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Findings suggest that a dysphonic speaker's voice may force the child to allocate capacity to the processing of the voice signal at the expense of comprehension. The findings have implications for clinical and research settings where standardized language tests are used.

The slower the better: Does the speaker' speech rate influence children' performance on a language comprehension test?, International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2013. 16(2), pp.181-190. http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2013 The aim of this study was to examine the effects of speech rate on children's performance on a widely used language comprehension test, the Test for Reception of Grammar, version 2 (TROG-2), and to explore how test performance interacts with task difficulty and with the child's working memory capacity. Participants were 102 typically developing Swedishspeaking children randomly assigned to one of the three conditions; the TROG-2 sentences spoken by a speech-language pathologist with slow, normal or fast speech rate. Resultsshowed that the fast speech rate had a negative effect on the TROG-2 scores and that slow rate was more beneficial in general. However, for more difficult tasks the beneficial effect of slow speech was only pronounced for children with better scores on a working memory task.Our interpretation is that slow speech is particularly helpful when children do not yet fully master a task but are just about to grasp it. Our results emphasise the necessity of careful considerations of the role dynamic aspects of examiner's speech might play in test administration and favour digitalised procedures in standardised language comprehension assessment.

Abstract. Speaker age is a speaker characteristic which is always present in speech. Previous studies have found numerous acoustic features which correlate with speaker age. However, few attempts have been made to establish their relative importance. This study automatically extracted 161 acoustic features from six words produced by 527 speakers of both genders, and used normalised means to directly compare the features. Segment duration and sound pressure level (SPL) range were identified as the most important acoustic correlates of speaker age.