Showing papers in "Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research in 2000"
TL;DR: The vocal quality of a patient is modeled by means of a Dysphonia Severity Index (DSI), which is designed to establish an objective and quantitative correlate of the perceived vocal quality.
Abstract: The vocal quality of a patient is modeled by means of a Dysphonia Severity Index (DSI), which is designed to establish an objective and quantitative correlate of the perceived vocal quality The DSI is based on the weighted combination of the following selected set of voice measurements: highest Frequency (F-0-High in Hz), lowest intensity (I-Low in dB), maximum phonation time (Mm in s), and jitter (%). The DSI is derived from a multivariate analysis of 387 subjects with the goal of describing, purely based on objective measures, the perceived voice quality It is constructed as DSI = 0.13 x MPT + 0.0053 x F-0-High - 0.26 x I-Low - 1.18 x Jitter (%)+ 12.4. The DSI For perceptually normal voices equals +5 and for severely dysphonic voices -5. The more negative the patient's index, the worse is his or her vocal quality As such, the DSI is especially useful to evaluate therapeutic evolution of dysphonic patients. Additionally, there is a high correlation between the DSI and the Voice Handicap Index score.
540 citations
TL;DR: This study evaluated the extent to which 10 general language performance measures (GLPM) differentiated school-age children with language learning disabilities (LLD) from chronological- age (CA) and language-age (LA) peers.
Abstract: Language performance in naturalistic contexts can be characterized by general measures of productivity, fluency, lexical diversity, and grammatical complexity and accuracy. The use of such measures as indices of language impairment in older children is open to questions of method and interpretation. This study evaluated the extent to which 10 general language performance measures (GLPM) differentiated school-age children with language learning disabilities (LLD) from chronological-age (CA) and language-age (LA) peers. Children produced both spoken and written summaries of two educational videotapes that provided models of either narrative or expository (informational) discourse. Productivity measures, including total T-units, total words, and words per minute, were significantly lower for children with LLD than for CA children. Fluency (percent T-units with mazes) and lexical diversity (number of different words) measures were similar for all children. Grammatical complexity as measured by words per T-uni...
510 citations
TL;DR: Results indicated that children with language impairment, as well as those in intervention, exhibited deficient nonword repetition skills compared to normal language controls and likelihood ratio analyses indicated that NRT performance, though not sufficient on its own, may provide a useful index to assist in ruling in or ruling out language disorder.
Abstract: This study examined nonword repetition performance in a population-based sample of school-age children. A total of 581 second graders who were participating in a longitudinal, epidemiologic investigation of specific language impairment (SLI) were administered the Nonword Repetition Task (NRT) developed by Dollaghan & Campbell (1998). Performance was examined according to second-grade diagnostic category, presence/absence of language impairment, and treatment status. Results indicated that children with language impairment, as well as those in intervention, exhibited deficient nonword repetition skills compared to normal language controls. Findings also confirmed that the NRT is a culturally nonbiased measure of language processing. Results from likelihood ratio analyses indicated that NRT performance, though not sufficient on its own, may provide a useful index to assist in ruling in or ruling out language disorder.
486 citations
TL;DR: The hypothesis of reduced muscular reserve in the swallows of older men as compared to younger men is supported and the potential for exercise to improve reserve is discussed.
Abstract: As the U.S. population ages, there is increasing need for data on the effects of aging in healthy elderly individuals over age 80. This investigation compared the swallowing ability of 8 healthy yo...
378 citations
TL;DR: The present results are consistent with three primary phases in the development of lip and jaw coordination for speech: integration, differentiation, and refinement, which entails the existence of distinct coordinative constraints on early articulatory movement.
Abstract: This investigation was designed to describe the development of lip and jaw coordination during speech and to evaluate the potential influence of speech motor development on phonologic development. Productions of syllables containing bilabial consonants were observed from speakers in four age groups (i.e., 1-year-olds, 2-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and young adults). A video-based movement tracking system was used to transduce movement of the upper lip, lower lip, and jaw. The coordinative organization of these articulatory gestures was shown to change dramatically during the first several years of life and to continue to undergo refinement past age 6. The present results are consistent with three primary phases in the development of lip and jaw coordination for speech: integration, differentiation, and refinement. Each of these developmental processes entails the existence of distinct coordinative constraints on early articulatory movement. It is suggested that these constraints will have predictable consequences for the sequence of phonologic development.
