Conspiring simplification strategies of [Obstruent+Liquid] clusters in a case study of child Greek: emergence of the marked.

This paper addresses the idiosyncratic cluster simplification patterns observed in a child with disordered phonological development, who is acquiring Greek. The child has mastered word-internal and word-final codas and clusters of reversed sonority. However, the child does not realise the target well-formed tautosyllabic [Obstruent+Liquid] clusters with rising sonority. The child's system requires a single onset with maximum sonority dispersion between the onset and the syllable nucleus. As a result, cluster simplification occurs, via reduction to the less sonorous Obstruent - the most prevalent reduction pattern cross-linguistically. However, at the same time, the grammar requires faithful realisation of the target segment number. This requirement is fulfiled through two distinct conspiring metathesis patterns, distributed complementarily, resulting in the realisation of marked structures. The patterns depend on the position of the cluster within the target word. In word internal position, a compensatory metathesis of the Liquid takes place in the preceding syllable coda. In word initial position, the Manner of Articulation of the metathesised Liquid is delinked, while its Coronal Place of Articulation is faithfully preserved, and is realised by default as a Coronal Sibilant [s]. The latter Sibilant is attached as an appendix to the syllable node at the word left-edge. We argue that, in the grammar of this child, there is a-synchronisation between the development of the prosodic word layer and the development of syllable layer. Specifically, a-synchronisation is evident in the development of the (branching) onset syllabic subconstituent.

Improving Text-Independent Forced Alignment to Support Speech-Language Pathologists with Phonetic Transcription.

Problem: Phonetic transcription is crucial in diagnosing speech sound disorders (SSDs) but is susceptible to transcriber experience and perceptual bias. Current forced alignment (FA) tools, which annotate audio files to determine spoken content and its placement, often require manual transcription, limiting their effectiveness. Method: We introduce a novel, text-independent forced alignment model that autonomously recognises individual phonemes and their boundaries, addressing these limitations. Our approach leverages an advanced, pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 model to segment speech into tokens and recognise them automatically. To accurately identify phoneme boundaries, we utilise an unsupervised segmentation tool, UnsupSeg. Labelling of segments employs nearest-neighbour classification with wav2vec 2.0 labels, before connectionist temporal classification (CTC) collapse, determining class labels based on maximum overlap. Additional post-processing, including overfitting cleaning and voice activity detection, is implemented to enhance segmentation. Results: We benchmarked our model against existing methods using the TIMIT dataset for normal speakers and, for the first time, evaluated its performance on the TORGO dataset containing SSD speakers. Our model demonstrated competitive performance, achieving a harmonic mean score of 76.88% on TIMIT and 70.31% on TORGO. Implications: This research presents a significant advancement in the assessment and diagnosis of SSDs, offering a more objective and less biased approach than traditional methods. Our model's effectiveness, particularly with SSD speakers, opens new avenues for research and clinical application in speech pathology.

Acquisition of the feature [+spread glottis] in Icelandic.

The feature [+spread glottis] ([+s.g.]) denotes that a speech sound is produced with a wide glottal aperture with audible voiceless airflow. Icelandic is unusual in the degree to which [+spread glottis] is involved in the phonology: in /h/, pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops, voiceless fricatives and voiceless sonorants. The ubiquitousness of the feature could potentially affect the rate and process of its acquisition. This paper investigates the development of [+s.g.] in Icelandic, both in general and in a range of contexts, in a cross-sectional study of 433 typically developing Icelandic-speaking children aged two to seven years. As a feature, [+s.g.] is acquired early in Icelandic, although specific sound classes lag behind due to other output constraints. Children reach mastery of [+s.g.] by age three except in word-initial post-aspirated stops and voiceless nasals. Findings are interpreted in light of the literature on the feature and its development.

Morphosyntactic profiles among preschoolers with and without speech sound disorders.

