A Right-Ear Effect for Auditory Feedback Control of Children’s Newly Acquired Phonemes

Abstract

To determine the relative importance of binaural, right-ear, and left-ear auditory feedback control on the correct production of newly acquired articulatory patterns in children, 40 children exhibiting misarticulations were tested under four experimental conditions. The children were individually administered a shortened version of the Deep Test of Articulation (McDonald, 1964) under (1) a no-masking condition, followed in a counterbalanced order by readministration of the Deep Test under conditions of (2) binaural masking, (3) monaural right-ear masking, and (4) monaural left-ear masking. Correct articulatory production by the children was significantly reduced under binaural and monaural right-ear masking. There was, however, no significant reduction in the children’s correct production under the condition of monaural left-ear masking. The results extend previous findings of right-ear superiority for children’s auditory processing of externally produced stimuli to the closed-loop auditory feedback control of children’s own speech production.

Use of Auditory Masking to Estimate Automatization of Correct Articulation in Children

“…The competing speech portion of the master tape was the same as that used in the investigations by Campbell et al (1976), Manning et al (1976Manning et al ( , 1977a and Manning and Louko (1977). This form of masking consisted of 4 adults (2 males and 2 females) simultaneously reading four different phonetically balanced passages.…”

“…Recently, several investigations have been conducted which deal with a procedure for estimating when a child has automatized ( Wright et al, 1969) a newly learned correct pattern of articulation (Manning et al, , 1977aManning and Louko, 1977;Campbell et al, 1976). The suggested procedure involves testing a child on an articulation test under approximately 6 5-85 dB sound pressure level of auditory masking.…”