Alveolar Backing in 3-Year-Old Children With and Without Repaired Cleft Palate: Preliminary Findings Related to Cleft Type and History of Otitis Media

Objective The purpose of this preliminary study was to determine if cleft type and/or history of otitis media with effusion (OM) contribute to backing of /t/ and/or /s/ in young children with and without repaired cleft palate (CP). Method Participants were 39 children ( M age = 36 months, range: 34–41). Ten children had repaired unilateral cleft lip and palate (CLP), nine had repaired CP only, 12 had no clefts but histories of OM, and eight were typically developing (TD) without clefts or OM history. All children were video- and audio-recorded during administration of the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation–Third Edition (GFTA-3). Standard scores of articulation, frequency of alveolar backing, and first spectral moments of the /t/−/k/ and /s/−/ʃ/ phonetic contrasts were obtained. Results Children with CLP had lower GFTA-3 scores than both TD ( p = .012) and OM ( p = .001) groups. Fisher's exact test showed that significantly more children with CLP backed alveolar targets, mostly /s/, than children with CP ( p = .020). Children with CLP also had (a) reduced /t/−/k/ spectral difference compared to TD children ( p = .016) and (b) reduced /s/−/ʃ/ spectral difference compared to both children with CP ( p = .010) and children with OM ( p = .018). Children with OM had reduced /t/−/k/ spectral difference compared to TD children ( p = .009). Conclusions Cleft type contributes to alveolar backing and reduced spectral contrast of /s/−/ʃ/ in 3-year-old children with repaired CP. History of OM affects spectral contrast of /t/−/k/ in noncleft children. Etiology and clinical implications of alveolar backing are discussed.

Individual Differences in Phonetic Plasticity Across Native and Nonnative Contexts

Purpose Individuals vary in their ability to learn the sound categories of nonnative languages (nonnative phonetic learning) and to adapt to systematic differences, such as accent or talker differences, in the sounds of their native language (native phonetic learning). Difficulties with both native and nonnative learning are well attested in people with speech and language disorders relative to healthy controls, but substantial variability in these skills is also present in the typical population. This study examines whether this individual variability can be organized around a common ability that we label “phonetic plasticity.” Method A group of healthy young adult participants ( N = 80), who attested they had no history of speech, language, neurological, or hearing deficits, completed two tasks of nonnative phonetic category learning, two tasks of learning to cope with variation in their native language, and seven tasks of other cognitive functions, distributed across two sessions. Performance on these 11 tasks was compared, and exploratory factor analysis was used to assess the extent to which performance on each task was related to the others. Results Performance on both tasks of native learning and an explicit task of nonnative learning patterned together, suggesting that native and nonnative phonetic learning tasks rely on a shared underlying capacity, which is termed “phonetic plasticity.” Phonetic plasticity was also associated with vocabulary, comprehension of words in background noise, and, more weakly, working memory. Conclusions Nonnative sound learning and native language speech perception may rely on shared phonetic plasticity. The results suggest that good learners of native language phonetic variation are also good learners of nonnative phonetic contrasts. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16606778

The Effects of a Digital Articulatory Game on the Ability to Perceive Speech-Sound Contrasts in Another Language

Digital and mobile devices enable easy access to applications for the learning of foreign languages. However, experimental studies on the effectiveness of these applications are scarce. Moreover, it is not understood whether the effects of speech and language training generalize to features that are not trained. To this end, we conducted a four-week intervention that focused on articulatory training and learning of English words in 6–7-year-old Finnish-speaking children who used a digital language-learning game app Pop2talk. An essential part of the app is automatic speech recognition that enables assessing children’s utterances and giving instant feedback to the players. The generalization of the effects of such training in English were explored by using discrimination tasks before and after training (or the same period of time in a control group). The stimuli of the discrimination tasks represented phonetic contrasts from two non-trained languages, including Russian sibilant consonants and Mandarin tones. We found some improvement with the Russian sibilant contrast in the gamers but it was not statistically significant. No improvement was observed for the tone contrast for the gaming group. A control group with no training showed no improvement in either contrast. The pattern of results suggests that the game may have improved the perception of non-trained speech sounds in some but not all individuals, yet the effects of motivation and attention span on their performance could not be excluded with the current methods. Children’s perceptual skills were linked to their word learning in the control group but not in the gaming group where recurrent exposure enabled learning also for children with poorer perceptual skills. Together, the results demonstrate beneficial effects of learning via a digital application, yet raise a need for further research of individual differences in learning.

Neural indicators of articulator-specific sensorimotor influences on infant speech perception

While there is increasing acceptance that even young infants detect correspondences between heard and seen speech, the common view is that oral-motor movements related to speech production cannot influence speech perception until infants begin to babble or speak. We investigated the extent of multimodal speech influences on auditory speech perception in prebabbling infants who have limited speech-like oral-motor repertoires. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how sensorimotor influences to the infant’s own articulatory movements impact auditory speech perception in 3-mo-old infants. In experiment 1, there were ERP discriminative responses to phonetic category changes across two phonetic contrasts (bilabial–dental /ba/-/ɗa/; dental–retroflex /ɗa/-/ɖa/) in a mismatch paradigm, indicating that infants auditorily discriminated both contrasts. In experiment 2, inhibiting infants’ own tongue-tip movements had a disruptive influence on the early ERP discriminative response to the /ɗa/-/ɖa/ contrast only. The same articulatory inhibition had contrasting effects on the perception of the /ba/-/ɗa/ contrast, which requires different articulators (the lips vs. the tongue) during production, and the /ɗa/-/ɖa/ contrast, whereby both phones require tongue-tip movement as a place of articulation. This articulatory distinction between the two contrasts plausibly accounts for the distinct influence of tongue-tip suppression on the neural responses to phonetic category change perception in definitively prebabbling, 3-mo-old, infants. The results showing a specificity in the relation between oral-motor inhibition and phonetic speech discrimination suggest a surprisingly early mapping between auditory and motor speech representation already in prebabbling infants.

