Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research最新文献

Purpose: This study investigated whether temporal coupling was present between lower limb motion rate and different speech tempi during different exercise intensities. We hypothesized that increased physical workload would increase cycling rate and that this could account for previous findings of increased speech tempo during exercise. We also investigated whether the choice of speech task (read vs. spontaneous speech) affected results.

Method: Forty-eight women who were ages 18-35 years participated. A within-participant design was used with fixed-order physical workload and counterbalanced speech task conditions. Motion capture and acoustic data were collected during exercise and at rest. Speech tempo was assessed using the amplitude envelope and two derived intrinsic mode functions that approximated syllable-like and footlike oscillations in the speech signal. Analyses were conducted with linear mixed-effects models.

Results: No direct entrainment between leg cycling rate and speech rate was observed. Leg cycling rate significantly increased from low to moderate workload for both speech tasks. All measures of speech tempo decreased when participants changed from rest to either low or moderate workload.

Conclusions: Speech tempo does not show temporal coupling with the rate of self-generated leg motion at group level, which highlights the need to investigate potential faster scale momentary coupling. The unexpected finding that speech tempo decreases with increased physical workload may be explained by multiple mental and physical factors that are more diverse and individual than anticipated. The implication for real-world contexts is that even light physical activity-functionally equivalent to walking-may impact speech tempo.

Purpose: This study investigated whether speakers adapt their breathing and speech (fundamental frequency [f_o]) to a prerecorded confederate who is sitting or moving under different levels of physical effort and who is either speaking or not. Following Paccalin and Jeannerod (2000), we would expect breathing rate to change in the direction of the confederate's, even if the participant is physically inactive. This might in turn affect their speech acoustics.

Method: We recorded the speech and respiration of 22 native German speakers. They produced solo and synchronous read speech in interaction with a confederate who appeared on a prerecorded video. There were three within-subject experimental conditions: the confederate (a) sitting, (b) biking with light effort, or (c) biking with heavier effort.

Results: During speech, the confederate's inhalation amplitude and f_o increased with physical effort, as expected. Her breath cycle duration changed differently, probably because of read speech constraints. Overall, the only adaptation the participants showed was higher f_o with increase in the confederate's physical effort during synchronous, but not solo, speech. Additionally, they produced shallower inhalations when observing the confederate biking in silence, as compared to the condition without movement. Crucially, the participants' acoustic and breathing data showed large interindividual variability.

Conclusions: Our findings indicate that, in this paradigm, convergence only took place on f_o during synchronous speech and that this phonetic adaptation happened independently from any speech breathing adaptation. It also suggests that participants may adapt their quiet breathing while watching a person performing physical exercise but that the mechanism is more complex than that explained previously.

Purpose: Neurogenic speech and language disorders-such as acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) and aphasia with phonemic paraphasia (APP)-are often misdiagnosed due to similarities in clinical presentation. Word syllable duration (WSD)-a measure of average syllable length in multisyllabic words-serves as a proxy for speech rate, which is an important and arguably more objective clinical characteristic of AOS and APP. This study reports stability of WSD over time for speakers with AOS (and aphasia).

Method: Twenty-nine participants with AOS and aphasia (11 women and 18 men, M_age = 53.5 years, SD = 13.3) repeated 30 multisyllabic words (of three-, four-, and five-syllable lengths) on three occasions across 4 weeks. WSDs were calculated for each word and then averaged across each list (i.e., word length), as well as across combined lists (i.e., all 30 words) to yield four WSDs for each participant at each time point. Stability over time was calculated using Friedman's test for the group and using Spearman's rho for the individual level. Effects of time and word length were examined using robust mixed-effects linear regression.

Results: Friedman's tests and correlations indicated no significant difference in WSDs across sampling occasions for each word length separately or combined. WSD correlated positively with AOS severity and negatively with intelligibility but was not correlated with aphasia severity. Regression analyses confirmed WSD to be stable over time, while WSD calculated from only five tokens (i.e., WSD-5) was less stable over time.

Conclusions: Results indicate that WSD can be a stable measure over time, at the individual and group level, providing support for its use in diagnosis and/or as an outcome measure, both clinically and for research. In general, WSD outperformed WSD-5, suggesting that it may be better to calculate WSD from more than five tokens. Stability of WSD in other populations and suitability for differential diagnosis need to be determined. Currently, differentiating disorders by speaking rate, alone, is not recommended.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25438735.

