Non-verbal Speech: A Phonological Investigation Into The Utterances of a Non-verbal Individual with Autistic Spectrum Condition

Do the vocalisations of non-verbal people display phonological influence? It is known that Autistic Spectrum disorder (ASC) presents barriers to achieving fluency in a language. These barriers are often negotiated by utilising Alternative, Assistive Communication systems (AACs) that can rely on signing and symbolic awareness. This can leave the vocal behaviours of non-verbal people in a non-communicative space, often explored in Intensive Interaction, and social games. This research investigates the vocalisations of Simeon, a young man with ASC, who is non-verbal, but vocalises socially. Exploring the relationship between Simeon’s vocalisations and the phonologies of his home languages provides an insight into the ways he appears to align with the phonetics of his environment. The analysis explores the influence of three distinct language variants: Central Thai, Isan, and South East British English. The influence of these language variants is tested by comparing their phonemic inventories with the phones Simeon articulates. The tones of Thai and Isan as well as English patterns of intonation are compared to the pitch contour patterns found in Simeon’s vocalisations. Simeon’s articulation of vowels are subjected to formant analysis and compared to the articulations of his parents. In this approach, the paper addresses the question in a way that is respectful to the rights of the participant, but also critical of over-application of phonological theory. Instead a middle space is identified between the apparent phonetic systems present in the data, and language-centred phonology

An examination of growth in vocabulary and phonological awareness in early childhood: an individual growth model approach

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston UniversityThe present study used individual growth modeling to examine the role of specific forms (i.e., receptive, expressive, and definitional vocabulary and grammatical skill) and levels of oral vocabulary skill (i.e., 25th, 50th, or 75th percentile) in phonological awareness growth during the preschool and kindergarten years. Sixty-one, typically-developing, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, all from middle- to upper-income families, participated in the year-long study. A comprehensive battery of standardized and unstandardized measures was used to assess phonological awareness, oral vocabulary (i.e., receptive, expressive, and definitional) and grammatical skill at baseline, and at 3, 6, and 9 months later. Receptive vocabulary was the strongest predictor of growth in phonological awareness for the sample as a whole, followed by expressive vocabulary and grammatical skill, respectively. In the full model, definitional level vocabulary did not make a significant contribution to growth in phonological awareness. Receptive vocabulary accounted for additional phonological awareness growth in the 3-year-olds, but not in 4- and 5-year-olds, while expressive vocabulary accounted for additional phonological awareness growth in 4- and 5-year-olds, but not in 3-year-olds. Post hoc analyses were conducted to explore the change in relations between phonological awareness and receptive and expressive vocabulary that was identified by the individual growth models. The post hoc results suggested that higher levels of expressive vocabulary (i.e., higher scores on the measures) are likely required to complete phonological awareness tasks with the most difficult operations and highest task demands, even if the linguistic unit involved is large. The theory of lexical reorganization attributes the origin and protracted development of phonological awareness to increases in vocabulary size (Metsala & Walley, 1998). The present study's results suggest that increases in vocabulary size might be necessary, but not sufficient, as a foundation for phonological awareness development. Expressive level vocabulary might also be needed to hold words in memory to perform complex manipulations required in higher level phonological awareness tasks

Multimodal Data Analysis of Dyadic Interactions for an Automated Feedback System Supporting Parent Implementation of Pivotal Response Treatment