298 citations
TL;DR: Results were interpreted to suggest that children with SLI have less functional verbal working memory capacity than their CA peers and have greater difficulty managing both their working memory abilities and general processing resources than both age peers and younger children when performing a "complex" off-line sentence processing task.
Abstract: In this study we examined the influence of verbal working memory on sentence comprehension in children with SLI. Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for age (CA), and ...
295 citations
TL;DR: The hypothesis that linguistic complexity is one factor that contributes to the disruptions of speech motor stability characteristic of stuttering is supported.
Abstract: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of utterance length and syntactic complexity on the speech motor stability of adults who stutter. Lower lip movement was recorded from 8 adults who stutter and 8 normally fluent controls. They produced a target phrase in isolation (baseline condition) and the same phrase embedded in utterances of increased length and/or increased syntactic complexity. The spatiotemporal index (STI) was used to quantify the stability of lower lip movements across multiple repetitions of the target phrase. Results indicated: (a) Adults who stutter demonstrated higher overall STI values than normally fluent adults across all experimental conditions, indicating decreased speech motor stability; (b) the speech motor stability of normally fluent adults was not affected by increasing syntactic complexity, but the speech motor stability of adults who stutter decreased when the stimuli were more complex; (c) increasing the length of the target utterance (without increasing syntactic complexity) did not affect the speech motor stability of either speaker group. These results indicate that language formulation processes may affect speech production processes and that the speech motor systems of adults who stutter may be especially susceptible to the linguistic demands required to produce a more complex utterance. The present findings, therefore, support the hypothesis that linguistic complexity is one factor that contributes to the disruptions of speech motor stability characteristic of stuttering.
238 citations
TL;DR: The ability to identify speech in reverberation and noise reaches adult-like level of performance at different ages for different components of the speech signal.
Abstract: This study assessed the effects of reverberation, noise, and their combination on listeners’ identification of consonants and vowels in naturally produced nonsense syllables presented at different ...
236 citations
TL;DR: The results of this study suggest that children may benefit from using cochlear implants regardless of the communication strategy/teaching approach employed by their school program and that other considerations, such as the age at which children receive implants, are more important.
Abstract: This study examines the relationship between the teaching method, oral or total communication, used at children's schools and children's consonant-production accuracy and vocabulary development ove...
214 citations
TL;DR: Support is provided for the hypothesis that tongue strength plays a role in oropharyngeal swallowing, particularly related to the oral phase of the swallow, and significant correlations of tongue strength and endurance and some swallow measures were found pre- and posttreatment for the group with head and neck cancer and for the control group.
Abstract: This study examined tongue function and its relation to swallowing in 13 subjects with oral or oropharyngeal cancer treated with primary radiotherapy ± chemotherapy and 13 age- and sex-matched cont...
204 citations
TL;DR: The results of the present study provide qualified support for the hypothesis that stuttering adults show atypical lateralization of language processes.
Abstract: Over the last decade positron emission tomography (PET) has been used extensively for the study of language and other cognitive and sensorimotor processes in healthy and diseased individuals. In th...
TL;DR: Investigation of the abilities of four fundamental frequency (F0)-dependent and two F0-independent measures to quantify vocal noise showed that measures based on the LP model were much superior to the other measures.
Abstract: We investigated the abilities of four fundamental frequency (F0)-dependent and two F0-independent measures to quantify vocal noise. Two of the F0-dependent measures were computed in the time domain, and two were computed using spectral information from the vowel. The F0-independent measures were based on the linear prediction (LP) modeling of vowel samples. Tests using a database of sustained vowel samples, collected from 53 normal and 175 pathological talkers, showed that measures based on the LP model were much superior to the other measures. A classification rate of 96.5% was achieved by a parameter that quantifies the spectral flatness of the unmodeled component of the vowel sample.
TL;DR: The data appear to indicate that the mechanism underlying the optional infinitive phenomenon extends to normal (second) language learning after the primary acquisition years and indicate that tense-marking difficulty may not be an adequate clinical marker of SLI when comparing children with impairment to both monolingual and bilingual peers.
Abstract: This study compares the morphosyntax of children with SLI to the morphosyntax of children acquiring a second language (L2) to determine whether the optional infinitive phenomenon (M. Rice, K. Wexle...
TL;DR: There was a systematic age-related shift in the PI functions, suggesting that young children require a higher AI to achieve performance equivalent to that of adults.
