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

Prefixes repel stress in reading aloud: Evidence from surface dyslexia

This study examined the importance of prefixes as sublexical cues for stress assignment during reading aloud English disyllabic words. In particular, we tested the hypothesis that prefixes repel stress (Rastle & Coltheart, 2000) by investigating the likelihood with which patients with surface dyslexia assign second-syllable stress to prefixed words. Five such patients were presented with three types of disyllabic words for reading aloud: 'regular' prefixed words with weak-strong stress pattern (e.g., remind); 'irregular' prefixed words with strong-weak stress pattern (e.g., reflex); and non-prefixed words with strong-weak stress pattern (e.g., scandal). Results showed that all five patients frequently regularized the strong-weak prefixed words by pronouncing them with second syllable stress. These regularization errors provide strong evidence for the functional role of prefixes in stress assignment during reading. Additional computational simulations using the rule-based algorithm for pronouncing disyllables developed by Rastle and Coltheart (2000) and the CDP++ model of reading aloud (Perry et al., 2010) allowed us to evaluate how these two opponent approaches to reading aloud fare in respect of the patient data.15 page(s

GreekLex 2: a comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stress, as well as several measurements of word similarity and phonetic information. The addition of detailed statistical information about Greek part-of-speech, syllabification, and stress neighbourhood allowed novel analyses of stress distribution within different grammatical categories and syllabic lengths to be carried out. Results showed that the statistical preponderance of stress position on the pre-final syllable that is reported for Greek language is dependent upon grammatical category. Additionally, analyses showed that a proportion higher than 90% of the tokens in the database would be stressed correctly solely by relying on stress neighbourhood information. The database and the scripts for orthographic and phonological syllabification as well as phonetic transcription are available at http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/greeklex/

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

Cross-Modal Transfer of Statistical Information Benefits from Sleep

Extracting regularities from a sequence of events is essential for understanding our environment. However, there is no consensus regarding the extent to which such regularities can be generalised beyond the modality of learning. One reason for this could be the variation in consolidation intervals used in different paradigms, also including an opportunity to sleep. Using a novel statistical learning paradigm in which structured information is acquired in the auditory domain and tested in the visual domain over either 30min or 24hr consolidation intervals, we show that cross-modal transfer can occur, but this transfer is only seen in the 24hr group. Importantly, the extent of cross-modal transfer is predicted by the amount of SWS obtained. Additionally, cross-modal transfer is associated with the same pattern of decreasing MTL and increasing striatal involvement which has previously been observed to occur across 24 hours in unimodal statistical learning. We also observed enhanced functional connectivity after 24 hours in a network of areas which have been implicated in cross-modal integration including the precuneus and the middle occipital gyrus. Finally, functional connectivity between the striatum and the precuneus was also enhanced, and this strengthening was predicted by SWS. These results demonstrate that statistical learning can generalise to some extent beyond the modality of acquisition, and together with our previously published unimodal results, support the notion that statistical learning is both domain-general and domain-specific

Statistical learning leads to persistent memory: evidence for one-year consolidation

Statistical learning is a robust mechanism of the brain that enables the extraction of environmental patterns, which is crucial in perceptual and cognitive domains. However, the dynamical change of processes underlying long-term statistical memory formation has not been tested in an appropriately controlled design. Here we show that a memory trace acquired by statistical learning is resistant to inference as well as to forgetting after one year. Participants performed a statistical learning task and were retested one year later without further practice. The acquired statistical knowledge was resistant to interference, since after one year, participants showed similar memory performance on the previously practiced statistical structure after being tested with a new statistical structure. These results could be key to understand the stability of long-term statistical knowledge

Efficacy of ABRACADABRA literacy instruction in a school setting for children with autism spectrum disorders

© 2018 Background: There is evidence indicating that instruction using ABRACADABRA (ABRA) – a free web application designed to promote literacy development – may benefit children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) when administered on an individualized basis in children's homes. Aims: Here, we investigated the efficacy of ABRA instruction administered in small groups of children with ASD within a school setting. Methods and procedures: Children were aged 5.83–8.42 years (n = 23). Some children were assigned to an instruction group and received a minimum of 20 h of ABRA instruction over 9 weeks (n = 11). The other children comprised an age- and ability-matched control group (n = 12) and received business as usual literacy instruction. Outcome measures included word-level accuracy, passage-level accuracy, and passage-level comprehension, all assessed using standardized tests that were independent of ABRA. Outcomes and results: ANOVAs comparing pre- versus post-instruction raw scores showed statistically significant improvements in word- and passage-level reading accuracy for the instruction group relative to the control group, with large effect sizes. Gains in reading comprehension for the instruction group were not statistically significant and, in a posthoc correlational analysis, appeared to be related to children's socialisation skills (r =.62). Conclusions and implications: Literacy instruction using ABRA is associated with improvement in reading accuracy for children with ASD when administered in small groups within a school setting. Children with ASD may require additional supports to make gains in reading comprehension when literacy instruction using ABRA is delivered in groups

Reading Instruction for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Systematic Review and Quality Analysis

© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This study reviews the literature on reading instruction consistent with the recommendations of the National Reading Panel (NRP; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) for children with autism spectrum disorder, using the Evaluative Method for Determining Evidence-Based Practices in Autism to assess research quality (Reichow, Volkmar, & Cicchetti, 2008). A search of the literature published between 2009 and 2017 identified 10,779 relevant records, of which 19 met inclusion criteria. Studies reported gains in phonics, reading accuracy, reading fluency, and/or reading comprehension skills; however, few were of adequate or strong quality. Instruction that incorporated multiple Big Five elements from the NRP was associated with gains in reading accuracy and comprehension as well as relatively high quality ratings. Clinical implications and priorities for future research are discussed

An acoustic study of lexical stress contrastivity in children with and without autism spectrum disorders

© Cambridge University Press 2018. In this exploratory study, we examined stress contrastivity within real word productions elicited via picture naming in 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 20 typical peers group-wise matched on age and vocabulary. Targets had a dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a strong-weak pattern (SW: 'caterpillar', 'butterfly') or a non-dominant pattern of lexical stress beginning with a weak-strong pattern (WS: 'tomato', 'potato'). Children produced each target twice (n = 320 productions). Acoustic measures were made for the duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the first two vowels for each word production. For vowel duration and fundamental frequency, children with ASD and typical peers produced a similar magnitude of stress contrastivity for SW and WS words. However, there was a significant group difference in the way contrastivity in intensity was realised for WS words whereby children with ASD produced less stress contrastivity than typical peers. Bayesian analyses were in line with our interpretation of our frequentist analyses