Purpose: One of the strategies that can be used to support speech communication in deaf children is cued speech, a visual code in which manual gestures are used as additional phonological information to supplement the acoustic and labial speech information. Cued speech has been shown to improve speech perception and phonological skills. This exploratory study aims to assess whether and how cued speech reading proficiency may also have a beneficial effect on the acoustic and articulatory correlates of consonant production in children.

Method: Eight children with cochlear implants (from 5 to 11 years of age) and with different receptive proficiency in Canadian French Cued Speech (three children with low receptive proficiency vs. five children with high receptive proficiency) are compared to 10 children with typical hearing (from 4 to 11 years of age) on their production of stop and fricative consonants. Articulation was assessed with ultrasound measurements.

Results: The preliminary results reveal that cued speech proficiency seems to sustain the development of speech production in children with cochlear implants and to improve their articulatory gestures, particularly for the place contrast in stops as well as fricatives.

Conclusion: This work highlights the importance of studying objective data and comparing acoustic and articulatory measurements to better characterize speech production in children.

Purpose: Although children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are known to have difficulties with emergent literacy skills, few available studies have examined emergent literacy skills in Arabic-speaking children with DLD. Even though Arabic language characteristics, such as diglossia and orthographic structure, influence the acquisition of literacy in Arabic-speaking children, research shows that oral language skills, such as vocabulary, and cognitive skills, such as verbal short-term memory (VSTM), predict literacy in Arabic-speaking children. Moreover, linguistic and memory abilities are impaired in children with DLD, including Arabic-speaking children. The current study examines the relationships between oral language, VSTM, and emergent literacy skills in Arabic-speaking typically developing (TD) children and children with DLD.

Method: Participants were 40 TD children (20 girls; aged 4;0-6;11 [years;months]) and 26 children with DLD (nine girls, aged 4;0-6;11). All participants were monolingual Arabic speakers and matched on age and socioeconomic status. A set of comprehensive Arabic language (vocabulary knowledge, morphosyntactic, and listening comprehension skills), VSTM, and emergent literacy (phonological awareness and letter knowledge skills) tests were administered.

Results: The DLD group scored significantly lower than the TD group on language, VSTM, and emergent literacy measures. Results revealed that the contributions of oral language and VSTM to emergent literacy skills across TD and DLD groups were different. In the TD group, VSTM predicted emergent literacy skills, whereas in the DLD groups, both vocabulary knowledge and VSTM predicted emergent literacy skills.

Conclusions: This study represents an important first step in understanding emergent literacy skills and their relationships to language and memory in Arabic-speaking children with and without DLD. The implications of these findings for clinical and education provision are discussed.

Purpose: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by worsening of speech and/or language. Script training intervention promotes automatized speech production via repeated practice of scripted content. This study evaluated the acceptability, feasibility, and effects of a modified version of Video-Implemented Script Training for Aphasia (VISTA) in the three PPA variants and compared outcomes by intervention modality (teletherapy vs. in person).

Method: Thirteen bilingual (Spanish-Catalan) participants were included (semantic variant, n = 5; logopenic variant, n = 5; nonfluent/agrammatic variant, n = 3; teletherapy, n = 7). Using a nonrandomized design, intervention was administered in participants' dominant language. Participants were trained on an individualized script twice per week, over 8 weeks. Performance on measures related to script accuracy, content, and subjective ratings of production quality was evaluated at baseline, immediately post, and at 3 and 6 months post-intervention.

Results: No significant differences were observed on the basis of intervention modality. Participants demonstrated significant improvements from pre- to post-intervention in script production, synonym production, keywords, and global quality on the trained script. Maintenance was observed when comparing performance at post-intervention relative to 3- and 6-month follow-up for script and synonym production. Significant improvement in production quality of the untrained topic was observed following intervention. Different patterns of benefit were observed by PPA variant.

Conclusions: Modified VISTA was acceptable and effective across the three PPA variants, as evidenced by improvements on a broader array of outcome measures than those previously reported. Findings also provide further support for provision for teletherapy in individuals with PPA.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26999326.

Purpose: The aim of the study was to analyze how face masks influence speech perception and time spent looking at the speaker's mouth and eyes by adults with and without hearing loss.

Method: Twenty participants with hearing loss and 20 without were asked to repeat Spanish words presented in various conditions, including different types of face masks (no mask, transparent window mask, and opaque mask FFP2) and presentation modes (audiovisual, video only, and audio only). Recognition accuracy and the percentage of time looking at the speaker's eyes and mouth (dwell time) were measured.