Abstract: In this study, the influence of stimulus context and audibility on sentence recognition was assessed in 60 normal-hearing children, 23 hearing-impaired children, and 20 normal-hearing adults. Perfo...
TL;DR: Emergent storybook reading may be a useful addition to language sampling protocols because it can reveal higher order language skills and contribute to understanding the relationship between language impairment and later reading disability.
Abstract: The research reported in this paper was based on the premise that oral and written language development are intertwined. Further, the research was motivated by research demonstrating that narrative...
TL;DR: The fundamental tenets of a theoretical synthesis proposed by Roy and Bless (2000) to explain the dispositional bases of FD and VN are summarized and the merits of this theory are evaluated.
Abstract: It has been argued that personality, emotions, and psychological problems contribute to or are primary causes of voice disorders and that voice disorders in turn create psychological problems and personality effects. This article (a) briefly reviews the literature surrounding the role of psychological and personality processes in individuals with functional dysphonia (FD), vocal nodules (VN), and spasmodic dysphonia (SD); (b) provides an overview of recent concepts in personality and trait structure; and (c) summarizes the fundamental tenets of a theoretical synthesis proposed by Roy and Bless (2000) to explain the dispositional bases of FD and VN. This theory links FD and VN to the signal sensitivities and behavioral response biases of neurotic introverts and neurotic extraverts, respectively. In a companion article, the merits of the Roy and Bless theory are evaluated.
TL;DR: The results of this study confirm that instructional context is an important mediator of teachers' directiveness and suggest that subtypes of directiveness have differential effects on child language output.
Abstract: Five subtypes of directiveness were examined in the interactions of day care teachers with toddler and preschooler groups. The instructional context (book reading, play dough) yielded significant d...
TL;DR: The results indicate that finiteness marking remains an area of relative difficulty, but perhaps not the only grammatical difficulty, for children with language impairments in the school years.
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of verb and noun morphology in school-age children's spoken and written language. Sixty children, with and without language learning disabilities (LLD), each produced 2 spoken and 2 written language samples. The children's accuracy in using morphemes that mark verb finiteness (regular past tense, 3rd person singular present tense, copula, and auxiliary BE) was compared with their accuracy in using noun morphology (regular plural, possessive, articles). As would be expected, the typically achieving children, who were aged 7 to 12 years, had mastered the verb and noun morphology in spoken and written samples. The children with LLD, aged 10 to 12 years, also showed high accuracy in the spoken samples. On the other hand, they showed substantial difficulty in the written samples with the regular past tense, with errors in 26% of obligatory contexts. However, the children with LLD also had difficulty with the regular plural, with errors in 12% of obligatory c...
TL;DR: Despite changes in the acoustical properties of the vocal tract that occur during the course of development, the model was able to demonstrate motor-equivalent speech production under lip-restriction conditions even though there was no prior experience with lip restriction during training.
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that self-produced auditory feedback is sufficient to train a mapping between auditory target space and articulator space under conditions in which the structures of speech production are undergoing considerable developmental restructuring. One challenge for competing theories that propose invariant constriction targets is that it is unclear what teaching signal could specify constriction location and degree so that a mapping between constriction target space and articulator space can be learned. It is predicted that a model trained by auditory feedback will accomplish speech goals, in auditory target space, by continuously learning to use different articulator configurations to adapt to the changing acoustic properties of the vocal tract during development. The Maeda articulatory synthesis part of the DIVA neural network model (Guenther et al., 1998) was modified to reflect the development of the vocal tract by using measurements taken from MR images of children. After training, the model was able to maintain the 11 English vowel targets in auditory planning space, utilizing varying articulator configurations, despite morphological changes that occur during development. The vocal-tract constriction pattern (derived from the vocal-tract area function) as well as the formant values varied during the course of development in correspondence with morphological changes in the structures involved with speech production. Despite changes in the acoustical properties of the vocal tract that occur during the course of development, the model was able to demonstrate motor-equivalent speech production under lip-restriction conditions. The model accomplished this in a self-organizing manner even though there was no prior experience with lip restriction during training.
TL;DR: The results indicate an association between PA and early oral reading ability in children with Down syndrome and are interpreted within a theoretical view of reading development in which PA plays a central role.
