A First Step toward the Clinical Application of Landmark-Based Acoustic Analysis in Child Mandarin

Abstract

As an initial step for the clinical application of landmark-based acoustic analysis in child Mandarin, the study quantified the developmental trajectories of consonants produced by four-to-seven-year-old children who acquired Taiwanese Mandarin as their first language. The results from a total of 80 children (20 in each age group, with gender balanced) indicated that younger age groups produced more +b landmark features than seven-year-olds did, showing that the development of obstruents was not completed by the age of six. A multiple regression showed that the participants’ speech intelligibility scores could be predicted by landmark features. Additionally, the +b landmark feature demonstrated the strongest net effect on speech intelligibility scores. The findings indicated that: (a) the landmark feature +b was an essential indicator of speech development in child Mandarin and; (b) the consonantal development in child Mandarin could be predicted by the physiological complexity of the articulatory gestures. Future studies focusing on a wider range of population (e.g., typically developing adults, aging and other clinical groups) with different language backgrounds are encouraged to apply landmark-based acoustic analysis to trace the linguistic development of a particular group.

Consonantal Landmarks as Predictors of Dysarthria among English-Speaking Adults with Cerebral Palsy

“…Table 1. Acoustic rules and articulatory interpretations of the six abrupt-consonantal landmarks (adopted from MacAuslan [41], Ishikawa, MacAuslan and Boyce [42], and Liu [30]). [39] and Ishikawa and MacAuslan [43]).…”

“…Table 1. Acoustic rules and articulatory interpretations of the six abrupt-consonantal landmarks (adopted from MacAuslan [41], Ishikawa, MacAuslan and Boyce [42], and Liu [30]). Empirical studies using the software SpeechMark© have shown that the numbers of these acoustic landmarks could quantify the production traits of different populations and were highly correlated with the speech intelligibility of both typical and atypical populations.…”

“…Specifically, once the problematic features of consonantal productions from the dysarthric speakers are characterized and quantified, the underlying speech motor impairments and deficits can be identified, and this, in turn, can provide essential information for clinical specialists (e.g., language therapists, pediatricians, physiatrists and speech–language pathologists) in language rehabilitation and patients’ progress assessments. In this regard, the employment of acoustic analysis will be particularly helpful because it can reliably detect subtle differences in production [ 18 , 27 , 28 ], whereas traditional acoustic phonetic analysis required users to manually tag the boundaries of each of the sound segments in concern, which was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process [ 29 , 30 ]. Therefore, it is understandable that such a method is less likely to be employed by physiatrists and language therapists, as these clinicians are often constrained by tight schedules [ 31 , 32 ].…”

“…The acoustic specifications and the associated articulatory interpretations of the six consonantal landmarks are shown in Table 1 . Please note that the descriptions from Table 1 were directly adopted from MacAuslan [ 41 ], Ishikawa, MacAuslan and Boyce [ 42 ], and Liu [ 30 ], because these acoustic rules for generating the landmarks were specified by the software developers, and, hence, the resulting articulatory interpretations were constant as well. Based on Liu [ 39 ] and Ishikawa and MacAuslan [ 43 ], the landmark detection algorithm is shown in Figure 1 .…”

“…Additionally, the classification tree model indicated that the +s and +b landmarks were effective predictors for the dysphonic speech. Liu [ 30 ] analyzed the disyllabic words produced by 80 children ranging from four to seven years old. The results indicated that the younger age groups produced more +b landmarks than did the oldest age group.…”