Perception of Voiceless Fricatives by Children with a Functional Articulation Disorder

Abstract

The two studies presented here examine the relationship between speech perception and speech production errors in children who have a functional articulation disorder. In both experiments, speech perception was assessed with a word identification test, based upon a synthesized continuum of speech stimuli, contrasting the specific phonemes that were associated with production errors in our sample of articulation-disordered subjects. Experiment 1 required subjects to identify words that contrasted the phonemes /s/ and /S/. In this test, adults, normal speaking 5-year-olds, and some articulation-disordered 5-year-olds identified the words seat and sheet appropriately and reliably. However, a subgroup of articulation-disordered children were unable to identify the test stimuli appropriately. Experiment 2 required a second group of subjects to identify words that contrasted the phonemes /s/ and /theta/. Although both adults and normal speaking children responded appropriately to the words sick and thick, in this test, none of the articulation-disordered children was able to identify these words appropriately. It is concluded that, for a subgroup of children who have a functional articulation disorder, production errors may reflect speech perception errors.

Phonological Processing and Reading in Children With Speech Sound Disorders

“…The discrepant findings can be explained by the use of tasks that do not tap the specificity of acoustic-phonetic representations for words. For further discussion of levels of representation and appropriate assessment procedures, see Boada and Pennington (2006), Munson, Edwards, and Beckman (2005), , and Rvachew and Jamieson (1989).…”

“…Speech perception deficits have even been observed in infants with a family history of RD, using both physiological and behavioral measures ( Leppanen, Pihko, Eklund, & Lyytinen, 1999;Lyytinen et al, 2004). It is also known that some, although not all, children with SSD have difficulties with speech perception ( Broen, Strange, Doyle, & Heller, 1983;Edwards, Fox, & Rogers, 2002;Hoffman, Daniloff, Bengoa, & Schuckers, 1985;Rvachew & Jamieson, 1989). It therefore seems reasonable to ask whether children who demonstrate concomitant difficulties with speech articulation and speech perception might be at risk for poor reading skills.…”

Speech perception and short-term memory deficits in persistent developmental speech disorder

“…Some children in this study, however, had mild language impairments which may have contributed to their perceptual difficulties. In fact, the authors questioned whether the speech perception difficulties were deviant or merely delayed and a consequence of the speech and language delay in many of these children rather than part of the developmental phonological disorder (Rvachew & Jamieson, 1989).…”

“…Because the stimuli differed in their first, second and third formant frequencies, the results might suggest that some misarticulating children have difficulties with using frequency spectra differences for categorizing speech sounds. In a similar study (Rvachew & Jamieson, 1989), two experiments compared groups of children who had multiple speech articulation errors involving fricatives with normally speaking children and adults. The discrimination curves were relatively flat in the speech disordered children on word identification tasks contrasting the words "seat" with "sheet" and "sick" with "thick" which differed in their frequency spectra for the initial fricative.…”

Audiovisual Tools for Phonetic and Articulatory Visualization in Computer-Aided Pronunciation Training

“…Here a common phenomenon is that these children shift posterior plosives (e.g. /g/ and /k/ are realized as /d/ and /t/), or they show a misarticulation of fricatives [5,6,7]. Other complex articulatory and coarticulatory problems occur for people suffering from motor speech disorders like apraxia of speech or dysarthria [8].…”