The aim of the current study was to identify whether certain morphosyntactic constructs are more difficult for children with speech sound disorder than children with typical speech development. In this post-hoc study, we used chi-square analyses to identify group differences on individual questions on a standardised test of expressive morphosyntax. Participants included 80 preschool-age children, 40 with typical speech and language development (TD), and 40 with speech sound disorder and typical language development (SSD). A chi-square analysis revealed group (TD vs. SSD) differences in usage of subject pronouns, irregular past tense verbs, and yes/no interrogative formation. Ordinal logistic regression revealed that phonological awareness was related to irregular past tense verb use. Children with SSD may present with subclinical morphosyntax difficulties. Speech-language pathologists should consider incorporating morphosyntax assessment into test batteries for children with SSD.

When liquids and fricatives outrank stops: A Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking child with Down syndrome and protracted phonological development.

This paper describes the phonological system of a monolingual Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking 9-year-old girl with Down Syndrome (DS) as part of a special crosslinguistic issue presenting individual profiles of children with protracted phonological development within the framework of constraints-based nonlinear phonology. Her responses to a 100-word speech test were audio-recorded and transcribed narrowly by two native speakers. Analyses showed low accuracy for word shapes (CV sequences), primarily because of expected deletion patterns in initial weak syllables and clusters, but also reflecting inaccuracies in segment length. Vowel match was also relatively low. For consonants, she unexpectedly showed lower accuracy for stops than typically later-developing liquids and fricatives. This case study provides researchers and speech-language pathologists with broader information about expected and unexpected patterns in children with DS and protracted phonological development in general.

When consonants resemble vowels: investigating protracted phonological development in Akan.

This paper addresses the phonology of an Akan-speaking child aged 5;3 with Protracted Phonological Development. His phonological system had many strengths, with most consonants accurate at least some of the time and with many long words, but with weaknesses that lead to a very low Whole Word Match. In addition to some difficulty with consonant and vowel sequences (leading to assimilation), there are issues relative to complex consonants that contain vowel features (consonants with secondary articulations, the labiopalatal glide, and /r/) and with syllabic consonants (nasals and /r/) that lead to deletion, epenthesis, and some extensive changes in output. One complex place of articulation (alveolopalatal) is well-established and frequently overgeneralized in the output. We present a non-linear analysis of his speech production and a plan for intervention targeting his difficulties.

When codas trump onsets: an English-speaking child with atypical phonological development before and after intervention.

This case study presents an English-speaking preschooler with severely protracted phonological development (PPD) before and after two six-week blocks of intervention (36 sessions). Pre-treatment (3;8), he showed very low whole word, singleton consonant, vowel, and word shape matches. He had two major uncommon patterns: (1) higher accuracy for word-final consonants compared with word-initial (WI) and word-medial (WM); and (2) frequent substitution of onset consonants with glottals [h] or [ʔ]. Goals and treatment strategies were selected using a nonlinear phonological approach. Post-treatment, there was a notable decrease in frequency of glottal substitutions and concomitant increase in word shape, consonant, and vowel match. Pre- and post-treatment data are presented and discussed in terms of theoretical and clinical implications.

Consonants lost: a Swedish girl with protracted phonological development.

This paper addresses the phonology of a Swedish girl, aged 3 years 10 months, with extensive phonological difficulties that include an unusual phonological pattern. She had relatively well-developed phonological building blocks in terms of features, stress pattern and word length (number of syllables), but had extensive difficulties regarding syllable and word shapes, with frequent deletions of both segments and whole syllables. Word-initial position was dominated by non-continuant consonants, both voiced and voiceless, with extensive deletion. Word-medial position was dominated by voiceless obstruents, with extensive use of [j] in place of voiced consonants. Word-final position was similar to word-medial, but with more deletion than [j]. Non-initial stressed syllables resemble word-initial syllables. Consonant clusters mirrored singletons, i.e. with similar substitution patterns or deletions. We present a non-linear analysis of her speech production, and a plan for intervention targeting her special difficulties.

