The Effect of Somatosensory Input on Word Recognition in Typical Children and Those With Speech Sound Disorder

Purpose: Recent work suggests that speech perception is influenced by the somatosensory system and that oral sensorimotor disruption has specific effects on the perception of speech both in infants who have not yet begun to talk and in older children and adults with ample speech production experience; however, we do not know how such disruptions affect children with speech sound disorder (SSD). Response to disruption of would-be articulators during speech perception could reveal how sensorimotor linkages work for both typical and atypical speech and language development. Such linkages are crucial to advancing our knowledge on how both typically developing and atypically developing children produce and perceive speech. Method: Using a looking-while-listening task, we explored the impact of a sensorimotor restrictor on the recognition of words whose onsets involve late-developing sounds (s, ʃ) for both children with typical development (TD) and their peers with SSD. Results: Children with SSD showed a decrement in performance when they held a restrictor in their mouths during the task, but this was not the case for children with TD. This effect on performance was only observed for the specific speech sounds blocked by the would-be articulators. Conclusion: We argue that these findings provide evidence for altered perceptual motor pathways in children with SSD. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.2180944

Tutorial:Speech assessment for multilingual children who do not speak the same language(s) as the speech-language pathologist

Purpose: The aim of this tutorial is to support speech language pathologists (SLPs) undertaking assessments of multilingual children with suspected speech sound disorders, particularly children who speak languages that are not shared with their SLP. Method: The tutorial was written by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, which comprises 46 researchers (SLPs, linguists, phoneticians, and speech scientists) who have worked in 43 countries and used 27 languages in professional practice. Seventeen panel members met for a 1-day workshop to identify key points for inclusion in the tutorial, 26 panel members contributed to writing this tutorial, and 34 members contributed to revising this tutorial online (some members contributed tomore than 1 task). Results: This tutorial draws on international research evidence and professional expertise to provide a comprehensive overview of working with multilingual children with suspected speech sound disorders. This overview addresses referral, case history, assessment, analysis, diagnosis, and goal setting and the SLP’s cultural competence and preparation for working with interpreters and multicultural support workers and dealing with organizational and government barriers to and facilitators of culturally competent practice. Conclusion: The issues raised in this tutorial are applied in a hypothetical case study of an English-speaking SLP’s assessment of a multilingual Cantonese-and English-speaking 4-year-old boy. Resources are listed throughout the tutorial.Australian Research Council: FT0990588United States Department of Health & Human Services National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA NIH National Institute on Deafness & Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD

Perceptual considerations in multilingual adult and child speech acquisition

We have shown that both first and second language learning involves making sense of diverse language input. The second language learner will be forced to attend to new acoustic-phonetic cues and weight the importance of previously attended cues differently in order to develop a language-specific strategy for processing L2 input. The SLP can help the L2 learner make this transition by structuring the input to focus attention on the critical acoustic cues. The selection of stimuli for such listening tasks should be guided by one.’s knowledge of the prosodic and segmental characteristics of the target phonology and the typical developmental speech errors that children make when learning the target language. All activities should involve authentic engagement with natural language in meaningful contexts. Well established perceptual knowledge of the phonological characteristics of the second language will provide a target to guide the child.’s acquisition of the articulatory gestures required for accurate production of those phonological structures, facilitating improved speech accuracy and intelligibility over time