Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research最新文献

Purpose: To avoid misdiagnosis with developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilingual children, it is recommended to evaluate both languages. However, unlike their monolingual peers, bilingual children acquire their heritage language under adverse input conditions. Focusing on Levantine Arabic, the study evaluates the clinical utility of a standardized test for Arabic and an Arabic Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings sentence repetition task (LITMUS-SRT) for ruling in/out DLD in bilingual children acquiring Arabic as a heritage language in Germany. Both tools were developed for the majority diglossic Lebanese bilingual context. However, it is still unclear whether they can be reliably applied in heritage contexts.

Method: Fifty-nine children (5;6-9;1 [years;months]) participated in the study: 18 bilingual typically developing ([BiTD]) children with early exposure to German (heritage BiTD), nine heritage bilingual children with DLD (heritage BiDLD), eight typically developing late-successive bilingual children, and 24 typically developing monolingual children, who served as controls.

Results: Unlike monolingual and late successive bilingual children with typical language development, many heritage BiTD children resembled their BiDLD peers, especially on measures of expressive/receptive vocabulary and morphosyntax production, which were negatively affected by early second language exposure. In contrast, the Arabic LITMUS-SRT did not disadvantage heritage BiTD children, who performed on par with their typically developing monolingual and late successive bilingual peers on most structures. BiDLD showed poor performance on all structures.

Conclusions: Standardized tests assessing language domains sensitive to reduced heritage language input bear a risk of overdiagnosis with DLD in heritage contexts. The Arabic LITMUS-SRT, on the other hand, provides a fair estimate of heritage language abilities. However, task construction should consider morphophonological aspects vulnerable in heritage Arabic.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate postural control in adults with age-related hearing loss (ARHL) by adding a variation of a 30° lateral head tilt for each measure.

Method: Individuals between the ages of 50 and 70 years were recruited (10 with normal hearing, 32 with ARHL) and evaluated using pure-tone audiometry, vestibular function assessments, and postural control measures. Vestibular function assessments used were video head impulse test (vHIT), cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs), and ocular VEMPs. Postural control measures used were single leg stance (SLS), Romberg on foam (RF), and tandem walking (TW). Pearson correlation and linear regression were used to evaluate the relationship between pure-tone average, vestibular function assessments, and postural control measures.

Results: Results revealed significant correlations between ARHL and cervical VEMPs and ocular VEMPs. As ARHL increased, amplitude of cervical and ocular VEMPs decreased. There were no significant correlations for ARHL and vHIT gain. SLS with lateral head tilt was significantly associated with ARHL. As ARHL increased, the time for SLS with lateral head tilt decreased. There were no significant findings for ARHL and SLS without lateral head tilt, TW with and without lateral head tilt, or RF with and without lateral head tilt.

Conclusions: The results of this study described the decreased postural control with lateral head tilt present as ARHL increased. Furthermore, this study supported the previously documented vestibular degradation that is present in the ARHL population compared to normal hearing. This study suggested that the postural control measure most sensitive to detecting reduced postural control in individuals with ARHL was SLS with lateral head tilt. Further study is needed to hone the specific parameters of using SLS with lateral head tilt as a screening measure to assess risk of falls in the ARHL population.

Purpose: Auditory perceptual and cognitive tasks can be useful as a long-term goal in guiding rehabilitation and intervention strategies in audiology clinics that mostly operate at a faster pace and on strict timelines. The rationale of this study was to assess test-retest reliability of an abbreviated test battery and evaluate age-related auditory perceptual and cognitive effects on these measures.

Method: Experiment 1 evaluated the test-retest repeatability of an abbreviated test battery and its use in an adverse listening environment. Ten participants performed two visits, each including four conditions: quiet, background noise, external noise, and background mixed with external noise. In Experiment 2, both auditory perceptual and cognitive assessments were collected from younger adults with normal hearing and older adults with and without hearing loss. The full test battery included measures of frequency selectivity, temporal fine structure and envelope processing, spectrotemporal and spatial processing and cognition, and an external measure of tolerance to background noise.

Results: Results from Experiment 1 showed good test-retest repeatability and nonsignificant effects from background or external noise. In Experiment 2, effects of age and hearing loss were shown across auditory perceptual and cognitive measures, except in measures of temporal envelope perception and tolerance to background noise.

Conclusions: These data support the use of an abbreviated test battery in relatively uncontrolled listening environments such as clinic waiting rooms. With an efficient test battery, perceptual and cognitive deficits can be assessed with minimal resources and little clinician involvement due to the automated nature of the test and the use of consumer-grade technology.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28021070.

