Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research最新文献

Purpose: In the current study, we examined the alignment of language choice of bilingual parent-child dyads in play-based interactions.

Method: Forty-four bilingual Spanish-English parent-child dyads participated in a 10-min naturalistic free-play interaction to determine whether bilingual children and their parents respond to each other in the same language(s) across conversational turns and whether children's language ability and children's and parents' language dominance affect language alignment. Children's language ability was indexed by the Bilingual English-Spanish Assessment. Logistic regression was used to test the effects of children's language ability and children's and parents' language dominance on the alignment of language choice.

Results: Results revealed that children and parents largely aligned their language choice and that children's and parents' language dominance, but not children's language ability, influenced alignment. Patterns of alignment differed between children and parents. Children aligned to their dominant language, and this was true for both English- and Spanish-dominant children. In contrast, English-dominant parents aligned equally to both languages, whereas Spanish-dominant parents aligned significantly more to Spanish.

Conclusion: Together, these findings suggest that bilinguals' alignment of language choice is deeply sensitive to language dominance effects in both children and adults but that parents may also choose their language strategically in conversations with their children.

Purpose: Many studies have investigated test design influences (e.g., number of stimuli, open- vs. closed-set tasks) on word recognition ability, but the impact that stimuli selection has on auditory emotion recognition has not been explored. This study assessed the impact of some stimulus parameters and test design methodologies on emotion recognition performance to optimize stimuli to use for auditory emotion recognition testing.

Method: Twenty-five young adult participants with normal or near-normal hearing completed four tasks evaluating methodological parameters that may affect emotion recognition performance. The four conditions assessed (a) word stimuli versus sentence stimuli, (b) the total number of stimuli and number of stimuli per emotion category, (c) the number of talkers, and (d) the number of emotion categories.

Results: Sentence stimuli yielded higher emotion recognition performance and increased performance variability compared to word stimuli. Recognition performance was independent of the number of stimuli per category, the number of talkers, and the number of emotion categories. Task duration expectedly increased with the total number of stimuli. A test of auditory emotion recognition that combined these design methodologies yielded high performance with low variability for listeners with normal hearing.

Conclusions: Stimulus selection influences performance and test reliability for auditory emotion recognition. Researchers should consider these influences when designing future tests of auditory emotion recognition to ensure tests are able to accomplish the study's aims.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28270943.

Purpose: Previous work has shown that judgments of emotion differ between clear and conversational speech, particularly for perceived anger. The current study examines talker differences in perceived emotion for a database of talkers producing clear and conversational speech.

Method: A database of 41 talkers was used to assess talker differences in six emotion categories ("Anger," "Fear," "Disgust," "Happiness," "Sadness," and "Neutral"). Twenty-six healthy young adult listeners rated perceived emotion in 14 emotionally neutral sentences produced in clear and conversational styles by all talkers in the database. Generalized linear mixed-effects modeling was utilized to examine talker differences in all six emotion categories.

Results: There was a significant effect of speaking style for all emotion categories, and substantial talker differences existed after controlling for speaking style in all categories. Additionally, many emotion categories, including anger, had significant Talker × Style interactions. Perceived anger was significantly higher in clear speech compared to conversational speech for 85% of the talkers.

Conclusions: While there is a large speaking style effect for perceived anger, the magnitude of the effect varies between talkers. The perception of negatively valenced emotions in clear speech, including anger, may result in unintended interpersonal consequences for those utilizing clear speech as a communication facilitator. Further research is needed to examine potential acoustic sources of perceived anger in clear speech.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28304384.

Purpose: Objective measures of auditory capacity in the hearing loss population are crucial for cross-checking behavioral measures. Mismatch negativity (MMN) is an auditory event-related potential component indexing automatic change detection and reflecting speech discrimination performance. MMN can potentially serve as an objective measure of speech discrimination. This study examined whether the audibility of stimuli modulates MMN to Mandarin lexical tone contrasts by analyzing hearing loss simulation (HLS) in adults with normal hearing.

Method: The configurations of HLS were the between-subjects variable, with the sloping HLS simulating high-frequency hearing loss (more severe hearing loss at frequencies > 1000 Hz) and the rising HLS simulating low-frequency hearing loss. An AX discrimination task was used to measure the lexical tone discrimination by calculating d'. A multideviant oddball paradigm with large (high-level vs. low-dipping tones, T1-T3) and small (high-rising vs. low-dipping tones, T2-T3) deviant contrasts was employed to examine whether deviant size affects MMN sensitivity to stimuli's audibility.

