Making Race Visible in the Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences: A Critical Discourse Analysis.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this critical discourse analytic study is to identify how two key professional standards documents in the Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences field-the Standards for Certification document and the Essential Functions rubric-contribute to the discursive construction of the ideal speech-language pathologist and audiologist, and to examine whether the experiences and needs of people of color are taken into consideration in these documents. METHOD: Critical discourse analysis was used as both a conceptual and methodological lens for the systematic analysis of the targeted text. RESULTS: The findings show that considerations of race and racism were almost entirely absent from both documents and thus reflected a discourse of race neutrality that is ideologically consistent with color-blind racism. The enactment of racially coded expectations within a construct of race-neutral discourse maintains racial inequities in the speech, language, and hearing sciences professions. CONCLUSIONS: The findings highlight the need for the open acknowledgment of racism in our institutional policies and discourses and official and ongoing commitments to concrete and measurable antiracist actions to counteract systemic racism. Recommendations for and examples of antiracist measures are offered.

Perceptual confusions of American-English vowels and consonants by native Arabic bilinguals.

This study investigated the perception of American-English (AE) vowels and consonants by young adults who were either (a) early Arabic-English bilinguals whose native language was Arabic or (b) native speakers of the English dialects spoken in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where both groups were studying. In a closed-set format, participants were asked to identify 12 AE vowels presented in /hVd/ context and 20 AE consonants (C) in three vocalic contexts: /aCa/, /iCi/, and /uCu/. Both native Arabic and native English groups demonstrated high accuracy in identification of vowels (70 and 80% correct, respectively) and consonants (94 and 95% correct, respectively). For both groups, the least-accurately identified vowels were /o/, /(see text)/, /ae/, while most consonant errors were found for /(see text)/, which was most frequently confused with /v/. However, for both groups, identification of /(see text)/ was vocalic-context dependent, with most errors occurring in liCil context and fewest errors occurring in luCu/ context. Lack of significant group differences suggests that speech sound identification patterns, including phonetic context effects for /(see text)/, were influenced more by the local English dialects than by listeners' Arabic language background. The findings also demonstrate consistent perceptual error patterns among listeners despite considerable variation in their native and second language dialectal backgrounds.

Mismatch negativity responses in children with a diagnosis of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS).

PURPOSE: To evaluate whether a hypothesis suggesting that apraxia of speech results from phonological overspecification could be relevant for childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). METHOD: High-density EEG was recorded from 5 children with CAS and 5 matched controls, ages 5-8 years, with and without CAS, as they listened to randomized sequences of CV syllables in two oddball paradigms: phonemic (/ba/, /pa/) and allophonic (/pa/, /p(h)a/). RESULTS: In the phonemic contrast condition, mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to oddball sounds were observed for the typically developing (comparison) group but not the CAS group, although a component similar to an immature mismatch response was apparent. The allophonic contrast did not elicit MMN responses in the comparison group, but in the CAS group, an MMN-like response was observed. CONCLUSION: The authors propose that these preliminary findings are consistent with a view of CAS as a disorder that not only affects motor planning but also has a phonological component.

Acquiring diglossia: mutual influences of formal and colloquial Arabic on children's grammaticality judgments.

There are differences and similarities between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and spoken varieties of Arabic, in all language domains. To obtain preliminary insights into interactions between the acquisition of spoken and standard varieties of a language in a diglossic situation, we employed forced-choice grammaticality judgments to investigate morphosyntactic knowledge of MSA and the local variant of Palestinian Colloquial Arabic (PCA), in 60 Arabic-speaking children aged 6 ; 4 to 12 ; 4, from a school in Nazareth. We used morphosyntactic structures which either differed or were similar between PCA and standard Arabic. Children generally performed better on items presented in PCA than in standard Arabic, with the exception of constructions involving negation. Children performed better on items when the two constructions were similar in both language varieties. We discuss the results with respect to the multiple factors that affect acquisition in a diglossic situation, and relate our findings to the possibility of interference effects of diglossia on learning.