abstract: Parents fulfill a pivotal role in early childhood development of social and communication skills. In children with autism, the development of these skills can be delayed. Applied behavioral analysis (ABA) techniques have been created to aid in skill acquisition. Among these, pivotal response treatment (PRT) has been empirically shown to foster improvements. Research into PRT implementation has also shown that parents can be trained to be effective interventionists for their children. The current difficulty in PRT training is how to disseminate training to parents who need it, and how to support and motivate practitioners after training. Evaluation of the parents’ fidelity to implementation is often undertaken using video probes that depict the dyadic interaction occurring between the parent and the child during PRT sessions. These videos are time consuming for clinicians to process, and often result in only minimal feedback for the parents. Current trends in technology could be utilized to alleviate the manual cost of extracting data from the videos, affording greater opportunities for providing clinician created feedback as well as automated assessments. The naturalistic context of the video probes along with the dependence on ubiquitous recording devices creates a difficult scenario for classification tasks. The domain of the PRT video probes can be expected to have high levels of both aleatory and epistemic uncertainty. Addressing these challenges requires examination of the multimodal data along with implementation and evaluation of classification algorithms. This is explored through the use of a new dataset of PRT videos. The relationship between the parent and the clinician is important. The clinician can provide support and help build self-efficacy in addition to providing knowledge and modeling of treatment procedures. Facilitating this relationship along with automated feedback not only provides the opportunity to present expert feedback to the parent, but also allows the clinician to aid in personalizing the classification models. By utilizing a human-in-the-loop framework, clinicians can aid in addressing the uncertainty in the classification models by providing additional labeled samples. This will allow the system to improve classification and provides a person-centered approach to extracting multimodal data from PRT video probes.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

The conceptualization of a theoretical framework for a music intervention to improve auditory development in very preterm infants

Very preterm infants are at a high risk for language delays that can persist throughout their lifetime. The auditory system is rapidly developing and highly sensitive to acoustic stimulation during the third trimester of pregnancy. The acoustic nature of the womb provides the essential foundation for auditory perceptual skills necessary for language acquisition. In contrast, the NICU environment presents a wider spectrum of sounds that can alter the early development of the auditory system and cause delays in language acquisition. Research supports the importance of early exposure to speech sounds for optimal development of auditory perceptual ability and the critical role of the intrauterine characteristics of language. Pitches below 300 Hz, as well as rhythmic patterns and prosodic contours are highly salient intrauterine features of language that make up the infant’s initial auditory experience. The purpose of this study is to form a theoretical framework as a structure for understanding how intrauterine speech characteristics of pitch, rhythm, and prosody can be implemented as active ingredients in a music intervention to improve auditory development and long-term language outcomes in very premature infants. The framework is presented and described in detail. Implications for a future research agenda and applications for clinical practice are explored

Early speech motor and language skills in childhood apraxia of speech: evidence for a core deficit in speech motor control?

