Factors Influencing the Accurate Identification of Written Minimal Pairs with Graphemic Similarity: Evidence from Persian-Speaking Children and Adults.

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and fifty adults were exposed to a distractor stimulus as a pre-mask, followed by the target, and then a post-mask stimulus. Subsequently, the corresponding WMPs including the target word and its graphemically minimal contrast were presented to the participants to obtain their reaction time (RT) in accurately identifying the target word. Results demonstrated that children tend to slow down their reaction as a compensatory strategy to circumvent their less mature knowledge of graphophonic units/morphemes to achieve accuracy during word recognition. In addition, among all controlled factors, children's RT was significantly influenced by similarity of the middle letter in the WMPs. Adults' RT, however, was influenced by factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, and homography.

Cluster production in speech of Persian-speaking cochlear implanted children.

OBJECTIVE: This study is to examine the final cluster processing in Cochlear implanted child and compare the hearing age factor with the chronological age one. INTRODUCTION: Scholars argue that, in a Cochlear Implanted (CI) child, the hearing age is the crucial factor in the speech rather than the chronological age. To determine which factor affects the production more, we examined the mastery of Persian final consonant clusters realization in CI children at one-to-two years of hearing experience and compared the result to Normal Hearing (NH) peers. METHODS AND MATERIALS: The study included 21 children in two categories of girls and boys. Using picture-naming task, we collected the data from participants. RESULT: Data analysis showed that all the children used the same set of phonological rules at their developmental stages of word final consonant cluster but the distribution of preferences differed between the groups. In one hand, Cluster reduction was the most produced phonological rule in both groups and on the other hand, CI children preferred breathing, coalescence and cluster simplification more than NH children did. Considering Gender, unlike NH girls and boys who had the same trend in their phonological system, CI girls were closer to complete production rather than boys. CONCLUSION: According to this survey, what seems to be important in speech production of CI children is years of hearing experience rather than chronological age. Girls tried different rules compared to boys for cluster production, but when the mastery over cluster production was achieved, there was no difference between girls and boys.

Acoustic-temporal aspects of stop-plosives in the speech of Persian-speaking children with cleft lip and palate.

PURPOSE: The main objective was to examine temporal parameters of stop-plosives in Persian-speaking children with repaired cleft lip and palate (CLP). METHOD: Eleven children with repaired bilateral CLP and 20 typically-developing children participated in the study. Stop-gap duration (SGD) and voice-onset time (VOT) were measured based on digital waveform and spectrographic displays. RESULT: Separate linear mixed model analyses showed significantly longer SGDs for children with CLP for all plosives in word-mid and final positions. Furthermore, children with CLP tend to produce longer VOTs for all voiceless plosives. CONCLUSION: Persian-speaking children with repaired CLP prolong stop-gap segments, similar to findings reported for English-speaking children with CLP. Prolonged segments may be due to an active strategy to increase oral air pressure and/or improve perceptual accuracy of speech segments.

Effect of gap detection threshold on consistency of speech in children with speech sound disorder.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: The present study examined the relationship between gap detection threshold and speech error consistency in children with speech sound disorder. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: The participants were children five to six years of age who were categorized into three groups of typical speech, consistent speech disorder (CSD) and inconsistent speech disorder (ISD).The phonetic gap detection threshold test was used for this study, which is a valid test comprised six syllables with inter-stimulus intervals between 20-300ms. The participants were asked to listen to the recorded stimuli three times and indicate whether they heard one or two sounds. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: There was no significant difference between the typical and CSD groups (p=0.55), but there were significant differences in performance between the ISD and CSD groups and the ISD and typical groups (p=0.00). The ISD group discriminated between speech sounds at a higher threshold. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Children with inconsistent speech errors could not distinguish speech sounds during time-limited phonetic discrimination. It is suggested that inconsistency in speech is a representation of inconsistency in auditory perception, which causes by high gap detection threshold.

