Results provide further evidence (a) of the viability of using a communication partner instructional program for teaching partners how to facilitate the communication skills of children who use AAC and (b) that the interaction strategy can be an effective tool for increasing expressive multisymbol message rates for children who use AAC.
In this study, identification of vowels produced by Michigan speakers by listeners of two dialects, Michigan (Inland North) and New Mexico (Western) was examined. New Mexico listeners identified sets of ten vowels (i, ɪ, e, ε, æ, ɑ, o, ʌ, U, u) from 30 speakers in the Hillenbrand et al. (1995) database. Their results were compared to the results from the Michigan listeners in the original study. Preliminary results from ten New Mexico listeners show that overall identification rates across the 30 speakers did not differ significantly between dialects. However, NM and MI listeners differed on identification rates for individual speakers and particular vowels. They agreed on the worst speaker but differed by as much as 11 percentage points for others. NM listeners performed worse on /ε/ and /ɑ/ but slightly better on /ʌ/ than MI listeners. To determine the nature of cross-dialect differences in perception, acoustic data such as vowel space area, formant dynamics, and duration characteristics will be examined, and the relation of acoustic data to identification scores will be presented.
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