The Specific Relation Between Perception and Production Errors for Place of Articulation in Developmental Apraxia of Speech

Abstract

Developmental apraxia of speech is a disorder of phonological and articulatory output processes. However, it has been suggested that perceptual deficits may contribute to the disorder. Identification and discrimination tasks offer a fine-grained assessment of central auditory and phonetic functions. Seventeen children with developmental apraxia (mean age 8:9, years:months) and 16 control children (mean age 8:0) were administered tests of identification and discrimination of resynthesized and synthesized monosyllabic words differing in place-of-articulatton of the initiai voiced stop consonants. The resynthetic and synthetic words differed in the intensity of the third formant, a variable potentially enlarging their clinical value. The results of the identification task showed equal slopes for both subject groups, which indicates no phonetic processing deficit in developmental apraxia of speech. The hypothesized effect of the manipulation of the intensity of the third formant of the stimuli was not substantiated. However, the children with apraxia demonstrated poorer discrimination than the control children, which suggests affected auditory processing. Furthermore, analyses of discrimination performance and articulation data per apraxic subject demonstrated a specific relation between the degree to which auditory processing is affected and the frequency of place-of-articulation substitutions in production. This indicates the interdependence of percep tion and production. The resuits also suggest that the use of perceptual tasks has significant clinical value.

Auditory feedback perturbation in children with developmental speech sound disorders

“…Empirical data indicate that there is a close relation between production symptoms and perceptual acuity in children with speech sound disorders (SSD): poor perceptual performance is related to poor production performance (Edwards, Fox, & Rogers, 2002;Groenen, Maassen, Crul, & Thoonen, 1996;Maassen, Groenen, & Crul, 2003;Nijland, 2009;Raaymakers & Crul, 1988). Computer simulations with the DIVA model suggest that the ability for auditory self-monitoring might influence the nature of speech-motor deficits during development .…”

Prosody-voice characteristics of children and adults with apraxia of speech

“…Unlike adults, whose apraxia was acquired after the developmental period for speech-language acquisition, the stress de® cits in the children with AOSci in this study presumably re¯ect di culty or delays in the acquisition of English stress rules. Some investigators have reported impaired auditory processing skills in children with suspected AOSc (e.g., Robin, Hall, and Jordan, 1986;Groenen, Maassen, Crul, and Thoonen, 1996 ). De® cient auditory or auditory-temporal processing could aOE ect both the initial decoding and eventual representation of metrical forms, as well as the on-line encoding and self-monitoring of appropriate sentential stress.…”

On the Clinical Relevance of Mismatch Negativity: Results from Subjects with Normal Hearing and Cochlear Implant Users

“…Electrical recordings, magnetic record ings, animal studies, and lesion studies point to a major origin on the superior surface of the temporal lobe in the auditory cortex [3,4], The P300 is considered to represent a more general cognitive response that originates from multiple auditory and nonauditory structures [5], Measuring MMN seems especially useful when testing subjects with problems of speech processing. Groencn et al [6,7] and Locke [8] in addition to others have demonstrated that speech perception problems are rarely of a general nature, but concern specific speech features. For the perception of consonants, three important dimensions arc considered for choosing speech contrasts: voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation.…”