An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

We examined whether typically developing Italian children exhibit adult-like stress contrastivity for word productions elicited via a picture naming task (n=25 children aged 3\u20135 years and 27 adults). Stimuli were 10 trisyllabic Italian words; half began with a weak\u2013strong (WS) pattern of lexical stress across the initial 2 syllables, as in patata, while the other half began with a strong\u2013weak (SW) pattern, as in gomito. Word productions that were identified as correct via perceptual judgement were analysed acoustically. The initial 2 syllables of each correct word production were analysed in terms of the duration, peak intensity, and peak fundamental frequency of the vowels using a relative measure of contrast\u2014the normalised pairwise variability index (PVI). Results across the majority of measures showed that children\u2019s stress contrastivity was adult-like. However, the data revealed that children\u2019s contrastivity for trisyllabic words beginning with a WS pattern was not adult-like regarding the PVI for vowel duration: children showed less contrastivity than adults. This effect appeared to be driven by differences in word-medial gemination between children and adults. Results are compared with data from a recent acoustic study of stress contrastivity in English speaking children and adults and discussed in relation to language-specific and physiological motor-speech constraints on production

Sensitivity to Probabilistic Orthographic Cues to Lexical Stress in Adolescent Speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Peers

Lexical stress refers to the opposition of strong and weak syllables within polysyllabic words and is a core feature of the English prosodic system. There are probabilistic cues to lexical stress present in English orthography. For example, most disyllabic English words ending with the letters “-ure” have first-syllable stress (e.g., “pasture”, but note words such as “endure”), whereas most ending with “-ose” have second-syllable stress (e.g., “propose”, but note examples such as “glucose”). Adult native speakers of English are sensitive to these probabilities during silent reading. During testing, they tend to assign first-syllable stress when reading a nonword such as “lenture” but second-syllable stress when reading “fostpose” (Arciuli & Cupples, 2006). Difficulties with prosody, including problems processing lexical stress, are a notable feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study investigated the ability of adolescents with ASD (13–17 years of age) to show this sensitivity compared with a group of typically developing peers. Results indicated reduced sensitivity to probabilistic cues to lexical stress in the group with ASD. The implications of these findings are discussed

Linguistic entrenchment: Prior knowledge impacts statistical learning performance

Available online 26 April 2018.Statistical Learning (SL) is typically considered to be a domain-general mechanism by which cognitive systems discover the underlying statistical regularities in the input. Recent findings, however, show clear differences in processing regularities across modalities and stimuli as well as low correlations between performance on visual and auditory tasks. Why does a presumably domain-general mechanism show distinct patterns of modality and stimulus specificity? Here we claim that the key to this puzzle lies in the prior knowledge brought upon by learners to the learning task. Specifically, we argue that learners’ already entrenched expectations about speech co-occurrences from their native language impacts what they learn from novel auditory verbal input. In contrast, learners are free of such entrenchment when processing sequences of visual material such as abstract shapes. We present evidence from three experiments supporting this hypothesis by showing that auditory-verbal tasks display distinct item-specific effects resulting in low correlations between test items. In contrast, non-verbal tasks – visual and auditory – show high correlations between items. Importantly, we also show that individual performance in visual and auditory SL tasks that do not implicate prior knowledge regarding co-occurrence of elements, is highly correlated. In a fourth experiment, we present further support for the entrenchment hypothesis by showing that the variance in performance between different stimuli in auditory-verbal statistical learning tasks can be traced back to their resemblance to participants' native language. We discuss the methodological and theoretical implications of these findings, focusing on models of domain generality/specificity of SL.This paper was supported by the ERC Advanced grant awarded to Ram Frost (project 692502-L2STAT), the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 217/14 awarded to Ram Frost) and by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (RO1 HD 067364 awarded to Ken Pugh and Ram Frost, and PO1 HD 01994 awarded to Haskins Laboratories). Louisa Bogaerts received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 743528 (IF-EF)

Adolescents’ Self-Report of School Satisfaction:The Interaction Between Disability and Gender

School satisfaction is a critical aspect of well-being for every child and adolescent. Yet studies have rarely investigated whether school satisfaction varies depending upon participant characteristics and school-related social factors. Here we investigated whether disability and gender moderate adolescents’ self-report of school satisfaction. We also explored the role of mediating variables such as teacher support, parent support, and relationships with peers (including friendships and also bullying). Our analysis of data from 3,830 adolescents revealed a significant interaction between disability and gender. Girls with disabilities reported the lowest school satisfaction, an effect that appeared to be more strongly mediated by perceived lack of teacher support than other variables. Our findings are novel in disaggregating school satisfaction data by both disability and gender to reveal an interaction between these variables and in investigating the role of mediating variables relating to school-related social factors

An automated lexical stress classification tool for assessing dysprosody in childhood apraxia of speech

