Error Patterns of Dorsal Rhotics: Evidence from Hebrew-Speaking Children.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper was to describe the error patterns of the dorsal rhotic /ʁ̞/ in the speech of typically developing Hebrew-speaking children and to examine the prosodic effect (i.e., position in the word and stress pattern) of its production. Method and Participants: The participants included 50 monolingual Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;6-3;3 years. The children performed an articulation task in which they were asked to articulate 18 disyllabic words composed of vowel-adjacent rhotics in initial, medial, and final word positions in both stressed and unstressed syllables. RESULTS: The results revealed that dorsal rhotics were produced correctly in 78.7% of the target words. The main error patterns were rhotic deletion and devoicing. There were fewer correct productions in initial word positions than in both medial and final word positions. No stress effect was found. In addition, 76% of the children produced the consonant correctly in over half of their productions. CONCLUSIONS: The result demonstrating a higher rate of errors in initial word positions may be due to the relatively late acquisition of the initial onset position in multisyllabic Hebrew words. Alternatively, this finding may result from the greater degree of allophonic variation found in this position. The finding that languages with dorsal rhotics have unique error patterns compared to other rhotics strengthens the evidence that rhotic error patterns are dependent on the rhotics' phonetic characteristics.

Auditory recognition in toddlers with typical hearing and toddlers with hearing loss using the Hebrew version of the Mr. Potato Head Task.

OBJECTIVE: This study describes the adaptation of the Mr. Potato Head Task into Hebrew and explores the development of word and sentence recognition in toddlers with typical hearing (TH) and toddlers with hearing loss (HL). DESIGN: Toddlers manipulated Mr. Potato Head according to auditory instructions. STUDY SAMPLE: One hundred and seventeen toddlers with TH and 28 toddlers with HL, age 23-48 months. RESULTS: Internal consistency scores in TH toddlers - words: α = 0.85, sentences: α = 0.87; in toddlers with HL, words: α = 0.88; sentences: α = 0.84. The findings showed a clear upward trajectory in the TH toddlers, plateauing at age four. Toddlers with HL showed poorer performance in general, but exhibited a similar trajectory, albeit with greater individual variability. Toddlers with HL performed less well than age-matched toddlers with TH, but performed at the same level as toddlers with TH matched for hearing experience. Severity of HL was associated with performance level. CONCLUSIONS: The Hebrew-adapted version can provide a developmental assessment of word and sentence recognition tasks in both groups of toddlers. These findings have important implications for toddlers with HL for whom assessment tools at the sentence level are rare.

Parental Reports on the Auditory Performance of Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Hearing Loss via the Hebrew Adaptation of the Parents' Evaluation of Aural/Oral Performance of Children Scale.

PURPOSE: The aims of this study were to adapt the Parents' Evaluation of Aural/Oral Performance of Children (PEACH) scale into Hebrew, to explore the auditory performance of children with normal hearing (NH) or hearing loss (HL), to examine changes with age, and to investigate the effect of descriptive variables on the performance of children with HL. METHOD: The PEACH scale was adapted into Hebrew using the "back-translation" method. The study included 260 parents of children with NH and 32 parents of children with HL. Children were between 9 and 72 months old. Inclusion criteria for children with HL are as follows: bilateral, congenital, or moderate-severe to profound sensorineural HL using bilateral sensory devices. Parents evaluated their child's auditory performance in real-life situations using the PEACH scale. RESULTS: A Cronbach's alpha analysis (N = 292) scored medium-to-high values: α = .86, α = .74, and α = .78 for the entire scale and in quiet and noisy situations, respectively. Noise affected the auditory performance of both groups, with the effect being more pronounced than the hearing status, although it was more prominent in children with HL. The auditory performance of children with NH improved rapidly up to 18 months of age and then progressed more gradually to reach a plateau of 85% at 36 months of age. Chronological age contributed to auditory performance over the entire scale and in quiet situations for children with NH, whereas maternal education contributed to auditory performance in quiet situations for children with HL. CONCLUSION: The Hebrew version of the PEACH scale provides a useful tool for evaluating the auditory performance of young children, although it is influenced by cultural differences beyond 36 months of age.

