Articulatory Variability in Cluttering

Abstract

In order to investigate the articulatory processes of the hasty and mumbled speech in cluttering, the kinematic variability was analysed by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulography. In contrast to persons with stuttering, those with cluttering improve their intelligibility by concentrating on their speech task. Variability has always been an important criterion in comparable studies of stuttering and is discussed in terms of the stability of the speech motor system. The aim of the current study was to analyse the spatial and temporal variability in the speech of three persons with cluttering (PWC) and three control speakers. All participants were native speakers of German. The speech material consisted of repetitive CV syllables and loan words such as ‘emotionalisieren’, because PWC have the severest problems with long words with a complex syllable structure. The results showed a significantly higher coefficient of variation for PWC in loan word production, both in the temporal and in the spatial domain, whereas the means of displacements and durations did not differ between groups. These findings were discussed in terms of the effects of the linguistic complexity, since for the syllable repetition task, no significant differences between PWC and controls were found.

A review of data collection practices using electromagnetic articulography

“…Nevertheless, several studies have tested children from five years of age onwards (e.g., Katz & Bharadwaj, 2001;Cheng et al, 2007;Schötz et al, 2013), giving important insights into the development of individual articulators during the process of early speech acquisition. Articulographs have also frequently been used to study disordered speech in individuals suffering from various conditions that can impact speech production and/or speech motor control, ranging from speech disorders such as stuttering and cluttering (Didirkova & Hirsch, 2019;McClean, Tasko, & Runyan, 2004;Hartinger & Mooshammer, 2008) or apraxia or speech (e.g., Bartle-Meyer, Goozée, & Murdoch, 2009;Nijland, Maassen, Hulstijn, & Peters, 2004); hypokinetic dysarthria (e.g., Kearney et al, 2018;Mefferd & Dietrich, 2019) or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (e.g., Lee & Bell, 2018;Shellikeri et al, 2016) to congenital conditions such as cleft lip (e.g., van Lieshout, Rutjes, & Spauwen, 2002) or congenital blindness (e.g., Trudeau-Fisette, Tiede, & Ménard, 2017). Using EMA to study disordered speech (more studies can be found in the Appendix) is important to provide insight into the underlying issues of speech motor control that cannot be detected through acoustics only.…”

Rate vs. rhythm characteristics of cluttering with data from a “syllable-timed” language

“…He found that there were only four cases in which PWC were not characterized by irregular speech rate. Temporal and spatial variability in the speech of PWC and control speakers were analyzed by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulography by Hartinger & Mooshammer (2008). They found that when producing loan words (long words with a complex syllable structure), the variation was higher in PWC both in the temporal and in the spatial domain than in control speakers.…”