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Using the Third Formant to Investigate Perceptual Abilities in Children with Residual Sound Errors (RSE)

Hamilton, Sarah
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1063-7422
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1479819962932214

Abstract Details

2016, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Allied Health Sciences: Communication Sciences and Disorders.
Listeners’ speech perception abilities appear to relate to their production abilities, but in investigations of older children with speech disorders, there is a surprising lack of consensus about perceptual difficulties that correspond to production. In this investigation, I focus on the American English rhotic /r/, which is one of the later-developing sounds in the language, with some children acquiring automatic production of the sound as late as age 9. It is also one of the most common errors in children and one of the most resistant to remediation. It is possible that, given that children with RSE have deficits in phonological processing skills, speech perception skills may also show deficits. To investigate this, three category goodness judgment experiments were devised. These tasks all required listeners to judge /r/ sounds along a distribution of natural speech words, where endpoints are “very good” and “very bad” productions. The distribution of productions was created using an acoustic parameter (the third formant) normalized to account for vocal tract differences. The three tasks demonstrated that the distribution of natural speech /r/ productions formed by normalized third formants was strongly associated with category goodness judgments of /r/ in adult listeners, but children with RSEs and age-matched controls made significantly different judgments. Children with RSE make more accurate category goodness judgments when listening to speech from other children versus their own speech. Category goodness judgments also did not correlate with /r/ production abilities after a course of ultrasound biofeedback therapy. Taken together, these results suggest that category goodness judgments (especially judgments of sounds like /r/) may be difficult for children regardless of disorder status, where they do not achieve adultlike performance even into the second decade of life. In addition, due to the significant interaction between effect of talker identity and judgments based on acoustic characteristics, it appears that training children with RSE to self-monitor without explicit attention to articulatory monitoring may be ultimately inefficient.
Suzanne Boyce, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Noah H. Silbert, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Tara McAllister Byun, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Carolyn Sotto, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
111 p.
Speech Therapy
Acoustics; Articulation; Speech perception; Residual sound errors; Rhotics; Ultrasound

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hamilton, S. (2016). Using the Third Formant to Investigate Perceptual Abilities in Children with Residual Sound Errors (RSE) [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1479819962932214

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hamilton, Sarah. Using the Third Formant to Investigate Perceptual Abilities in Children with Residual Sound Errors (RSE). 2016. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1479819962932214.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hamilton, Sarah. "Using the Third Formant to Investigate Perceptual Abilities in Children with Residual Sound Errors (RSE)." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1479819962932214

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1479819962932214
308
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This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.