Articulatory Effectiveness, Stimulability, and Children’s Performances on Perceptual and Memory Tasks

Abstract

The performances of 70 children, 35 from kindergarten and 35 from first grade, were studied on four auditory measures and one oral sensory discrimination task. Each group of 35 children included seven subjects with superior articulation, seven with deviant articulation and poor speech sound stimulability, seven with deviant articulation and good stimulability, seven with articulation defects and poor stimulability, and seven with articulation defects and good stimulability. Performances on a speech sound stimulability task were not found to be related to performances on any of the auditory measures and only slightly to the oral sensory task. Superior articulators had significantly better scores than the deviant and defectives on the oral sensory discrimination task, but scores on the auditory tasks were not significantly different. Comparison of the performances of /s/ and /r/ defectives revealed the latter group to be inferior on some auditory tasks compared with the superior articulators. Some relationships were found between subject performances on certain auditory tasks.

Comparing online versus laboratory measures of speech perception in older children and adolescents

“…These models predict that speakers who represent a given speech sound with a narrower region in sensory space should also be more precise in their phonetic realization of that sound. A number of empirical studies have supported this idea of links between perception and production across individuals [10][11][12][13][14][15], although findings of dissociation are also reported [16][17][18][19]. Stored representations of speech sound targets are thought to have both an auditory component (i.e., what should be heard when the sound is produced) and a somatosensory component (i.e., what it should feel like to produce the sound).…”