Purpose: We investigate the extent to which automated audiovisual metrics extracted during an affect production task show statistically significant differences between a cohort of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls.

Method: Forty children with ASD and 21 neurotypical controls interacted with a multimodal conversational platform with a virtual agent, Tina, who guided them through tasks prompting facial and vocal communication of four emotions-happy, angry, sad, and afraid-under conditions of high and low verbal and social cognitive task demands.

Results: Individuals with ASD exhibited greater standard deviation of the fundamental frequency of the voice with the minima and maxima of the pitch contour occurring at an earlier time point as compared to controls. The intensity and voice quality of emotional speech were also different between the two cohorts in certain conditions. Additionally, facial metrics capturing the acceleration of the lower lip, lip width, eye opening, and vertical displacement of the eyebrows were also important markers to distinguish between children with ASD and neurotypical controls. Both facial and speech metrics performed well above chance in group classification accuracy.

Conclusion: Speech acoustic and facial metrics associated with affect production were effective in distinguishing between children with ASD and neurotypical controls.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28027796.

Purpose: This study aimed to assess the magnitude and direction of dual-task interference in a listening effort dual-task paradigm in individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss before and in the short- and long-term after cochlear implantation.

Design: The study sample consisted of 26 adult candidates for cochlear implantation with severe-to-profound hearing loss. The dual-task paradigm consisted of a primary speech understanding task, conducted in a quiet condition, and a favorable and unfavorable noise condition on the one hand and a secondary visual memory task on the other hand. The dual-task effect for both tasks and the derived patterns of dual-task interference were determined. Participants were evaluated at four test moments: before cochlear implantation and at 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months after implantation.

Results: Across all listening conditions, a shift was observed from patterns of dual-task interference with worse and stable scores for the primary speech understanding task in the dual-task condition compared to the baseline condition before implantation, toward patterns in which stable or better scores were obtained, respectively, for the primary task in the dual-task condition after implantation. This indicates that more attention could be allocated to the primary speech understanding task during the dual-task condition after implantation, implying a decreased listening effort.

Conclusions: A decreased listening effort was found after cochlear implantation. This study provides additional insights into the evolution of dual-task interference after cochlear implantation. It highlights the importance of interpreting both the primary and secondary tasks using a dual-task paradigm in the assessment of listening effort.

Purpose: Recent advances in artificial intelligence provide opportunities to capture and represent complex features of human language in a more automated manner, offering potential means of improving the efficiency of language assessment. This review article presents computerized approaches for the analysis of narrative language and identification of language disorders in children.

Method: We first describe the current barriers to clinicians' use of language sample analysis, narrative language sampling approaches, and the data processing stages that precede analysis. We then present recent studies demonstrating the automated extraction of linguistic features and identification of developmental language disorder using natural language processing and machine learning. We explain how these tools operate and emphasize how the decisions made in construction impact their performance in important ways, especially in the analysis of child language samples. We conclude with a discussion of major challenges in the field with respect to bias, access, and generalizability across settings and applications.

Conclusion: Given the progress that has occurred over the last decade, computer-automated approaches offer a promising opportunity to improve the efficiency and accessibility of language sample analysis and expedite the diagnosis and treatment of language disorders in children.

Purpose: This study investigates how Mandarin-English bilingual students in Canada produce Mandarin tones and how this is influenced by factors such as tone complexity, cross-linguistic influences, and speech input.

Method: Participants were 82 students enrolled in a Chinese bilingual program in Western Canada. Students were recruited from Grades 1, 3, and 5 and divided into two groups based on their home language backgrounds: The heritage language group had early and strong input in Mandarin, and the second language (L2) group received mostly English input at home. Single-word tone productions were audio-recorded and transcribed by Mandarin-native listeners for match (accuracy) and pattern analyses. Acoustic measurements were extracted to provide phonetic details.

Results: First, Tone3 (dipping tone) was challenging across groups due to its complexity. Second, L2 students' productions were more influenced by English as a nontonal language and showed signs of categorical confusion. Third, increased tone match rates were related to both home input and school input, but bilingual students did not reach more than 90% of match rates in Grade 5. Instead, L2 students produced phonetic features less accurately in higher grades. This was attributed to reduced pronunciation instruction and limited home input.

