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PubMed2006

A randomized comparison of the effect of two prelinguistic communication interventions on the acquisition of spoken communication in preschoolers with ASD.

PURPOSE: This randomized group experiment compared the efficacy of 2 communication interventions (Responsive Education and Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching [RPMT] and the Picture Exchange Communication System [PECS]) on spoken communication in 36 preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). METHOD: Each treatment was delivered to children for a maximum total of 24 hr over a 6-month period. Spoken communication was assessed in a rigorous test of generalization at pretreatment, posttreatment, and 6-month follow-up periods. RESULTS: PECS was more successful than RPMT in increasing the number of nonimitative spoken communication acts and the number of different nonimitative words used at the posttreatment period. Considering growth over all 3 measurement periods, an exploratory analysis showed that growth rate of the number of different nonimitative words was faster in the PECS group than in the RPMT group for children who began treatment with relatively high object exploration. In contrast, analogous slopes were steeper in the RPMT group than in the PECS group for children who began treatment with relatively low object exploration.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1988

Developmental phonology: 18-29 months.

Utterances of 60 normally developing children, who were within 6 months of their second birthdays, were analyzed for occurrences of phonological processes. The subjects were divided equally into three chronological age groups: (a) 1:6-1:9, (b) 1:10-2:1, and (c) 2:2-2:5. The most prevalent phonological processes evidenced by all three groups were cluster reduction and deviations involving liquids (e.g., gliding). Phonological process percentage-of-occurrence means were considerably lower for the middle group than for the youngest group, with the most dramatic differences occurring for syllable reduction and postvocalic singleton omission. Potential clinical applications of the data for ascertaining what constitutes disordered phonological development in preschool children are discussed, as well as implications for specifying remediation priorities.

Child Language↗
PubMed1979

Children's judgments of utterance appropriateness.

Judgments of utterance appropriateness were examined in 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year olds to examine the bases for these judgments in a variety of social contexts. The results indicated that the 4- and 5-year olds based their judgments in part on factors such as the available nonlinguistic evidence supporting the utterance and the types of evaluative terms used in the utterance. The judgments of the 6-year olds more closely resembled those of a group of adults, but their judgments were not yet free of some of the factors operative for the younger children. The findings are discussed in terms of the illocutionary and conversational characteristics of the stimulus utterances.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

The emergence of vowels in an infant.

Recordings of vocal production of an infant (age 16-64 weeks) were subjected to perceptual and acoustic analysis. Sounds resembling the vowel sounds of English were identified, and formant frequency measurements were made from spectrograms. Significant longitudinal trends for individual vowel sounds were not apparent during this period, although formant relationships for some vowels after 38 weeks were consistent with the notion of restructuring of the infant's vocal tract. However, analysis of F1/F2 plots over time revealed the emergence of a well-developed vowel triangle, resembling that of older children and adults. The acute axis of this triangle seems to develop before the grave axis. Implications for anatomical, neuromuscular, and linguistic development are discussed.

Child Language↗
PubMed1981

Word duration in early child speech.

Word duration in early child speech was examined through a longitudinal study of a set of frequently occurring words for three subjects. These samples were controlled for phonetic form. Durations were measured from wide- and narrow-band spectrograms. Results show that for some words, but not the majority, duration decreased over time; this effect does not appear to be due to increased familiarity with individual lexical items. Generally, word duration variations within the tested time ranges can be attributed to the effect of position-in-utterance. From the time a child first combines two words into a single phrase, a nonfinal word will be produced with a shorter duration than it would have in isolated or final position in an utterance.

Child Language↗
PubMed1992

Articulation rate in 3- and 5-year-old children.

The major purposes of this study were to provide normative data on articulation rate in preschool children and to examine the influence on articulation rate of age, gender, context, and utterance length. The subjects were twenty 3-year-old children and twenty 5-year-old children, equally balanced for gender. Durational measures of utterances were analyzed in syllables and phones per second in both spontaneous and imitated speech contexts. The articulation rate of the 5-year-old subjects was significantly faster than that of the 3-year-olds. Spontaneous speech was significantly faster and more variable than imitated speech. Some gender differences were found. Measures in syllables per second and phones per second, although not always yielding identical results, were found to be highly correlated.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1993

Effects of word predictability, child development, and aging on time-gated speech recognition performance.

This study examined the interaction of acoustic-phonetic information with higher-level linguistic contextual information during the real-time speech perception process in child, young adult, and older adult listeners. Five age groups were studied: (a) young children ranging in age from 5 to 7 years, (b) older children aged 8 to 10 years, (c) young adults aged 18 to 23 years, (d) older adults aged 60 to 69 years, and (e) older adults aged 70 to 83 years. All subjects were presented with time-gated monosyllabic target words presented in sentence contexts containing contrasting levels of word predictability. Findings indicated that target word predictability influenced the timing and nature of the real-time recognition process including the listeners' use of initial word sounds. Predictability-high (PH) words were recognized earlier and with greater confidence than predictability-low (PL) words. PH recognition performance was more influenced by child development and aging than PL recognition performance. Older adult listeners required more PH-gated word stimuli to produce accurate responses than younger adults. Older children showed more effective use of PH contexts than younger children.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1995

Qualitative developments in the content and form of children's definitions.