Results: In the audiovisual condition, participants with hearing loss had significantly better word recognition scores when the speaker wore no mask compared to when they wore an opaque face mask. However, there were no differences between the transparent mask and no mask conditions. For those with typical hearing, the type of face mask did not affect speech recognition. Audiovisual presentation consistently improved speech recognition for participants with hearing loss across all face mask conditions, but for those with typical hearing, it only improved compared to video-only mode. These participants demonstrated a ceiling effect in audiovisual and audio-only modes. Regarding eye movement patterns, participants spent less time looking at the speaker's mouth and more time at the eyes when the speaker wore an opaque mask compared to no mask or a transparent mask.

Conclusion: The use of transparent face masks (ClearMask-type model) is recommended in contexts where face masks are still used (hospitals) to prevent the hindering effect of opaque masks (FFP2-type model) in speech perception among people with hearing loss, provided that any fogging of the window of the transparent mask is controlled by wiping it off as needed and the light is in front of the speaker to minimize shadows.

Purpose: For non-autistic children, it is well established that linguistic awareness skills support their success with reading and spelling. Few investigations have examined whether these same linguistic awareness skills play a role in literacy development for autistic elementary school-age children. This study serves as a first step in quantifying the phonological, prosodic, orthographic, and morphological awareness skills of autistic children; how these skills compare to those of non-autistic children; and their relation to literacy performance.

Method: We measured and compared the phonological, prosodic, orthographic, and morphological awareness skills of 18 autistic (with average nonverbal IQs) and 18 non-autistic elementary school-age children, matched in age, nonverbal IQ, and real-word reading. The relations between linguistic awareness and the children's word-level literacy and reading comprehension skills were examined, and we explored whether the magnitude of these relations was different for the two groups. Regression analyses indicated the relative contribution of linguistic awareness variables to performance on the literacy measures for the autistic children.

Results: The non-autistic children outperformed the autistic children on most linguistic awareness measures. There were moderate-to-strong relations between performances on the linguistic awareness and literacy measures for the non-autistic children, and most associations were not reliably different from those for the autistic children. Regression analyses indicate that the performance on specific linguistic awareness variables explains unique variance in autistic children's literacy performance.

Conclusion: Although less developed than those of their non-autistic peers, the linguistic awareness skills of autistic elementary school-age children are important for successful reading and spelling.

Purpose: This study aims to introduce an assessment questionnaire based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) to enable quantifiable clinical documentation. The questionnaire assists speech-language therapists (SLTs) in evaluating both non-audiological and audiological rehabilitation outcomes of patients with cochlear implants (CIs).

Method: Six SLTs were recruited to evaluate the effectiveness of CI care using ICF criteria. We carefully selected 20 pertinent ICF criteria, and SLTs received thorough training in how to apply them uniformly. A cohort of 48 patients was evaluated at three distinct time points: presurgery, postsurgery, and 6 months post-initial CI fitting. Patients underwent dedicated speech-language therapy sessions throughout the treatment course.

Results: A total of 144 complete datasets were scrutinized using a two-factor analysis of variance for ranks. Following CI care, patients exhibited substantial improvements in auditory perception, characterized by enhanced sound recognition and speech discrimination. Additionally, patients demonstrated improved attentional focus, proficiency in daily tasks and increased conversational engagement over time. Environmental factors, particularly sound perception, improved markedly, correlating with reported reductions in stress levels. Minimal changes were noted in stress management and communication techniques. Articulatory function, speech functions, and pain perception exhibited the least alteration.

Conclusions: The data extracted from the ICF-based assessments underscore the vital significance of incorporating speech therapy-based metrics to evaluate both non-audiological and audiological factors in assessing the success of CI care within the SLTs domain. This approach proves to be highly relevant both in terms of demonstration and clinical applicability.

This Letter to the Editor was created in response to the article titled, "Instrumental Assessment of Aero-Resistive Expiratory Muscle Strength Rehabilitation Devices" by Dietsch et al. (2024). The article aims to compare six expiratory muscle strength training (EMST) devices and investigates their minimum trigger pressure, variability across the settings, and stability. The models tested include five positive expiratory pressure (PEP) devices, Acapella, TheraPEP, Threshold PEP, EMST75, and EMST150. It also includes a combined inspiratory and expiratory muscle training device, the Breather. We have several concerns about the integrity of results presented regarding the Breather as presented in the article. These include the heterogeneity of device sample used, as well as inadequate methodology and the experimental setup.