Conclusions: Bilingual students' speech development in a minority language indicates unique influences of home and school input but also the universal influences of tone complexity. This study provides evidence for bilingual speech theories in the suprasegmental domain and has implications for the pedagogy of a minority language in the context of bilingual education.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28098206.

Purpose: This study aims to examine the associations of phonological, lexical, and grammatical skills within and between languages in Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers.

Method: Sixty-three Singaporean Mandarin-English bilingual children aged 3-5 years were assessed for articulation, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar using standardized instruments in English and compatible tools in Mandarin. Regression analyses were performed on each language outcome, with other language variables as predictors, controlling for age, nonverbal working memory, and home language environment.

Results: Phonological and grammatical skills in one language predicted corresponding skills in the other. Phonemes shared across languages showed higher accuracy rates compared to unshared phonemes, while accuracy varied across grammatical structures. Vocabulary did not correlate between languages. It was influenced by household language distribution, with Mandarin vocabulary also correlating with nonverbal working memory. Mandarin grammar positively correlated with the number of native Mandarin speakers at home. Within each language, phonological skills were predicted by vocabulary, while vocabulary and grammar were reciprocally predictive. Cross-language, cross-domain relationships were weak.

Conclusions: This study shows domain-specific cross-language associations and language-specific cross-domain associations in Mandarin-English bilingual children, indicating both interdependent and autonomous development. Our findings call for approaches that value the child's full linguistic repertoire and utilize interconnectedness between languages and language domains to enhance bi/multilingual competence. They also highlight the importance of assessing each of the child's languages and considering individual bilingual profiles in research on bilingual language development.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.28200128.

Purpose: Interprofessional practice requires regular communication between professionals from different disciplines using shared terminology. Within schools, many professionals are tasked with supporting children with language disorders, namely, developmental language disorder (DLD) and/or dyslexia. Limited information exists as to (a) how school-based professionals' definitions of DLD and dyslexia align with research definitions, (b) how different school-based professionals define language disorders, (c) how school-based professionals' definitions of DLD and dyslexia align across professional groups, and (d) how one's definition of a language disorder correlates with other measures of knowledge.

Method: In this mixed-methods study, we analyzed 304 definitions of language disorders from school-based professionals using a summative content analysis process. We explored the relationship between definitions and knowledge of disorder characteristics and best practices.

Results: Data reflected limited alignment between professional and research definitions of DLD and dyslexia. Common misconceptions related to each disorder were prevalent among school-based professionals' definitions. There were differences between the extent to which professional groups' definitions aligned with research definitions of DLD and dyslexia.

Conclusion: Results highlight the need for shared terminology between professional groups and researchers to improve collaborative practices and to narrow the research-to-practice gap.

Purpose: The Daily Phonotrauma Index (DPI) can quantify pathophysiological mechanisms associated with daily voice use in individuals with phonotraumatic vocal hyperfunction (PVH). Since DPI was developed based on weeklong ambulatory voice monitoring, this study investigated if DPI can achieve comparable performance using (a) short laboratory speech tasks and (b) fewer than 7 days of ambulatory data.

Method: An ambulatory voice monitoring system recorded the vocal function/behavior of 134 females with PVH and vocally healthy matched controls in two different conditions. In the laboratory, the participants read the first paragraph of the Rainbow Passage and produced spontaneous speech (in-lab data). They were then monitored for 7 days (in-field data). Separate DPI models were trained from the in-lab and in-field data using the standard deviation of the difference between the magnitude of the first two harmonics (H1-H2) and the skewness of neck-surface acceleration magnitude. First, 10-fold cross-validation evaluated the classification performance of the in-lab and in-field DPIs. Second, the effect of the number of ambulatory monitoring days on the accuracy of in-field DPI classification was quantified.

Results: The average in-lab DPI accuracy computed from the Rainbow Passage and spontaneous speech were 57.9% and 48.9%, respectively, which are close to chance performance. The average classification accuracy of the in-field DPI was significantly higher with a very large effect size (73.4%, Cohen's d = 1.8). Next, the average in-field DPI accuracy increased from 66.5% for 1 day to 75.0% for 7 days, with the gain of including an additional day on accuracy dropping below 1 percentage point after 4 days.

Conclusions: The DPI requires ambulatory monitoring data as its discriminative power diminished significantly once computed from short in-lab recordings. Additionally, ambulatory monitoring should sample multiple days to achieve robust performance. The result of this research note can be used to make an informed decision about the trade-off between classification accuracy and cost of data collection.