How to meet the neighbors: Modality effects on phonological generalization

Influence of an Intensive Speech Therapy Program on the Speech of Individuals with Cleft Lip and Palate

Introduction  Compensatory articulations are speech disorders due to the attempt of the individual with cleft palate/velopharyngeal dysfunction to generate intraoral pressure to produce high-pressure consonants. Speech therapy is the indicated intervention for their correction, and an intensive speech therapy meets the facilitating conditions for the correction of glottal stop articulation, which is the most common compensatory articulation. Objective  To investigate the influence of an intensive speech therapy program (ISTP) to correct glottal stop articulation in the speech of individuals with cleft palate. Methods  Speech recordings of 37 operated cleft palate participants of both genders (mean age = 19 years old) were rated by 3 experienced speech/language pathologists. Their task was to rate the presence and absence of glottal stops in the 6 Brazilian Portuguese occlusive consonants (p, b, t, d, k, g) distributed within several places in 6 sentences. Results  Out of the 325 pretherapy target consonants rated with glottal stop, 197 (61%) remained with this error, and 128 (39%) no longer presented it. The comparison of the pre- and posttherapy results showed: a) a statical significance for the p1, p2, p3, p4, t1, k1, k2 and d6 consonants (McNemar test; p  < 0.05); b) a statistical significance for the p consonant in relation to the k, b, d, g consonants and for the t consonant in relation to the b, d, and g consonants (chi-squared test; p  < 0.05) in the comparison of the proportion improvement among the 6 occlusive consonants. Conclusion  The ISTP influenced the correction of glottal stops in the speech of individuals with cleft palate.

Nexus to Lexis: Phonological Disorders in Children

Research on phonological disorders in children has conventionally emphasized the speech sound in search of causes, diagnoses, treatments, and prevention of the disorder. This article aims to shift the research focus to the word instead. The motivation comes from advances in psycholinguistics that demonstrate the word is central to the perception, production, and acquisition of phonological information. Three strands of potential study are outlined in evaluation of how words might initiate and boost, but perhaps also, interrupt learning for children with phonological disorders.

Effect Size for Single-Subject Design in Phonological Treatment

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study was to document, validate, and corroborate effect size (ES) for single-subject design in treatment of children with functional phonological disorders; to evaluate potential child-specific contributing variables relative to ES; and to establish benchmarks for interpretation of ES for the population.

METHOD

Data were extracted from the Developmental Phonologies Archive for 135 preschool children with phonological disorders who previously participated in single-subject experimental treatment studies. Standard mean difference(all with correction for continuity) was computed to gauge the magnitude of generalization gain that accrued longitudinally from treatment for each child with the data aggregated for purposes of statistical analyses.

RESULTS

ES ranged from 0.09 to 27.83 for the study population. ES was positively correlated with conventional measures of phonological learning and visual inspection of learning data on the basis of procedures standard to single-subject design. ES was linked to children's performance on diagnostic assessments of phonology but not other demographic characteristics or related linguistic skills and nonlinguistic skills. Benchmarks for interpretation of ES were estimated as 1.4, 3.6, and 10.1 for small, medium, and large learning effects, respectively.

CONCLUSION

Findings have utility for single-subject research and translation of research to evidence-based practice for children with phonological disorders.

Dense neighborhoods and mechanisms of learning: evidence from children with phonological delay

There is a noted advantage of dense neighborhoods in language acquisition, but the learning mechanism that drives the effect is not well understood. Two hypotheses--long-term auditory word priming and phonological working memory--have been advanced in the literature as viable accounts. These were evaluated in two treatment studies enrolling twelve children with phonological delay. Study 1 exposed children to dense neighbors versus non-neighbors before training sound production in evaluation of the priming hypothesis. Study 2 exposed children to the same stimuli after training sound production as a test of the phonological working memory hypothesis. Results showed that neighbors led to greater phonological generalization than non-neighbors, but only when presented prior to training production. There was little generalization and no differential effect of exposure to neighbors or non-neighbors after training production. Priming was thus supported as a possible mechanism of learning behind the dense neighborhood advantage in phonological acquisition.