This research examined qualitative developments in school-age children's (N = 96) expressible knowledge of a sample of 434 words selected to represent the contents of a large unabridged dictionary. Definitions were classified according to the quality of both semantic content and syntactic form. Analyses revealed developmental increases in the proportions of known words and in the relative proportions of definitions credited for high-quality content and/or form. Children generally were more successful in expressing precise semantic content than in using conventional syntactic form. The work characteristics of part of speech and morphological composition also affected definitional quality, with coordination of high-quality content and form achieved earlier for root and compound nouns than for inflected and derived nouns for verbs and adjectives of all morphological types. Both lexical organization and differential experience may support the earlier use of conventional definitional form for root and compound nouns than for other word types. The results provide a more complete picture of the development of definitional skills.

Child↗
PubMed1995

Metrical patterns of words and production accuracy.

This investigation examined the influence of metrical patterns of words (syllable stress and serial position) on the production accuracy of 20 children (22 to 28 months). The data were productions of six pairs of individualized two-syllable experimental words that referred to unfamiliar objects. Members of each pair differed only in the placement of stress (e.g., ['soti] vs. [so'ti]). Unstressed syllables were much more likely to be omitted, particularly at the beginning of words. Very few stressed syllables and unstressed second position syllables were omitted. One fourth of the word initial unstressed syllables were omitted. Consonant omissions, though few in number, tended to occur in initial position. Assimilation errors were not influenced by stress or serial position. When segmental errors due to syllable omissions were excluded, other consonant errors were not affected by stress or serial position. These findings indicate that young children's productions of syllables are influenced by the metrical patterns of words. However, the trochaic pattern of English is a statistical tendency, not an absolute constraint on two-syllable words. Metrical pattern also does not affect the consonant accuracy in syllables produced.

Child Language↗
PubMed1995

The articulatory basis of babbling.

This article evaluates the "Frames, then Content" hypothesis for speech acquisition, which states that much of the patterning of babbling is a direct result of production of syllabic "Frames" by means of rhythmic mandibular oscillation, with relatively little of the intrasyllabic and intersyllabic "Content" of the syllable-like cycles under mandible-independent control. Analysis was based on a phonetically transcribed corpus of 6,659 utterances of 6 normally developing infants obtained from one-hour weekly audio-recordings over a 4-6 month period. Intrasyllabic predictions were that front vowels would preferentially co-occur with front (alveolar) consonants, back vowels with back (velar) consonants, and central vowels with labial consonants, with the latter effect presumably resulting from mandibular oscillation alone. Intersyllabic predictions were for more variegation in tongue height for vowels than in front-back tongue movement, and for consonant manner changes to predominate over place changes (related primarily to mandibular oscillation). All 30 individual predictions from both hypotheses were confirmed, leading to a conception of the articulatory basis of babbling as "Frame Dominance."

Child Language↗
PubMed1996

How children learn to organize their speech gestures: further evidence from fricative-vowel syllables.

Previous studies with fricative-vowel (FV) syllables have shown that the difference in overall spectrum between fricatives is less in children's speech than in that of adults, but that fricative noises show greater differences in the region of the second formant (F2) as a function of the upcoming vowel than those of adults at corresponding points in the fricative. These results have been interpreted as evidence that children produce fricatives that are not spatially differentiated as those of adults and that children initiate vowel gestures earlier during syllable production than adults do (Nittrouer, Studdert-Kennedy, & McGowan, 1989). The goals of the present study were (a) to replicate the previous age-related difference for F2 with FV syllables; (b) to test the alternative interpretation that age-related differences in fricative f2 reflect age-related differences in vocal-tract geometry; (c) to determine whether age-related differences in F2 (and so, by inference, in articulatory organization) might extend beyond the syllable boundaries, perhaps into the schwa of a preceding unstressed syllable; and (d) determine if gestures other than fricative gestures show less spatial differentiation in children's than in adults' speech. To these ends, F2 frequencies were measured in schwa-fricative-vowel utterances (consisting of the fricatives /s/ and [symbol:see text] and of the vowels /i/ and /a/) from 40 speakers (10 each of the ages of 3, 5, 7 years, and adults) at three locations (for the entire schwa, for 10 ms of fricative noise centered at 30 ms before voicing onset, and 10 pitch periods from vocalic center). Results of several analyses supported four conclusions: (a) the earlier finding was replicated; (b) age-related differences in vocal-tract geometry could not explain the age-related difference in vowel effects on fricative noise; (c) children master intersyllabic gestural organization prior to intrasyllabic gestural organization; and (d) unlike fricative gestures, children's vowel gestures are more spatially distinct than those of adults.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Performances of young African American children on two comprehension tasks.

