Lingual kinematics and coordination in speech‐disordered children exhibiting differentiated versus undifferentiated lingual gestures

Abstract

All three of the children with articulation/phonological disorders demonstrated aberrant lingual kinematics. The child who exhibited undifferentiated lingual gestures further exhibited excess tongue body movement during alveolar consonants, suggestive of poor motor control, an immature or deviant bracing system, and/or a compensatory mechanism to counteract potential disturbances in tongue tip fine motor control. Electromagnetic articulography provided a means of examining speech motor control deficits, including disturbances in tongue movement and coordination, in children with articulation/phonological disorders.

Speech characteristics of 8-year-old children: Findings from a prospective population study

“…Increasingly however, it has been recognised that difficulties can persist beyond the early years and into older childhood. This is evident from recent studies that have investigated samples of children with persistent speech disorder (PSD) (Clark, Harris, Jollef, Price & Neville, 2010;Goozee, Murdoch, Ozanne, Cheng, Hill & Gibbon, 2007;McGrath, Hutaff-Lee, Scott, Boada & Shriberg, 2008;Peterson, Pennington, Shriberg & Boada, 2009;Shriberg, Potter & Strand, 2011). Yet population data on the speech characteristics of children beyond the age when speech acquisition is generally considered to be complete is lacking.…”

“…Moreover, studies of PSD have typically used small clinical samples rather than reference to a normative dataset. These small clinical samples were identified either through referral to speechlanguage pathology services Pascoe, Stackhouse & Wells, 2005), identification of speech sound disorder when younger (Goozee et al, 2007;Kenney, Barac-Cikoja, Finnegan, Jeffries & Ludlow, 2006;Lewis, Freebairn, Hansen, Iyengar & Taylor, 2004;Lewis & Freebairn, 1992) or presence of a comorbid condition (Clark et al, 2010;Gibbon, McNeill, Wood & Watson, 2003;Shriberg, Potter & Strand, 2011). Tomblin (2010) highlights the limitations of studies based solely on clinical samples and advocates for the use of population sampling methods.…”

Physiological investigation of dysarthria: Recent advances

“…By separating the signal components at each receiver coil and determining the distance between the receiver coil and each transmitter coil using the magnitude of each signal component, the location (x-y coordinates) of the receiver coil within the 2D representation of articulator movements along the midsagittal parameters can be computed, including the velocity, acceleration/deceleration, displacement, and duration of articulatory movements. To date 2D EMA has been used to study articulatory kinematics in a range of normal and disordered speakers including: children and adults (Kuruvilla, Murdoch & Goozée, 2007) with dysarthria subsequent to traumatic brain injury; adults with dysarthria post-stroke (Chen, Murdoch, & Goozée, 2008); and speech disordered children exhibiting differentiated and undifferentiated lingual gestures (Goozée, Murdoch, Ozanne, Cheng, Hill, & Gibbon, 2007a). The technique has also been used to investigate lingual kinematic strategies used to increase speech rate in younger and older adults (Goozée, Stephenson, Murdoch, Darnell, & LaPointe, 2007b).…”

Implications of Peripheral Muscular and Anatomical Development for the Acquisition of Lingual Control for Speech Production: A Review

“…Further motivation for this review comes from work by Gibbon, Cheng and their colleagues [13,14] who have used electropalatography (EPG) to study the development of lingual control. These researchers found that undifferentiated lingual gestures, defined as unusually large areas of tongue-to-palate contact [13,14], are widespread in children whose speech development is delayed or disordered [14,15,16]. Gibbon, Cheng, and colleagues argue that undifferentiated lingual gestures occur when speakers have not mastered the relatively independent control of the tip/blade, body, and lateral margins of the tongue seen in normal speakers of the same age.…”