A Nonword Repetition Task for Speakers With Misarticulations: The Syllable Repetition Task (SRT)

Abstract

Syllable Repetition Task (SRT)Purpose. Conceptual and methodological confounds occur when non(sense) repetition tasks are administered to speakers who do not have the target speech sounds in their phonetic inventories or who habitually misarticulate targeted speech sounds. We describe a nonword repetition task, the Syllable Repetiton Task (SRT) that eliminates this confound and report findings from three validity studies.Method. Ninety-five preschool children with Speech Delay and 63 with Typical Speech, completed an assessment battery that included the Nonword Repetition Task (NRT: Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998) and the SRT. SRT stimuli include only four of the earliest occurring consonants and one early occurring vowel.Results. Study 1 findings indicated that the SRT eliminated the speech confound in nonword testing with speakers who misarticulate. Study 2 findings indicated that the accuracy of the SRT to identify expressive language impairment was comparable to findings for the NRT. Study 3 findings illustrated the SRT's potential to interrogate speech processing constraints underlying poor nonword repetition accuracy. Results supported both memorial and auditory-perceptual encoding constraints underlying nonword repetition errors in children with speech-language impairment.3 Conclusion. The SRT appears to be a psychometrically stable and substantively informative nonword repetition task for emerging genetic and other research with speakers who misarticulate. 4 Nonword Repetition Tasks in Genetic Studies of Verbal Trait DisordersFindings from the genetics literature continue to support Adams and Gathercole's (2000) conclusion that poor non(sense)word repetition is a key feature of heritable specific language impairment (SLI). Bishop and colleagues (Bishop, 2002a(Bishop, , 2002bBishop, Adams, & Norbury, 2004;Bishop, Bishop, Bright, Delaney, & Tallal, 1999;Bishop, North, & Donlan, 1996), and Kovas et al. (2005) have reported high heritability for nonword repetition in twin samples and cohorts of children with concurrent or histories of speech-language disorders. Shriberg et al. (2005) reported that in comparison to control participants with speech sound disorders, participants with speech sound disorders who were at familial risk for a genetically transmitted subtype of speech disorder had significantly lower nonword repetition task performance.Molecular genetic studies using nonword repetition tasks have reported linkage to regions of interest on chromosomes 16 and 19 for children with language impairment (Monaco and the SLI Consortium [SLIC], 2007;SLI Consortium, 2002. The first genetic entries for speech sound disorder in the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man database were based, in part, on linkage of nonword repetition task performance to regions of interest on chromosome 3 (Stein et al., 2004) and chromosome 6 (Smith, Pennington, Boada, & see Caylak, 2007, andLewis et al., 2006 for literature reviews).One property that appears to underlie the productivity of nonword repetition tasks in genetic and other...

A Diagnostic Marker to Discriminate Childhood Apraxia of Speech From Speech Delay: III. Theoretical Coherence of the Pause Marker with Speech Processing Deficits in Childhood Apraxia of Speech

“…Data for the following analyses were obtained from conversational speech samples and from the syllable repetition task (SRT; Shriberg et al, 2009). Procedures to obtain, reduce, and analyze the speech, prosody, and voice data from the conversational speech samples were described or referenced in PM I, including reliability estimates for all perceptual and acoustic data reduction tasks.…”

“…Encoding is the percentage of within-class substitution errors on the SRT, which is interpreted as successful encoding of at least the feature of the target compared to out-of-feature class substitution errors. Transcoding is the percentage of repetitions of SRT items that include additions, typically of homorganic or heterorganic nasals (Shriberg et al, 2009). Because such additions in participants with CAS were observed on nonsense words as short as two syllables (e.g., "banda" for "bada"), they were interpreted as more likely due to a representational deficit in encoding and/or memory/ retrieval, than to a transcoding deficit in motor planning or motor programming.…”

“…As described in the reference citation for the SRT, the consensus in the speech sound disorder (SSD) literature is that nonword imitation tasks are sensitive to the language component of speech-language delay, but are only low to moderately associated with SD (Shriberg et al, 2009). Consistent with the wide age range of participants in this group shown in Table 2 (3-9 years), only some had language impairment at the time they were administered the SRT, with individual differences likely in the type and severity of language impairment in participants who had comorbid speechlanguage impairment.…”

Differential Diagnosis of Pediatric Speech Sound Disorder

“…It is not surprising, then, that assumptions about what a particular task may assess will change as knowledge grows. As an example, it is generally acknowledged that the use of non-word repetition to assess PWM is problematic for children who make errors pronouncing real words, which led to an assessment specifically for children with SSD [32]. Knowledge about the effect of SSD on non-word repetition tasks has been extended by two recent studies [12•, 23] that challenge PWM as an adequate explanation for SSD.…”

A Diagnostic Marker to Discriminate Childhood Apraxia of Speech From Speech Delay: II. Validity Studies of the Pause Marker

“…The criterion-referenced cutoff for Stress is a Prosody-Voice Screening Profile (Shriberg, Kwiatkowski, & Rasmussen, 1990) Stress score below 80%. Criterionreferenced Transcoding information is obtained from the Syllable Repetition Task (Shriberg et al, 2009;Shriberg & Lohmeier, 2008). A Phonology Project technical report (Tilkens et al, 2017) includes additional PM findings and audio exemplars of inappropriate between-words pauses, including examples of the primary type of inappropriate between-words pauses, termed an abrupt between-words pause (see PM III; Shriberg et al, 2017b).…”