The gender factor in the perception of English segments by non-native speakers

The aim of the paper is to present the findings of an empirical study which contributes to the ongoing research into gender effects on second language acquisition by exploring a biological influence on L2 pronunciation learning. One of the most frequent arguments used to vindicate single-sex education is that there are substantial sensory and perceptual differences between males and females which rationalize gender-specific teaching methods and gender-segregation at schools. The present study provides some preliminary insights into the perception of selected phonetic contrasts by Polish secondary school learners with the aim of investigating gender-based similarities and differences in the accuracy of sound recognition by males and females. The findings suggest that a commonly cited female advantage in acquiring L2 pronunciation cannot be attributed to their superior phonetic perception, as male participants performed equally well and identified the same number of English segments correctly.

Early phonetic learning without phonetic categories: Insights from large-scale simulations on realistic input

Before they even speak, infants become attuned to the sounds of the language(s) they hear, processing native phonetic contrasts more easily than nonnative ones. For example, between 6 to 8 mo and 10 to 12 mo, infants learning American English get better at distinguishing English and [l], as in “rock” vs. “lock,” relative to infants learning Japanese. Influential accounts of this early phonetic learning phenomenon initially proposed that infants group sounds into native vowel- and consonant-like phonetic categories—like and [l] in English—through a statistical clustering mechanism dubbed “distributional learning.” The feasibility of this mechanism for learning phonetic categories has been challenged, however. Here, we demonstrate that a distributional learning algorithm operating on naturalistic speech can predict early phonetic learning, as observed in Japanese and American English infants, suggesting that infants might learn through distributional learning after all. We further show, however, that, contrary to the original distributional learning proposal, our model learns units too brief and too fine-grained acoustically to correspond to phonetic categories. This challenges the influential idea that what infants learn are phonetic categories. More broadly, our work introduces a mechanism-driven approach to the study of early phonetic learning, together with a quantitative modeling framework that can handle realistic input. This allows accounts of early phonetic learning to be linked to concrete, systematic predictions regarding infants’ attunement.

CAN AUDIO-VISUAL TRAINING EQUALLY AFFECT PHONEMIC AND PHONETIC CONTRASTS? AN EXAMPLE OF L2 FRICATIVE PRODUCTION

The paper explores the effect of audio-visual perceptual training on Serbian EFL learners’ production of novel phonemic and phonetic contrasts in L2, specifically focused on fricatives. Hence, the paper aims at discovering whether audio-visual training has equal effects at phonemic and phonetic levels, and also, whether the effect is the same at two different age/proficiency levels, 6th grade primary and 4th grade secondary school. In order to explore the phonemic level we concentrated on interdental fricatives, and for the phonetic level differences sibilant contrasts were included, following the predictions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1994) and Speech Learning Model (Flege 1995). The testing for relevant acoustic information was per- formed prior to and immediately following the experimental period, when all the participants were recorded pronouncing a prepared sentence list containing target sounds. It consisted of measuring spectral moments, frication duration and comparison of spectrograms. The results of the audio-visual phonetic training proved especially beneficial for phonemic contrasts, i.e. interdental fricatives for both levels of age/proficiency, while sibilant contrasts showed insignificant progress. The age/proficiency level did not appear to be a significant predictor of the effect of audio-visual training. Along with the empirical results, the paper likewise presents pedagogical implications important for pronunciation teaching and highlights the significance of phonetic training in the Serbian EFL context in particular.

Development of Phonetic Contrasts in Cantonese Tone Acquisition

Purpose Previous studies showed both early and late acquisition of Cantonese tones based on transcription data using different criteria, but very little acoustic data were reported. Our study examined Cantonese tone acquisition using both transcription and acoustic data, illustrating the early and protracted aspects of Cantonese tone acquisition. Method One hundred fifty-nine Cantonese-speaking children aged between 2;1 and 6;0 (years;months) and 10 reference speakers participated in a tone production experiment based on picture naming. Natural production materials with 30 monosyllabic words were transcribed by two native judges. Acoustic measurements included overall tonal dispersion and specific contrasts between similar tone pairs: ratios of average fundamental frequency height for the level tones (T1, T3, T6), magnitude of rise and inflection point for the rising tones (T2, T5), magnitude of fall, H1*–H2*, and harmonic-to-noise ratio for the low tones (T4, T6). Auditory assessment of creakiness for T4 was also included. Results Children in the eldest group (aged 5;7–6;0) were still not completely adultlike in production accuracy, although two thirds of them had production accuracy over 90%. Children in all age groups had production accuracy significantly higher than chance level, and they could produce the major acoustic contrasts between specific tone pairs similarly as reference speakers. Fine phonetic detail of the inflection point and creakiness was more challenging for children. Conclusion Our findings illustrated the multifaceted aspects (both early and late) of Cantonese tone acquisition and called for a wider perspective on how to define successful phonological acquisition. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.11594853