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) commonly affects the production of lexical stress contrast in polysyllabic words. Automated classification tools have the potential to increase reliability and efficiency in measuring lexical stress. Here, factors affecting the accuracy of a custom-built deep neural network (DNN)-based classification tool are evaluated. Sixteen children with typical development (TD) and 26 with CAS produced 50 polysyllabic words. Words with strong–weak (SW, e.g., dinosaur) or WS (e.g., banana) stress were fed to the classification tool, and the accuracy measured (a) against expert judgment, (b) for speaker group, and (c) with/without prior knowledge of phonemic errors in the sample. The influence of segmental features and participant factors on tool accuracy was analysed. Linear mixed modelling showed significant interaction between group and stress type, surviving adjustment for age and CAS severity. For TD, agreement for SW and WS words was >80%, but CAS speech was higher for SW (>80%) than WS (~60%). Prior knowledge of segmental errors conferred no clear advantage. Automatic lexical stress classification shows promise for identifying errors in children’s speech at diagnosis or with treatment-related change, but accuracy for WS words in apraxic speech needs improvement. Further training of algorithms using larger sets of labelled data containing impaired speech and WS words may increase accuracy

The Association between Parental Educational Expectations and School Functioning among Young People with Disabilities:A Longitudinal Investigation

Past research has established clear educational inequities between young people with disabilities and their peers. In part, some of these inequities may be attributed to expectations. In this study, we examined whether parental expectations were related to school functioning at high school, with school functioning broadly defined as ease and frequency of engagement in school-based activities. Using the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children ( N = 3,956; 48.9% female; 5.01% with disability), we examined parental expectations and school functioning measured at three time-points, biennially from the ages of 12 and 13 through to 16 and 17. A multigroup, parallel latent growth curve analysis revealed that high parental expectations at the first timepoint predicted steeper increases in the trajectory of school functioning over time, but only among young people with disability. Parental expectations did not significantly predict school functioning trajectories for the remainder of the sample. Subsequent multigroup analyses that compared disability characteristics revealed that learning difficulties and speech problems, in particular, were associated with lower parental expectations. These results suggest that the perceptions of parents in the lives of young people with disability are important and efforts to shape them may have long-term benefits

Advancing our understanding of the link between statistical learning and language acquisition: The need for longitudinal data

Mastery of language can be a struggle for some children. Amongst those that succeed in achieving this feat there is variability in proficiency. Cognitive scientists remain intrigued by this variation. A now substantial body of research suggests that language acquisition is underpinned by a child’s capacity for statistical learning (SL). Moreover, a growing body of research has demonstrated that variability in SL is associated with variability in language proficiency. Yet, there is a striking lack of longitudinal data. To date, there has been no comprehensive investigation of whether a capacity for SL in young children is, in fact, associated with language proficiency in subsequent years. Here we review key studies that have led to the need for this longitudinal research. Advancing the language acquisition debate via longitudinal research has the potential to transform our understanding of typical development as well as disorders such as autism, specific language impairment, and dyslexia

Subskills associated with spelling ability in children with and without autism spectrum disorders

Background and aims Effective literacy instruction demands a clear understanding of the subskills that underpin children’s reading and writing abilities. Some previous research on reading has questioned whether the same subskills support literacy acquisition for typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders. This study examined the subskills associated with spelling ability in a group of 20 children with ASD aged 5–12 years (ASD group). A group of 20 typically developing children matched for age and word spelling accuracy (TD group) provided comparative data. Methods Participants completed standardised assessments of vocabulary, phonological awareness, letter knowledge and word spelling. Errors produced in response to the word spelling assessment were analysed for evidence of phonological awareness. In addition, all spelling attempts were analysed for evidence of phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness, ‘linguistic awareness’, using the Computerised Spelling Sensitivity System. Results Correlation and regression analyses showed statistically significant relationships between phonological awareness and word spelling accuracy for children in the ASD and TD groups. Spelling errors produced by both groups contained evidence of phonological awareness. Analysis of all spelling attempts showed that the overall level of linguistic awareness encoded by children in the ASD and TD groups was not significantly different. Conclusions These findings provide evidence that phonological awareness and other subskills support spelling in children with autism spectrum disorders as they do in typically developing children. Implications The similar spelling profiles exhibited by children with autism spectrum disorders and their typically developing peers suggest that these populations may benefit from literacy instruction that targets the same underpinning subskills

Orthographic correlates of lexical stress

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Probabilistic Cues to Grammatical Category in English Orthography and Their Influence During Reading

We investigated probabilistic cues to grammatical category (noun vs. verb) in English orthography. These cues are located in both the beginnings and endings of wordsas identified in our large-scale corpus analysis. Experiment 1 tested participants' sensitivity to beginning and ending cues while making speeded grammatical classifications. Experiment 2 tested sensitivity to these cues during lexical decisions. For both tasks, words with consistent ending cues (with respect to grammatical category) were processed more quickly and with lower error rates than words with inconsistent ending cues. However, for beginnings, consistent cues resulted in lower errors but no differences in response times. The data reported here point to the multifaceted nature of grammatical category representation and indicate that probabilistic orthographic cues relating to grammatical category have a clear influence on lexical processing particularly when these cues are located at the end of the word