Speech production and speech perception in children with speech sound disorder.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the relationship between speech production (SP) and speech perception in children with Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) from both typical speech production (TSP) and child's own atypical speech production (ASP). Ten children with SSD were evaluated by a speech production task (naming test) and two speech perception tasks (phonological contrast identification) using the PERCEFAL instrument. In the identification task, the acoustic stimulus, from typical and child's own atypical speech productions, was presented to each child, and they needed to choose the corresponding stimulus between two pictures displayed on the computer screen. The percentages of errors on speech production (SP) task, on the identification task from TSP and ASP were calculated for each child. ANOVA showed a significant difference between speech production and speech perception. Post hoc analysis demonstrated a greater mean of errors in the ASP compared to the mean of errors in the TSP and SP performances. Only SP and ASP performances presented a significant correlation (r = 0.65). Errors involving manner and manner+place were most recurring in SP. TSP seems to precede SP; that is, children with SSD perceive more speech from typical production than they are able to produce. The significant correlation between ASP and SP suggests that the evaluation of these skills accesses the children's equivalent underlying phonological representation. A more accurate production, such as typical production, may have cues that help children with SSD to identify phonological contrasts, even if their underlying representations are overly broad or not established.

Interdentals to the rescue: a German four-year-old with protracted phonological development.

This paper examines the phonology of a German four-year-old with asynchronous phonological development: age-level word structure and vowels, but a restricted consonantal inventory. Both expected and unexpected developmental patterns were evident. While the absence of dorsal non-continuants and most coronal and labiodental fricatives and affricates is not unexpected in four-year-olds with PPD, less expected was his mastery of more marked /l/ and /ʁ/ and the pervasive use of ungrooved interdental fricatives (or affricates) as substitutions. Ungrooved interdentals often replace grooved fricatives and affricates, but in his system, they also replaced stops in more marked prosodic positions (unstressed initial syllables and clusters) and labiodental /f/. His case profile demonstrates the autonomy of phonological tiers (levels) but also the restrictive interactions that occur when one tier dominates, in his case, word structure. A proposed treatment plan targets new feature combinations and consonant sequences in order to address the asynchrony.

Word-initial /r/-clusters in Icelandic-speaking children with protracted versus typical phonological development.

Rhotics are generally acquired late across languages (Jiménez, 1987; Tar, 2006; Blumenthal and Lundeborg, 2014). Prior research suggests some possible differences in acquisition across languages, however (Másdóttir and Stokes, 2016). The current study set out to examine acquisition of /r/ in Icelandic, focusing primarily on match (accuracy) and mismatch data for word-initial (WI) /r/-clusters, but also comparing /r/-clusters with WI singleton /r/ and /l/ plus /l/-clusters. Single-word data were collected for 27 Icelandic-speaking preschoolers with protracted phonological development (PPD) and compared with data from age- and gender-matched typically developing peers. Results showed lower match levels for clusters versus singletons, /r/ versus /l/ and the children with PPD. Most frequent substitutions were approximant [ð̞] and [l]. Younger children with PPD showed more deletion in clusters and a greater variety of substitutions for both consonants. The data support general cross-linguistic trends in rhotic acquisition with the [ð̞] substitution being one difference.

Word-initial trill clusters in children with typical versus protracted phonological development: Bulgarian.

The current paper describes acquisition of word-initial (WI) trilled /r/ in clusters and as a singleton in 60 Bulgarian 3-5-year-olds with typically developing (TD) versus protracted phonological development (PPD). A native speaker audio-recorded and transcribed single-word responses to a picture-naming task (110 words) that included eight words with WI rhotic clusters and two with WI singleton /r/. Accuracy was significantly higher in the TD groups and for the PPD groups, by age. Mismatch patterns varied: the PPD cohort had the most varied patterns although the younger children with PPD showed more /r/ deletion in clusters, and the TD groups and 5-year-olds with PPD more substitutions for /r/. Substitutions for rhotics included taps (most frequent; possibly an acceptable variant), voiced uvular and palatal fricatives, laterals, glides, other rhotics, stops and nasals. These results add to the growing database on Bulgarian phonological acquisition concerning accuracy and mismatches by group and age.