Everyday hearing functioning in unilateral versus bilateral hearing aid users.

PURPOSE: The purpose of the present study was to assess hearing functioning in everyday listening situations of bilateral and unilateral hearing aid (HA) users. METHOD: 80 Arabic-speaking HA users: 46 bilateral and 34 unilateral HA users with various degrees of HL. Participants completed the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities (SSQ) self-report questionnaire. RESULTS: In general, bilateral users performed better than unilateral users on the speech and spatial scales. For participants with symmetrical unaided HL, the bilateral group significantly surpassed the unilateral group on all three scales. For participants with asymmetrical unaided HL, no significant intergroup differences emerged. Regarding degree of HL, the moderate HL group outperformed the severe, and profound HL groups. No differences emerged between the severe and profound groups. Finally, more severe HL correlated with poorer SSQ performance. Similarly, better speech discrimination scores correlated with better SSQ performance. CONCLUSION: Results support the need for subjective questionnaires when assessing HA benefits.

Typical acquisition by atypical children: Initial consonant cluster acquisition by Israeli Hebrew-acquiring children with cochlear implants.

This paper studies the developmental stages of word initial consonant clusters (CCs) in the speech of six monolingual Israeli Hebrew (IH) acquiring hearing impaired children using cochlear implant (CI). Focusing on the patterns of cluster reduction, this study compares the CI children with typically-developing hearing children. All the CI children, three boys and three girls with age ranged from 1;5-2;8 years at their first recording session, were with pre-lingual hearing impairment with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. Productions of word initial CCs were elicited in an isolated-word picture-naming task combined with spontaneously produced words. Data collection started 2-4 months after implantation and continued until the correct production of word initial biconsonantal clusters. Results reveal that both the developmental stages and reduction patterns of word initial CCs of the CI children are very similar to typically-developing IH acquiring children, thus supporting earlier studies which show that children with CIs follow the same stages of acquisition as hearing children.

Effects of speech in noise and dichotic listening intervention programs on central auditory processing disorders.

Twenty children with central auditory processing disorders [(C)APD] were subjected to a structured intervention program of listening skills in quiet and in noise. Their performance was compared to that of a control group of 10 children with (C)APD with no special treatment. Pretests were conducted in quiet and in degraded listening conditions (speech noise and competing speech). The (C)APD management approach was integrative and included top-down and bottom-up strategies. It focused on environmental modifications, remediation techniques, and compensatory strategies. Training was conducted with monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, sentences and phrases in quiet and in noise. Comparisons of pre- and post-management measures indicated increase in speech recognition performance in background noise and competing speech for the treatment group. This improvement was exhibited for both ears. A significant difference between ears was found with the left ear showing improvement in both the short and the long versions of competing sentence tests and the right ear performing better in the long competing sentences only following intervention. No changes were documented for the control group. These findings add to a growing body of literature suggesting that interactive auditory training can improve listening skills.

Consonant-free words: evidence from Hebrew speaking children with cochlear implants.

This paper reports on a rare phenomenon in language development-the production of words without consonants, and thus syllables without an onset. Such words, which are referred as Consonant-free words (CFWs), appeared for a short period in the early speech of hearing impaired Hebrew-speaking children, who produced words consisting of one or two vowels (where the latter were disyllabic). The quantitative data are drawn from the speech of six monolingual hearing-impaired Hebrew-speaking children using a cochlear implant device. Their age ranged from 1;5-2;8 years at their first recording session. The elicitation procedure was based on spontaneous speech and picture naming. Findings indicate that cochlear implant users produce CFWs at the initial stage of the prosodic word development. This study claims the CFWs characterize a transitional period between babbling and speech, which varies between different types of populations. The transitional period is rather short in typically developing children, who hardly ever produce CFWs, greater in cochlear implant children, and the greatest in developmental speech disorders such as dyspraxia. Clinical implications of these findings are also discussed.