Browsing by Subject "Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Continuous Measures of Children's Speech Production: Visual Analog Scale and Equal Appearing Interval Scale Measures of Fricative Goodness
    (2009-10-07) Urberg-Carlson, Kari Elizabeth; Munson, Benjamin; Kaiser, Eden A.
    Children acquire speech sounds gradually, but the primary tool used to assess speech development, phonetic transcription, is by definition categorical. This presentation is part of a larger project, one of the goals of which is to develop novel perceptual methods for assessing children's speech production that capture continuity in speech-sound development.
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    Does Gender Perception Affect Novel Language Learning?
    (2009-04-08) Schempp, Diana; Smith, Wendy
    Language is arguably what makes us unique as humans. We use it almost every waking minute, and in using it we convey and perceive multiple types of information. These include information about the meaning of an utterance (i.e. its 'regular' semantics) and information about attributes of the speaker who produced it, like their age and gender. A co-researcher, my adviser, and I set out to examine whether and how information about speaker attributes affects the learning of an artificial language that we created. For this study we recorded men and women saying words from our artificial language. Our language was constructed so that some sound sequences were only produced by women in the artificial language (like the shk sequence in the word bishker) and others were only produced by men (like the shp sequence in the word nishpam). Some sequences weren't presented at all (like the shm sequence). We constructed a task in which our research participants could implicitly learn this artificial language. We then tested whether the participants learned which sound sequences could occur in the novel language. They could: words with the shm sequence were perceived as poorer additions to our language than were untrained words with the shp and shk in them. However, listeners didn't learn the associations between sequences and genders. The knowledge gained from this study has applications in fields concerned with the study of language, such as speech-language-hearing science, second language acquisition, and linguistics, as well as related fields like Gender Studies.
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    The Effect of Parabolic Intonation on Speech Intelligibility
    (2010-11) Burke, Gerald
    This research was the first, to our knowledge, to explore the effect of a simple parabolic pitch contour on speech intelligibility. The absence of improvement in intelligibility for speech in the parabolic intonation conditions suggests that this simple pitch pattern is not sufficient to provide the necessary cues for speech understanding. But, the results do indicate that this pitch pattern is sufficient to improve naturalness of speech.
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    Nonword Repetition and Language Learning
    (2009-04-08) Lobitz, Kelann
    The Nonword Repetition (NWR) task is a test in which children repeat nonsense words. It is given to children to test their phonological working memories, which is assumed to underlie vocabulary development. NWR is said to be 'language-free,' and so designed to be suitable for testing children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In this research project, we predicted that children would score differently based on the language in which the test is given. A total of 186 children with and without known language delays participated in the study. Within each language, we found that children with language delay did not have as high NWR accuracy as typically developing children. However, we found that our hypothesis was correct; NWR is sensitive to native language. That is, native Spanish-speaking children had higher accuracy on a Spanish NWR task than an English NWR task and native English-speaking children did better in English than Spanish NWR. We also found that the majority of the pronunciation errors in English were with final consonants in the longest nonsense words. The consonants /p/, /g/, and /b/ presented particular difficulty. Children would either omit the final consonant or substitute another consonant. These errors also likely indicate language-specific differences.
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    Two to School: a compilation of nonwords
    (2012-01-18) Nelson, Laura
    Two to School is a 5-year longitudinal study of language acquisition in children and in which nonword repetition is the primary measure of language abilities. The following description is the methodology used to compile a bibliography of articles containing possible nonword stimuli as well as a list of nonwords used with a pilot group of children in Two to School. Dr. Benjamin Munson oversaw the project, and Tara Castellano and Kayla Ahonen were also collaborators in the final bibliography. (1) Searched PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/, an online citation tool of NCBI, with keyword “nonword.” (2) Set search parameters to articles published from 1990 to present. (3) Excluded articles in query in which written nonword stimuli were used. (4) Interest was given to articles with verbal nonword stimuli. (5) From article appendices, compiled nonwords, in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) script when available, in an Excel spreadsheet.