Abstract: The existence of a necessary association between phonological awareness (PA) and oral reading development has been questioned using evidence from children with Down syndrome. In this study, 22 children with Down syndrome (between the ages of 6;7 and 10;3) initially completed tests of receptive language, cognitive function, oral reading, and PA. Reading and PA were reassessed approximately 9 months later. Better oral reading was associated with superior phoneme segmentation skills on reassessment. Furthermore, there was some evidence that early segmentation ability predicted later nonword reading, but not the reverse. The results indicate an association between PA and early oral reading ability in children with Down syndrome and are interpreted within a theoretical view of reading development in which PA plays a central role.
TL;DR: Findings provide novel evidence that speech motor planning, execution, or both are affected by processes often considered to be relatively remote from the motor output stage.
Abstract: The possible influences of utterance length and complexity on speech motor performance were examined by assessing the effects of increased processing demands on articulatory movement stability. Eig...
TL;DR: Results show that, measured by masking, frequency resolution has reached adult-like performance by 6 years of age, whereas temporal resolution develops beyond 10 years ofAge.
Abstract: This study investigated the development of auditory frequency and temporal resolution using simultaneous and backward masking of a tone by a noise. The participants were 6- to 10-year-old children and adults. On the measure of frequency resolution (the difference in the detection threshold for a tone presented either in a bandpass noise or in a spectrally notched noise), 6-year-old children performed as well as adults. However, for the backward masking task, 6-year-olds had, on average, 34 dB higher thresholds than adults. A negative exponential decay function fitted to the backward masking data for subjects of all ages indicated that adult-like temporal resolution may not be reached until about 11 years of age. These results show that, measured by masking, frequency resolution has reached adult-like performance by 6 years of age, whereas temporal resolution develops beyond 10 years of age. Six-year-old children were also assessed with tests of cognitive ability. Improvements in both frequency and temporal resolution were found with increasing IQ score.
TL;DR: Examination of generality of a previous finding indicating that difficulty suppressing or inhibiting context-inappropriate interpretations is an important predictor of narrative discourse comprehension for adults with right brain damage found that for individual participants with RBD, the extent of suppression from one interval to the next was a significant predictor of performance on a specialized measure of inference comprehension.
Abstract: This study examined the generality of a previous finding indicating that difficulty suppressing or inhibiting context-inappropriate interpretations is an important predictor of narrative discourse comprehension for adults with right brain damage (RBD) (C. A. Tompkins, A. Baumgaertner, M. T. Lehman, & W. Fassbinder, 2000). Forty adults with RBD and 39 without brain damage listened to two-sentence stimuli and judged whether a probe word fit with the overall stimulus meaning. An ambiguous initial sentence elicited both dominant and less preferred inferences, and the second sentence resolved the ambiguity toward the initially less-likely interpretation. Probes represented the dominant inference for the first sentence and were presented at two poststimulus intervals. Probe judgment response times indicated that neither group suppressed the eventually inappropriate inferences in the time intervals studied. However, multiple regression analysis demonstrated that for individual participants with RBD, the extent of suppression from one interval to the next was a significant predictor of performance on a specialized measure of inference comprehension. The discussion evaluates these findings and identifies directions for future research.
TL;DR: The findings support a morphosyntactic model, such as the extended optional infinitive (EOI) model, with regard to the limitations in finiteness marking and for affected children.
Abstract: In this paper we add to what is known about the tense-marking limitations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) by exploring the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense, encompassing the age range of 2;6 to 8;9 (years;months) and comparing the performance of 21 children with SLI to that of 23 control children of the same age and 20 younger control children of equivalent mean length of utterance (MLU) at the outset. The analysis differentiated between the morphophonological component of past tense marking and the morphosyntactic component (finiteness). In the morphosyntactic component, the performance of the SLI group trails that of the two control groups over 3.5 years, whereas in the morphophonological component, the SLI group's performance is equivalent to that of the younger controls. Models of growth curves for regular past tense and irregular finiteness marking show the same pattern, with linear and quadratic components and the child's MLU at the outset as the only predictor. For morphophonological growth the picture changes, with an interaction of linear trend and MLU and the child's receptive vocabulary emerging as a predictor. The findings support a morphosyntactic model, such as the extended optional infinitive (EOI) model, with regard to the limitations in finiteness marking and for affected children.
TL;DR: Hearing sensitivity was examined prospectively in young children as a function of otitis media with effusion (OME) status in Years 1, 2, and 3 and results reveal that children who were classified as bilaterally OME positive in Years 2, 3 had significantly poorer hearing than children classification as bilateral OME free in each of these time periods.