Tongue displacement and durational characteristics of normal and disordered Brazilian Portuguese liquids.

The goal of the present study was to characterize normal and disordered Brazilian Portuguese liquids. The research hypotheses were that disordered liquid sounds would be characterized by (1) longer syllable and segment durations, (2) larger and more undifferentiated displacement of the tongue and (3) that the speech errors would show sub-phonemic differences depending on the target sound. The participants of this study were 11 children with phonological disorders and 9 control participants matched for age and educational background. The children's tongue movement in the sagittal plane was recorded with ultrasound. The speech stimuli consisted of 3 repetitions of 5 words representing the four Brazilian Portuguese liquids /l/, /ʎ/, /ɾ/ and /ʀ/ in the context of the vowel /a/. A panel of four listeners transcribed each of the productions and classified them as correct or incorrect. The outcome measures were based on duration (syllable duration, ratio L/V) and tongue displacement (percentage average displacement, anterior displacement, posterior displacement). Based on mixed model analyses of variance, the first research hypothesis was confirmed for the /l/ and /ɾ/ targets, but not for the /ʀ/ and /ʎ/ targets. The second hypothesis was partially confirmed. The third hypothesis was confirmed. The research serves to illustrate the effects of phonological disorder on the phonetic realisation of Brazilian Portuguese liquid sounds.

Using PhonBank and Phon in studies of phonological development and disorders.

The goal of this paper is to present an overview of new tools that can be used to further our understanding of phonological development and disorders. We begin with a summary of the field of child phonology with a focus on databases and methods of analysis and then move to a description of PhonBank, a shared database for the study of phonology, and Phon, a specialised software system capable of performing various types of phonological analyses based on both phonetic transcriptions and acoustic analyses of speech productions. We provide a detailed example of using PhonBank and Phon to examine the use of velar fronting using longitudinal data from one child with typical development and three children with phonological disorder. We conclude with an emphasis on data sharing and its central relevance to further advances in our field.

Speech Sound Disorders in Children: An Articulatory Phonology Perspective.

Speech Sound Disorders (SSDs) is a generic term used to describe a range of difficulties producing speech sounds in children (McLeod and Baker, 2017). The foundations of clinical assessment, classification and intervention for children with SSD have been heavily influenced by psycholinguistic theory and procedures, which largely posit a firm boundary between phonological processes and phonetics/articulation (Shriberg, 2010). Thus, in many current SSD classification systems the complex relationships between the etiology (distal), processing deficits (proximal) and the behavioral levels (speech symptoms) is under-specified (Terband et al., 2019a). It is critical to understand the complex interactions between these levels as they have implications for differential diagnosis and treatment planning (Terband et al., 2019a). There have been some theoretical attempts made towards understanding these interactions (e.g., McAllister Byun and Tessier, 2016) and characterizing speech patterns in children either solely as the product of speech motor performance limitations or purely as a consequence of phonological/grammatical competence has been challenged (Inkelas and Rose, 2007; McAllister Byun, 2012). In the present paper, we intend to reconcile the phonetic-phonology dichotomy and discuss the interconnectedness between these levels and the nature of SSDs using an alternative perspective based on the notion of an articulatory "gesture" within the broader concepts of the Articulatory Phonology model (AP; Browman and Goldstein, 1992). The articulatory "gesture" serves as a unit of phonological contrast and characterization of the resulting articulatory movements (Browman and Goldstein, 1992; van Lieshout and Goldstein, 2008). We present evidence supporting the notion of articulatory gestures at the level of speech production and as reflected in control processes in the brain and discuss how an articulatory "gesture"-based approach can account for articulatory behaviors in typical and disordered speech production (van Lieshout, 2004; Pouplier and van Lieshout, 2016). Specifically, we discuss how the AP model can provide an explanatory framework for understanding SSDs in children. Although other theories may be able to provide alternate explanations for some of the issues we will discuss, the AP framework in our view generates a unique scope that covers linguistic (phonology) and motor processes in a unified manner.

