relate to new domains, such as an item on talking with customers or clients for the 'major life areas' domain. Inclusion of new items in other domains would benefit the comprehensiveness of the item bank
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