Abstract: Hearing sensitivity was examined prospectively in young children as a function of otitis media with effusion (OME) status in Years 1, 2, and 3. Hearing and OME status were sampled bimonthly from 5 to 36 months of age. Behavioral thresholds were obtained at 4 test frequencies (500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz) using visual reinforcement audiometry and conditioned play audiometry techniques. The majority of children's audiograms were obtained using a computer-controlled test procedure. Thresholds for the test frequencies were averaged for each visit and then averaged across all visits in each year. Reference values were developed for infants and children in Years 1, 2, and 3 who were OME free. Results reveal that children who were classified as bilaterally OME positive in Years 1, 2, and 3 had significantly poorer hearing than children classified as bilaterally OME free in each of these time periods. There was no difference in hearing as a function of gender, socioeconomic status, or birth-risk status.
TL;DR: The performances of the group of children with language impairments were significantly lower on each measure than that of chronological age matched African American children who were typically developing.
Abstract: This investigation compares the performances of 24 African American children, diagnosed as language impaired (LI) and receiving school-based language therapy, to 2 groups of typically developing peers (N = 48) on 5 traditional types of language assessment measures. Three of the measures were derived from child-centered free play language sample analyses and included average length of communication units (MLCU), frequencies of complex syntax, and numbers of different words. Two of the measures examined language comprehension and included responses to requests for information in the form of Wh-questions and responses to probes of active and passive sentence constructions. The performances of the group of children with language impairments were significantly lower on each measure than that of chronological age matched African American children who were typically developing. Sensitivity and specificity of the battery appeared excellent. The findings are discussed in terms of the potential of these informal language measures to contribute to a culturally fair assessment protocol for young African American children.
TL;DR: The results suggest that the kinematic characteristics of the fluent speech of adults who stutter generally overlap that of normally fluent speakers; however, subtle differences in kinematics parameters are interpreted to reveal their susceptibility to speech motor breakdown when performance demands increase.
Abstract: Articulatory kinematics were analyzed to determine if adults who stutter are generally poorer at speech movement pattern generation and if changing speech rate affects their stability in the same w...
TL;DR: A new approach to speech movement trajectory analysis is introduced, where trajectories from multiple movement sequences are time- and amplitude-normalized, and the STI (spatiotemporal index) is computed to capture the degree of convergence of a set of trajectories onto a single, underlying movement template.
Abstract: Speech requires the control of complex movements of orofacial structures to produce dynamic variations in the vocal tract transfer function. The nature of the underlying motor control processes has...
TL;DR: The present data suggest that, for a short period after stuttering onset in the preschool years, a short delay in treatment does not appear to increase treatment time, which is not consistent with the Starkweather and Gottwald report, which linked advancing age with longer treatment time.
Abstract: It is known that children may recover from stuttering without formal treatment during the first years after onset. Consequently, the timing of professional, early stuttering intervention is a pressing issue in speech-language pathology. This report presents data pertinent to this issue for 261 preschool-age children who received the Lidcombe Program of early stuttering intervention. Of these children, 250 completed the program and were considered by their clinicians to have been treated successfully. For the children who were treated successfully, logistical regression analyses were used to determine whether age, gender, period from onset to treatment, and stuttering severity related systematically to the time required for treatment. The present data confirmed previous reports that a median of 11 clinic visits was required to achieve zero or near-zero stuttering with the Lidcombe Program. Results were also consistent with a preliminary report of 14 children (C. W. Starkweather & S. R. Gottwald, 1993) showing a significant relation between stuttering severity and the time needed for treatment, with children with more severe stuttering requiring longer treatment times than children with less severe stuttering. However, results did not associate either increasing age or increased onset-to-treatment intervals with longer treatment times. This finding is not consistent with the Starkweather and Gottwald report, which linked advancing age with longer treatment time. In fact, the present data suggest that, for a short period after stuttering onset in the preschool years, a short delay in treatment does not appear to increase treatment time. An important caveat to these data is that they cannot be generalized to late childhood or early adolescence. The present findings are discussed in relation to natural recovery from stuttering.
TL;DR: The results indicate that tinnitus patients have impaired cognitive performance overall, as measured by these variations of the Stroop paradigm, but hearing impairment cannot be excluded as a possible confounder.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate cognitive interference caused by tinnitus by means of a modified version of the Stroop color-word test. In a mixed-design study, the performances of tinnitu...