Results: The results showed that the T1-T3 change elicited MMN in the sloping and rising HLS groups. The T2-T3 change elicited MMN in the sloping HLS group but a positive mismatch response in the rising HLS group. Furthermore, regression analysis indicates that more negative mismatch responses to T2-T3 predict better performance in discriminating T2-T3 contrasts.

Conclusions: MMN to the T2-T3 change is sensitive to reduced audibility at frequencies lower than 1000 Hz. This suggests that MMN has the potential to serve as an objective assessment for evaluating lexical tone discrimination in people with hearing loss.

Purpose: Although users can customize the frequency-gain response of hearing aids, the variability in their individual adjustments remains a concern. This study investigated the within-subject variability in the gain adjustments made within a single self-adjustment procedure.

Method: Two experiments were conducted with 20 older adults with mild-to-severe hearing loss. Participants used a two-dimensional touchscreen to adjust hearing aid amplification across six frequency bands (0.25-8 kHz) while listening to continuous speech in background noise. In these two experiments, two user interface designs, differing in control-to-gain map, were tested. For each participant, the statistical properties of 30 repeated gain adjustments within a single self-adjustment procedure were analyzed.

Results: When participants made multiple gain adjustments, their preferred gain settings showed the highest variability in the 4- and 8-kHz frequency bands and the lowest variability in the 1- and 2-kHz bands, suggesting that midfrequency bands are weighted more heavily in their preferences compared to high frequencies. Additionally, significant correlations were observed for the preferred gains between the 0.25- and 0.5-kHz bands, between the 0.5- and 1-kHz bands, and between the 4- and 8-kHz bands. Lastly, the standard error of the preferred gain reduced with an increasing number of trials, with a rate close to being slightly shallower than would be expected for invariant mean preference for most participants, suggesting convergent estimation of the underlying preference across trials.

Conclusion: Self-adjustments of frequency-gain profiles are informative about the underlying preference; however, the contributions from various frequency bands are neither equal nor independent.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28405397.

Objective: The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between laryngeal aerodynamics, acoustics, and hypernasality in children with cleft palate with or without lip (CP ± L).

Method: This study used a prospectively performed cross-sectional design. Fifty-six children between the ages of 6 and 17 years with CP ± L participated (M_age= 11.7, SD = 3.4; male = 32, female = 24). Children were separated into four groups based on auditory-perceptual ratings of hypernasality made using the Cleft Audit Protocol for Speech-Augmented-Americleft Modification protocol. Laryngeal aerodynamic measures including subglottal pressure, transglottal airflow, laryngeal aerodynamic resistance (LAR), and phonation threshold pressure were collected. Acoustic measures of smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPP) and low-to-high ratio on sustained vowels and connected speech were also considered. Analyses controlled for age, sex, auditory-perceptual ratings of voice quality, and speech intelligibility.

Results: Children with minimally or mildly hypernasal resonance demonstrated significantly increased subglottal pressure, reduced transglottal airflow, and increased LAR, when compared with children with balanced or moderately hypernasal resonance. CPP on sustained vowel was significantly lower for children with moderate hypernasality when compared with all other groups-suggesting poorer voice quality. Other acoustic measures were in or near normative pediatric range.

Conclusions: Children with CP ± L and minimal or mildly hypernasal resonance demonstrated aerodynamic voice measures indicative of vocal hyperfunction. These findings suggest that children with CP ± L may compensate for velopharyngeal dysfunction on a laryngeal level, thus increasing the risk of laryngeal pathology. Future study should explore the relationship between laryngeal function and velopharyngeal port closure and consider how voice problems can be prevented or mitigated in children with CP ± L.

Purpose: Some bilinguals may exhibit lower performance when recognizing speech in noise (SiN) in their second language (L2) compared to monolinguals in their first language. Poorer performance has been found mostly for late bilinguals (L2 acquired after childhood) listening to sentences containing linguistic context and less so for simultaneous/early bilinguals (L2 acquired during childhood) and when testing context-free stimuli. However, most previous studies tested younger participants, meaning little is known about interactions with age; the purpose of this study was to address this gap.

Method: Context-free SiN understanding was measured via the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) in 3,803 young and middle-aged bilingual and monolingual adults (ages 18-57 years; 19.6% bilinguals, all L2 English) with normal to near-normal hearing. Bilingual adults included simultaneous (n = 462), early (n = 185), and late (n = 97) bilinguals. Performance on the MRT was measured with both accuracy and response time. A self-reported measure of current English use was also collected for bilinguals to evaluate its impact on MRT performance.

Results: Current age impacted MRT accuracy scores differently for each listener group. Relative to monolinguals, simultaneous and early bilinguals showed decreased performance with older age. Response times slowed with increasing current age at similar rates for all groups, despite faster overall response times for monolinguals. Among all bilingual listeners, greater current English language use predicted higher MRT accuracy. For simultaneous bilinguals, greater English use was associated with faster response times.

