An ultrasound study of lingual coarticulation in /sV/ syllables produced by adults and typically developing children

Abstract

Abstract

An Ultrasound Study of the Development of Lingual Coarticulation during Childhood

“…Both these theories are compatible with the premise that children's productions are limited by their general motor abilities, which undergo continuous development during childhood. Such protracted maturation of speech motor abilities, in particular, has been demonstrated in a number of acoustic and articulatory studies (e.g., Smith and Goffman, 1998;Walsh and Smith, 2002;Koenig et al, 2008;Zharkova et al, 2011Zharkova et al, , 2012Romeo et al, 2013;Zharkova et al, 2014). For the children in their first 2 years of life, the dependence of speech production on developing motor skills has been formulated in terms of language-specific "opportunities and challenges" (Vihman, 2010, p. 279), which enhance or inhibit, respectively, the likelihood of children's phonetic realisations corresponding to adult targets (see also Vihman, 2014).…”

“…And yet, the development of lingual coarticulation has been shown to be protracted, with certain non-adult-like patterns observed in children up to 12 years old (e.g., Zharkova et al, 2014). A growing number of studies have also shown that coarticulation development is segment-specific (Katz and Bharadwaj 2001;Zharkova et al, 2012Zharkova et al, , 2014Reidy, 2015). There is, however, very little information on the developmental course of segment-specific lingual coarticulatory patterns throughout childhood (see, e.g., Rubertus et al, 2015;Zharkova, 2017).…”

The ‘Whistled' Fricative in Xitsonga: Its Articulation and Acoustics

“…The curves are significantly different where the confidence intervals do not overlap. As this use of confidence intervals has become the standard for the SS ANOVA analysis in the field [e.g., Davidson, 2006;Simonet et al, 2008;Chen and Lin, 2011;Mielke et al, 2011;De Decker and Nycz, 2012;Zharkova et al, 2012;Kochetov et al, 2013;Lee-Kim et al, 2013], we used the confidence intervals to determine significant differences between curves. SS ANOVA was implemented using the gss package in R [Gu, 2012].…”

Análise ultrassonográfica quantitativa do movimento da língua em 14 fonemas do Português Brasileiro

“…Although many studies with the use of tongue ultrasound are found in the literature, the use of this instrument as a methodology for the analysis of the production of speech sounds is mostly performed internationally since the 1960s (7)(8)(9) . These studies contemplate both a qualitative and a quantitative description of patterns of speech production in adults (10,11) , in typical children (12,13) , and in different clinical groups, such as: hearing impaired individuals (14,15) , children with apraxia of speech (16,17) , glossectomized individuals (18,19) and individuals with tongue paresis (20) .…”

“…These studies contemplate both a qualitative and a quantitative description of patterns of speech production in adults (10,11) , in typical children (12,13) , and in different clinical groups, such as: hearing impaired individuals (14,15) , children with apraxia of speech (16,17) , glossectomized individuals (18,19) and individuals with tongue paresis (20) . Among the cited studies that aimed to analyze the typical production in adult and/or child speech (10)(11)(12)(13) , there is a limited number of individuals (varying from 6 to 10) using both qualitative and quantitative parameters to describe the tongue movement held in the production of different speech sounds (/p/; /t/; /k/; /f/; /s/; /∫/; /l/ e /r/). On the other hand, the studies that aimed to analyze speech production in different clinical groups mostly used ultrasound for therapeutic purposes, as a feedback instrument.…”