Background: Intelligibility measurement is influenced by the characteristics of a speaker, listener and contextual factors. This study addresses the clinical problem of measuring speech intelligibility in children with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) in real-world conditions. Aims: The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of…

Background: Acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) involves speech-production deficits on both the segmental and suprasegmental levels. Recent research has identified a non-linear interaction between the metrical structure of bisyllabic words and word-production accuracy in German speakers with AOS, with trochaic words (strong-weak stress) being…

Rhyme awareness is a typical component of preschool curricula, yet research evidence does not support a direct link between rhyming ability in typically developing preschoolers and later literacy acquisition. Since the evidence base on literacy development among typically developing children is often used to guide intervention among children with…

Purpose: This study compared perception of consonants in medial position by preschoolers, with and without speech sound disorder (SSD), with similar vocabulary and language skills. In addition, we investigated the association between speech perception and production skills. Method: Participants were 36 monolingual English-speaking children with…

Purpose: Children with dyslexia have been suggested to experience deficits in both categorical perception (CP) and speech identification in noise (SIN) perception. However, results regarding both abilities are inconsistent, and the relationship between them is still unclear. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between CP…

Purpose: Subjective speech intelligibility assessment is often preferred over more objective approaches that rely on transcript scoring. This is, in part, because of the intensive manual labor associated with extracting objective metrics from transcribed speech. In this study, we propose an automated approach for scoring transcripts that provides…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…

Background: Intelligibility is a speaker's ability to convey a message to a listener. Including an assessment of intelligibility is essential in both research and clinical work relating to individuals with communication disorders due to speech impairment. Assessment of the intelligibility of spontaneous speech can be used as an overall…

Background: A pattern of ingressive substitutions for word-final sibilants can be identified in a small number of cases in child speech disorder, with growing evidence suggesting it is a phonological difficulty, despite the unusual surface form. Phonological difficulty implies a problem with the cognitive process of organizing speech into sound…

The purpose of this study was to address the hypothesis that childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is influenced by an underlying deficit in sequential processing that is also expressed in other modalities. In a sample of 21 adults from five multigenerational families, 11 with histories of various familial speech sound disorders, 3 biologically…

Purpose: The purpose of the project was to design a nonverbal dynamic assessment of phoneme deletion that may prove useful with individuals who demonstrate complex communication needs (CCN) and are unable to communicate using natural speech or who present with moderate-severe speech impairments. Method: A nonverbal dynamic assessment of phoneme…

The current study was designed to examine the relationships between performance on a nonverbal phoneme deletion task administered in a dynamic assessment format with performance on measures of phoneme deletion, word-level reading, and speech sound production that required verbal responses for school-age children with speech sound disorders (SSDs).…

Purpose: The authors sought to describe longitudinal changes in Percentage of Consonants Correct--Revised (PCC-R) after severe pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI), to compare the odds of normal-range PCC-R in children injured at older and younger ages, and to correlate predictor variables and PCC-R outcomes. Method: In 56 children injured…

Although children with speech impairment are at increased risk for impaired literacy, many learn to read and spell without difficulty. Around half the children with speech impairment have delayed acquisition, making errors typical of a normally developing younger child (e.g. reducing consonant clusters so that "spoon" is pronounced as…

Background: Currently, clinicians mainly rely on perceptual judgements to assess intelligibility of dysarthric speech. Although often highly reliable, this procedure is subjective with a lot of intrinsic variables. Therefore, certain benefits can be expected from a speech technology-based intelligibility assessment. Previous attempts to develop an…