Conclusions: SiN outcomes in bilingual adults are impacted by age at time of testing and by fixed features of their language history (i.e., age of acquisition) as well as language practices, which can shift over time (i.e., current language use). Results support routine querying of language history and use in the audiology clinic.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28405430.

Purpose: This pilot study systematically compared voice symptomatology across varied sensory trick conditions in those with laryngeal dystonia (LD), those with essential vocal tremor (EVT), and vocally normal controls (NCs). Sensory tricks are considered signature characteristics of dystonia and were hypothesized to reduce voice symptoms in those with LD compared to EVT and NC groups.

Method: Five participants from each group (LD, EVT, and NC) completed speech recordings under control and sensory trick conditions (delayed auditory feedback [DAF], vibrotactile stimulation [VTS], and nasoendoscopic recordings with and without topical anesthesia). Comparisons between groups and conditions were made using (a) a paired-comparison paradigm (control vs. sensory condition) listener ratings of voice quality, (b) participant-perceived vocal effort ratings, and (c) average smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS).

Results: Participants with EVT displayed significantly worse listener ratings under most sensory trick conditions, whereas participants with LD were rated significantly worse for DAF and VTS conditions only. However, participant vocal effort ratings were similar across all sensory trick conditions. Average CPPS values generally supported listener ratings across conditions and speakers except during DAF, wherein CPPS values increased (i.e., measurably improved voice quality), whereas listener ratings indicated worsened voice quality for both voice disorder groups.

Conclusions: Outcomes of this study did not support the hypothesized influences of sensory trick conditions on LD voice symptoms, with both LD and EVT groups experiencing worsened symptoms under VTS and DAF conditions. These adverse effects on voice symptoms warrant further research to further evaluate neural pathways and associated sensorimotor response patterns that distinguish individuals with LD and EVT.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28462292.

Purpose: The purpose of this work is to examine whether therapy-related improvements in trained versus untrained items (acquisition and response generalization, respectively) are differentially affected by phonological versus semantic language treatments and to investigate individual variables associated with treatment response.

Method: Sixty-three participants with chronic poststroke aphasia were included in this retrospective analysis of data from a large, multisite clinical trial with an unblinded cross-over design in which all participants underwent 3 weeks of semantic treatment and 3 weeks of phonological treatment. A linear mixed-effects model was used to examine treatment acquisition and generalization effects for the two treatment types. Multiple regression analyses were also conducted to examine individual participant factors associated with acquisition compared to generalization.

Results: Results showed main effects of outcome type (acquisition vs. response generalization) and treatment type (semantic vs. phonological) on posttreatment changes in naming and an interaction between these factors: For acquisition, phonological treatment resulted in better gains than semantic treatment, whereas for response generalization, semantic treatment resulted in slightly better gains than phonological treatment. There were no significant associates of generalization gains. However, acquisition after phonological treatment was associated with less severe aphasia and higher nonverbal semantic processing abilities at baseline, whereas acquisition after semantic treatment was associated with apraxia of speech.

Conclusions: On average, phonological treatment may be more effective for acquiring trained items, whereas semantic treatment may be more effective for response generalization to untrained items. Moreover, acquisition gains are associated with individual baseline variables. These findings could have clinical implications for treatment planning.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28410212.

Purpose: Automatic measurements of fundamental frequency (F0) typically contain tracking errors that can be challenging to accurately correct. This study assessed to what degree these errors change F0 summary statistics in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and neurotypical adults. In addition, we include a case study examining how the removal of tracking errors influenced our ability to predict a perceptual outcome measure, speech expressiveness, associated with dysarthria and PD. Several different statistical approaches for characterizing F0 variability were used to demonstrate the influence of tracking errors.

Method: Eight speakers with PD and eight neurotypical speakers were recorded reading The Caterpillar passage. F0 measurements were extracted in Praat and tracking errors were manually identified. The effect of tracking errors on F0 mean and standard deviation was statistically analyzed. Twenty listeners rated speech expressiveness across 80 sentences. The relationship between listener ratings and F0 variability was examined using different statistical approaches for characterizing F0 variability (with and without tracking errors).

Results: Measurements of F0 standard deviation, but not F0 mean, were significantly affected by tracking errors. Relationships between measurements of F0 variability and expressiveness were strengthened when tracking errors were removed from data analysis.

Conclusions: Tracking errors significantly alter F0 standard deviation values for both speakers with PD and neurotypical adults. Case study evidence also suggests that tracking errors can reduce the strength of relationships between F0 variability and perceptual outcome measures, such as speech expressiveness.