Children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) present with significant speech production deficits, the effects of which often persist well into late childhood (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2007; Lewis, Freebairn, Hansen, Iyengar, & Taylor, 2004). Debate has historically surrounded whether the features of CAS are the result of an impairment in linguistic or speech motor systems, or both (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2007). Most research, however, has failed to explicitly consider a developmental perspective of the disorder, arguably limiting the associated interpretations that often (implicitly) assume an established underlying system (Maassen, 2002). One of the key tenets of such a developmental perspective is the possibility of an original core deficit in one system, with negative consequences for aspects of the system that subsequently develop.A mixed-methodology paradigm was employed in the present research in order to explore the core deficit in CAS. Similar paradigms have been applied to the study of dyslexia (Koster et al., 2005; Lyytinen et al., 2001; Viholainen et al., 2006) and autism spectrum disorders (Coonrod & Stone, 2004; Dawson, Osterling, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 2000; Iverson & Wozniak, 2007), but have yet to be applied to CAS.Study 1 sought to quantify parental report of vocalisation behaviours in children with a clinical diagnosis of CAS. The parents of 20 children with suspected CAS (sCAS) completed a questionnaire focussing on the prelinguistic development of their children as infants. Responses were compared to those from parents of 20 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 20 children with typically developing (TD) speech and language development. The sCAS children were reported to be significantly less vocal, less likely to have babbled, later in the emergence of first words and later in the emergence of two-word combinations than the TD children. However, the SLI children were reported similarly on many (but not all) items. Despite this similarity, the sCAS group were unique in terms of the presence of reported babbling (35% were reported not to have babbled at all, compared to the TD and SLI children who were all recalled as having babbled in infancy), and the emergence of two word combinations (significantly later than both the TD and SLI groups). In addition, the motor milestones of age of crawling and age of walking were significantly correlated with age of emergence of two-word combinations in the sCAS group, suggesting commonly constrained speech and motor development. Overall, the results provided preliminary support for the notion of atypical prelinguistic vocal development in children with sCAS, and highlighted the importance of further research on the topic.Study 2 applied a retrospective data paradigm in exploring the prelinguistic vocal development of children with CAS. Nine clinically-ascertained children, aged 3 to 4 years and presenting with a range of speech and language profiles (including 3 with suspected CAS), were characterised in terms of operationally-defined CAS characteristics in the first stage (2A) of this study. The battery of tasks included standardised speech and language assessments as well as non-standardised tasks targeting speech production ability. A group of 21 age-matched children with typically developing speech and language skills provided comparison data for the non-standardised tasks. This phase of the study documented CAS characteristics in five of the nine clinical sample participants, with two of these children showing all five of the features investigated. Study 2B examined the early speech, language and motor development of the clinical sample children, via analysis of data available retrospectively for this unique group of children.Their infant profiles were compared to those of 205 infants who had been part of the same community program that the clinical sample had been involved in (and thus had infant data available) but who did not have identified ongoing speech and language issues. Single case comparisons (Crawford & Garthwaite, 2005) revealed that the child with the greatest number and severity of CAS features at preschool age demonstrated significantly poorer expressive skills and a significant dissociation in receptive-expressive abilities in infancy, compared to the typically developing children. Profiles for the other clinical sample children varied considerably.In the third study (Study 3), the development of infants with a family history of CAS (n = 8) was compared to that of infants with no such familial risk (n =8) to further examine the proposed core deficit in CAS. Early speech, language and motor development was tracked at 9, 12, 15, 18 and 24 months. The siblings as a group demonstrated significantly poorer expressive language, speech sound development and fine motor ability than the comparison group, consistent with the notion of a verbal trait deficit (Lewis, Freebairn, Hansen, Taylor et al., 2004). At two years of age, two siblings (and none of the comparison infants) showed clinically-important delays in speech and language development. Inspection of their profiles suggested one infant (SIB2) to present with features consistent with putative early features of CAS (Davis & Velleman, 2000); the other (SIB1) to present with language difficulties not suggestive of CAS.Analysis of their vocalisation samples revealed that while SIB2’s rate of vocalisations at 9 months was not different to that of the comparison group, the nature of the vocalisations were different. While all comparison infants were using canonical syllables at 9 months, SIB2 had not entered this important stage until 12 months, and showed a significantly reduced proportion of canonical syllables at this age (2.5% compared to the comparison infants, who averaged 17%, with none producing less than 6%). Acoustic analyses performed on prelinguistic canonical syllables showed that while duration did not differ, a restricted use of the F1:F2 planar space was noted for SIB2 compared to the typically developing infants, suggesting limited vowel production. Furthermore, a particularly strong correlation between F1 and F2 was observed, suggesting stronger coupling of the articulators. Importantly, the vocalisation data, together with data from standardised assessments, showed a dissociation between speech motor and conceptualiser areas, with a deficit in speech motor control evident in the context of intact conceptual skills for this infant. In contrast, SIB1 (who showed a language delayed profile at 2 years, with no CAS features) did not evidence the types of anomalies identified for SIB2.Taken together, the results of the present research provide support for the viability of a speech motor control deficit account of CAS, when interpreted in a developmental context. As such, they highlight the importance of the prelinguistic period and longitudinal investigations in examining the underlying core deficit in CAS, and suggest important implications for theoretical and clinical conceptualisations of the disorder

Models and analysis of vocal emissions for biomedical applications

This book of Proceedings collects the papers presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications, MAVEBA 2003, held 10-12 December 2003, Firenze, Italy. The workshop is organised every two years, and aims to stimulate contacts between specialists active in research and industrial developments, in the area of voice analysis for biomedical applications. The scope of the Workshop includes all aspects of voice modelling and analysis, ranging from fundamental research to all kinds of biomedical applications and related established and advanced technologies