Children With Specific Language Impairments Perceive Speech Most Categorically When Tokens Are Natural and Meaningful

Abstract

Purpose-To examine perceptual deficits as a potential underlying cause of specific language impairments (SLI).Method-Twenty-one children with SLI (8;[7][8][9][10][11]11 [years;months]) and 21 age-matched controls participated in categorical perception tasks using four series of syllables for which perceived syllable-initial voicing varied. Series were either words or abstract nonword syllables and either synthesized or high-quality edited natural utterances. Children identified and discriminated (a) digitally edited tokens of naturally spoken "bowl"-"pole", (b) synthesized renditions of "bowl"-"pole", (c) natural "ba"-"pa", and (d) synthetic "ba"-"pa".Results-Identification crossover locations were the same for both groups of children, but there was modestly less accuracy on unambiguous endpoints for children with SLI. Planned comparisons revealed these effects to be limited to synthesized speech. Children with SLI showed overall reduced discrimination, but these effects were limited to abstract nonword syllables.Conclusion-Overall, children with SLI perceived naturally spoken real words comparably to age-matched peers but showed impaired identification and discrimination of synthetic speech and of abstract syllables. Poor performance on speech perception tasks may result from task demands and stimulus properties, not perceptual deficits. Keywordsspecific language impairment; categorical perception; speech perception (C) The American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association is the publisher of this article and holder of the copyright. Further reproduction of this article in violation of copyright is prohibited without the consent of the publisher. To contact the publisher: http:// www.asha.org/ Contact author: Jeffry A. Coady, Sargent College, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215. coady@bu.edu. Julia L. Evans is now at the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, and Elina MainelaArnold is now at the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Pennsylvania State University. HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Author ManuscriptThe present investigation was conducted to examine how speech perception abilities of children with specific language impairments (SLI) change as a function of the nature of the tokens with which they are tested. These children have normal hearing and nonverbal intelligence, with no obvious oral-motor or neurological deficits. Nevertheless, they experience difficulty learning language in spite of having all of the requisite cognitive abilities generally considered to support normal language acquisition (see Leonard, 1998, for a review). Although these children do acquire language, they experience deficits in many linguistic areas, including phonology, morphology, and syntax. Among the possible underlying causes that have been considered are deficits in , auditory processing (e.g., Eisenson, 1972). Explanations of these potential processing difficulties range from slower processing acr...

Children’s perception of their synthetically corrected speech production

“…As an evaluation of the quality of the synthesized speech, this finding is encouraging, especially when considering that all recordings and listening tasks were performed in a pre-school setting, and not in an experimental soundproof environment. In contrast to reports on children with specific language impairment (SLI) having more difficulties than their typically developing peers to evaluate synthesized speech stimuli (Coady, Evans, Mainela-Arnold, & Kluender, 2007), we observe no difference in performance between children with PD and their typically developing peers when they evaluate modified (and original) recordings of other children. Moreover, the children with PD are as accurate in their evaluations of modified versions of their own recordings as in their evaluations of unmodified versions.…”

“…Thus, it seems that the reported findings on children with SLI do not extend to the children with PD in the present study. Or, alternatively, the reported findings on children's evaluation of formant synthesized speech stimuli (as in Coady et al, 2007) are not generalizable to the concatenated speech stimuli in the present study. Instead, the pattern observed here suggests that all children -with or without PDgenerally accept the intended phonological form of the modified stimuli, seemingly without detecting the modification itself.…”

Specific Language Impairment: Evaluation and detection of differential psycholinguistic markers in phonology and morphosyntax in Spanish-speaking children

“…Another of these limitations was clearly observed in the difficulties experienced by the SLI group in distinguishing monosyllabic words in phonological reception. This suggests that Spanish-speaking children with SLI have a deficit in their capacity to extract phonetic features of speech or a deficiency in the processing of speech sounds at the level of segmental identity; this possibility has also been raised by studies on English-speaking children with SLI (e.g., Burlingame, Sussman, Gillam, & Hay, 2005;Coady, Evans, Mainela-Arnold, & Kluender, 2007;Ziegler, Pech-Georgel, George, Alario, & Lorenzi, 2005). Gallego et al (2000) also suggested that Spanish-speaking children with SLI have difficulty retrieving phonological forms in these kinds of tasks.…”

Waiting for lexical access: Cochlear implants or severely degraded input lead listeners to process speech less incrementally

“…The fact that these competition processes develop (Rigler et al, 2015; Sekerina & Brooks, 2007) and can be mistuned in impairment (Coady, Evans, Mainela-Arnold, & Kluender, 2007; Dollaghan, 1998; McMurray et al, 2014; McMurray et al, 2010) suggests that lexical activation dynamics do not just passively reflect the input, but are actively tuned to manage temporary ambiguity. Consequently, parameters of this process may be adapted to deal with uncertainty.…”