Speech characteristics after articulation therapy in children with cleft palate and velopharyngeal dysfunction - A single case experimental design.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of an intensive 10-week course of articulation therapy on articulation errors in cleft lip and palate patients who have Velopharyngeal Insufficiency (VPI), non-oral and passive cleft speech characteristics. METHODS: Five children with cleft palate (+/-cleft lip) with VPI and non-oral and passive cleft speech characteristics underwent 40 intensive articulation therapies over 10 weeks in a single case experimental design. The percentage of non-oral CSCs (NCSCs), passive CSCs (PCSCs), stimulable consonants (SC), correct consonants in word imitation (CCI), and correct consonants in picture naming (CCN) were captured at baseline, during intervention and in follow up phases. Visual analysis and two effect size indexes of Percentage of Nonoverlapping Data and Percentage of Improvement Rate Difference were analyzed. RESULTS: Articulation therapy resulted in visible decrease in NCSCs for all 5 participants across the intervention phases. Intervention was effective in changing percentage of passive CSCs in two different ways; it reduced the PCSCs in three cases and resulted in an increase in PCSCs in the other two cases. This was interpreted as intervention having changed the non-oral CSCs to consonants produced within the oral cavity but with passive characteristics affecting manner of production including weakness, nasalized plosives and nasal realizations of plosives and fricatives. Percent SC increased throughout the intervention period in all five patients. All participants demonstrated an increase in percentage of CCI and CCN suggesting an increase in the consonant inventory. Follow-up data showed that all the subjects were able to maintain their ability to articulate learned phonemes correctly even after a 4-week break from intervention. CONCLUSION: This single case experimental study supports the hypothesis that speech intervention in patients with VPI can result in an improvement in oral placements and passive CSCs.

The Effect of Non-sentential Context Prosody on Homographs' Lexical Activation in Persian.

This study examines the effect of non-sentential context prosody pattern on lexical activation in Persian. For this purpose a questionnaire including target and non-target words is used. The target words are homographs with two possible stress patterns belonging to different syntactic categories. Participants are asked to read out the words aloud and note the first word that comes to their mind. The results show that by reading the target words, both meanings of the target words are activated in mind and the prosodic pattern of the non-sentential preceding context does not affect the activation of the other stress pattern meaning. This result suggests that the metrical prosodic pattern of non-sentential context is not a strong constraint to determine which meaning of the target word must be activated. The experiment also illustrates that the stress pattern used to read the target words does not necessarily matches the stress pattern of the target word which relates to the written word. These findings confirm Swinney (Verb Learn Verb Behav 18:645-665, 1979) and Elston-Güttler and Friederici's (J Mem Lang 52(2):256-283, 2005) finding that both meanings of an ambiguous word are accessed at the first stage. This study shows that in lack of semantic context, Persian natives behave homographs as ambiguous words and there is no bias towards preferring one meaning over another.

Long-term average spectra of adult Iranian speakers' voice.

INTRODUCTION: Long-term average spectrum (LTAS) allows quantifying the voice quality and provides an overview of the mean spectral characteristics of a voice. The aims of this study were to survey normal spectral characteristics of Persian and investigate sex-related changes in the source characteristics of dynamic speech using LTAS. METHOD: Speech samples obtained from 30 male and 30 female Persian-speaking participants reading a text in habitual pitch and loudness level. At the LTAS window and using Praat software, the amplitude values were obtained at equal intervals of 160 Hz, ranging from 0 to 8 kHz. RESULTS: The main features of the average spectrum were as follows: peak in the region of 480 Hz with a reduction at higher frequencies, a 20 dB decline from 480 to 960 Hz, a flat region from 960 to 1920 Hz, a further decline from 1920 to 3040 Hz, and a further flat region from 3040 to 8000 Hz. In comparison to men, women revealed significant lower levels of amplitude at frequencies of 160 and 320 Hz and higher levels of amplitude at frequencies of 960, 3360, 3520, 3680, 3840, and 5920 Hz. CONCLUSION: The overall shape and gender-related energy distribution pattern of the LTAS of Persian were more similar to those of English than to those of Korean. The more phonetic differences between Persian and Korean compared with Persian and English might contribute to different spectral characteristics. The present study tried to clarify the spectral characteristics of Iranian male and female voices and focused on more breathy voice quality for women than men.

Spectral analysis of word-initial alveolar and velar plosives produced by Iranian children with cleft lip and palate.

Spectral moment analysis (SMA) was used to describe voiceless alveolar and velar stop-plosive production in Persian-speaking children with repaired cleft lip and palate (CLP). Participants included 11 children with bilateral CLP who were undergoing maxillary expansion and 20 children without any type of orofacial clefts. Four of the children with CLP also exhibited backed (palatal) placement for alveolar stops. All children produced consonant-vowel-consonant nonsense words that targeted the plosives /t/ and /k/. SMA revealed that children with CLP had significantly reduced first spectral moment of /t/ and /t/-/k/ difference. Children with CLP who produced palatal stops for alveolar targets also had lower but non-significant first spectral moments for /t/ as compared with children with CLP who did not produce palatal stops. The results are consistent with previously reported findings for English-speaking children with repaired CLP and further suggest that maxillary arch constriction may be a contributing factor for (a) reduced spectral distinction of alveolar targets and/or (b) palatal substitutions for alveolar targets.