Fostering human rights through TalkBank.

In accord with articles 19 and 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people with speech and language disorders have the right to receive maximal benefit from academic research on speech and language acquisition and disorders. To evaluate the diverse nature of speech and language disorders, this research must have access to large datasets, as well as to refined tools for the systematic analysis of these datasets. The TalkBank system addresses this need by providing researchers with thousands of hours of open-access database archives of digital audio, video and transcript files documenting typical and disordered language use in dozens of languages and cultures. In this paper, we review the TalkBank system, with an emphasis on the AphasiaBank, PhonBank and FluencyBank databases. We describe how specialised assessment tools can be used to study issues in speech and language acquisition and disorders recorded within these databases. We then provide illustrations of how assessments support the needs of researchers, clinicians, developers, and educators, whose combined work contributes solutions for people with speech, language and language learning disorders worldwide.

Eficácia da terapia para desvios fonológicos com diferentes modelos terapêuticos / Therapy effectiveness for phonological disorders with different therapeutic approaches

TEMA: terapia fonológica. OBJETIVO: avaliar a eficácia do tratamento em três diferentes modelos de terapia quanto às mudanças no sistema fonológico de sujeitos com diferentes gravidades do Desvio Fonológico (DF). MÉTODO: a amostra constituiu-se de 66 sujeitos, com idades entre 4:4 e 8:2, sendo 43 do sexo masculino e 23 do feminino, integrantes do banco de dados de uma clínica escola. Todos foram avaliados, antes e após um período de 15 a 25 sessões de terapia fonológica, utilizando-se a Avaliação Fonológica da Criança, a partir da qual foi determinada a gravidade do DF conforme o Percentual de Consoantes Corretas - PCC, o número de Segmentos Não Adquiridos - SNA , e o percentual de Segmentos Adquiridos (SA) após o período de tratamento. Os sujeitos foram tratados pelos modelos ABAB-Retirada e Provas Múltiplas, Oposições Máximas Modificado e Ciclos Modificado. Posteriormente, realizou-se análise estatística dos dados, utilizando o Teste T para amostras iguais, considerando-se p < 0,05. RESULTADOS: verificou-se um aumento do PCC e do percentual de SA, bem como redução do número de SNA em todos os grupos tratados pelos diferentes modelos de terapia. Estes resultados foram estatisticamente significativos para a maioria dos grupos. CONCLUSÃO: os resultados permitem afirmar que os três modelos de terapia aplicados foram eficazes no tratamento de crianças com DF, para as diferentes gravidades do desvio. Além disso, as maiores mudanças no sistema fonológico ocorreram para os grupos com DF de grau mais acentuado.

BACKGROUND: phonological therapy. AIM: to evaluate the effectiveness of three different therapy models regarding changes in the phonological system of subjects with different phonological disorder (PD) severity levels. METHOD: the research group was composed by 66 subjects, 43 males and 23 females, with ages between 4:4 and 8:2 years, who were part of a school clinic database. All subjects were evaluated, before and after a period of 15 to 25 sessions of phonological therapy, using the Child's Phonological Assessment. Based on this assessment, the severity level of the PD was determined using the Percentage Consonants Correct - PCC, and by calculating the number of Non-Acquired Segments -NAS and the percentage of Acquired Segments (AS) after treatment. The subjects were treated using the following approaches: ABAB-Withdrawal and Multiple Probes, Modified Maximum Opposition and Modified Cycles Models. For the statistical analysis the T-Test was used with a significance level of 5 percent. RESULTS: the statistical analysis indicated an increase in the PCC and in the percentage of AS, as well as a reduction in the number of NAS for all groups. These results were statistically significant for the majority of the groups. CONCLUSION: the results indicate that the three therapy approaches were effective in the treatment of children with PD, and were effective in treating different severity levels. Besides that, most of the changes occurred in the phonological system of the groups with more severe PD.