This investigation examines the performances of 63 urban 4- to 7-year-old African American children from middle-income homes on two tasks designed to assess the development of comprehension skills. Performances on a task designed to elicit responses to wh-questions, and another to distinctions between active and passive sentence constructions, revealed grade effects and a positive relationship to age. The findings are discussed in terms of the appropriateness of using tasks of these types with young African American boys and girls who are dialect users.

Black or African American↗
PubMed1998

A prominence account of syllable reduction in early speech development: the child's prosodic phonology of tiger and giraffe.

When young children produce multiword utterances and words that are polysyllabic in adult speech, they are most likely to omit unstressed syllables. Because unstressed syllables are omitted more often in weak-strong (iambic) than in strong-weak (trochaic) environments, a trochaic metrical theory has been proposed to account for the asymmetrical omission pattern. This paper presents an alternative explanation based on the notion of relative prosodic prominence. I propose that syllable prominence is a product of two orthogonal suprasegmental systems: one that marks stress/accent peaks and one that marks phrase boundaries. A two-component scale of prominence values reflecting the contributions of both systems was used to analyze single- and multi-word speech samples of 11 children 19 to 26 months of age. The results show that the prominence scale parsimoniously accounts not only for the bias toward syllable omissions in nontrochaic environments but also explains other types of syllable reduction not captured by metrical theories. Implications of the dual-system prosodic model are discussed in terms of possible contributions to a perceptually based theory of early polysyllabic and multiword patterns in child speech.

Child Language↗
PubMed1999

Speech and phonological characteristics of individual children with a history of tracheostomy.

The present investigation studied the speech production and phonological skills of 6 children between the ages of 2;8 and 6;8 (years;months) who had undergone tracheostomy before age 8 months. Each child's speech was analyzed for size and composition of phonetic inventory, use of phonological processes, production of vowels, and production of the voicing contrast for stops. Analyses were completed once consistent air support for vocalization was established for each child and 3 months after that date. This study highlights the slow development of sound acquisition, vowel production, and the distinction between voiced and voiceless stops for some, but not all, children with a history of tracheostomy. Each child exhibited his or her own pattern of speech production difficulties on four tasks. Excessive use of inappropriate phonological processes relative to age was the most prevalent speech production problem. Five of 6 subjects exhibited clinically significant use of Stridency Deletion, Liquid Deviation, and/or Cluster Reduction. Adjustments were noted in the speech of all subjects during a 3-month period.

Child↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Intervocalic consonants in the acquisition of German: onsets, codas or something else?

This study examines the behaviour of five phonemes /f, [symbol: see text], ts, k, l/ in word-initial, word-final, and intervocalic positions in the productions of five German-speaking children (age 1;3 to 3;3 years) in order to determine the patterning of those intervocalic consonants--do they behave more like onsets or codas? The study also contrasts the behaviour of intervocalic consonants after short versus long vowels in view of the stance taken in the theoretical literature that intervocalic consonants after short vowels are ambisyllabic but not after long vowels. Findings show that out of 25 conditions (5 phonemes x 5 children), nine yield support for the patterning of intervocalic consonants as codas, two as onsets, and five as unique (neither coda nor onset). Three conditions yield support for the dual patterning of intervocalic consonants. In all other conditions, there was insufficient information to support their patterning with codas or with onsets. Results provide minimal support for different patterns of intervocalic consonants after short and long vowels; however, the lengthening and insertion of consonants after short vowels suggest that children are aware of the different phonological roles of intervocalic consonants after short and long vowels.

Child Language↗
PubMed1994

Young children's understanding of "remember" and "forget".

3 studies examined young children's understanding that if one "remembers" or "forgot," one must have known at a prior time. In Study 1, 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood the prior knowledge component of "forgot"; both groups understood that a character with prior knowledge was "gonna remember." Study 2 controlled for the possibility that good performance on "remember" might be due to a simple association of remembering with knowledge. A significant number of 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that when 2 characters currently knew, the one with prior knowledge remembered, and that when neither character currently knew, the one with prior knowledge forgot. Study 3 made prior knowledge more salient by making the remembered or forgotten item visible to the subjects throughout. 4-year-olds performed near ceiling on both verbs, whereas 3-year-olds' performance did not differ from chance. The results are discussed in relation to children's developing understanding of the mind.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1988

Acoustic observations in young children's non-cry vocalizations.

A corpus of 1200 non-cry vocalization samples produced by 14 normal children between the ages of 11-25 months was examined retrospectively. Six percent of the samples yielded instances of either harmonic doubling (HD), fundamental frequency (F0) shift, or biphonation (Bp). These spectrographic features relate to short duration changes in F0, reflecting alterations in vocal fold state characteristics. The HD and Bp segments were perceptually judged to be harsh, while F0 shift closely reflected pitch breaks. The frequency of occurrence of the three acoustic features suggests that they are normally occurring phonatory events in normal children's vocal patterns.

Child Language↗