Matching Items (8)
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- All Subjects: Speech
- All Subjects: Hearing
- All Subjects: Story Champs
- Creators: Department of Speech and Hearing Science
- Status: Published
Description
This study evaluated whether the Story Champs intervention is effective in bilingual kindergarten children who speak Spanish as their native language. Previous research by Spencer and Slocum (2010) found that monolingual, English-speaking participants made significant gains in narrative retelling after intervention. This study implemented the intervention in two languages and examined its effects after ten sessions. Results indicate that some children benefited from the intervention and there was variability across languages as well.
ContributorsFernandez, Olga E (Author) / Restrepo, Laida (Thesis director) / Mesa, Carol (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
This thesis investigated the impact of word complexity as measured through the Proportion of Whole Word Proximity (PWP; Ingram 2002) on consonant correctness as measured by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC; Shriberg & Kwiatkowski 1980) on the spoken words of monolingual Spanish-speaking children. The effect of word complexity on consonant correctness has previously been studied on English-speaking children (Knodel 2012); the present study extends this line of research to determine if it can be appropriately applied to Spanish. Language samples from a previous study were used (Hase, 2010) in which Spanish-speaking children were given two articulation assessments: Evaluación fonológica del habla infantil (FON; Bosch Galceran, 2004), and the Spanish Test of Articulation for Children Under Three Years of Age (STAR; Bunta, 2002). It was hypothesized that word complexity would affect a Spanish-speaking child’s productions of correct consonants as was seen for the English- speaking children studied. This hypothesis was supported for 10 out of the 14 children. The pattern of word complexity found for Spanish was as follows: CVCV > CVCVC, Tri-syllables no clusters > Disyllable words with clusters.
ContributorsPurinton, Kaitlyn Lisa (Author) / Ingram, David (Thesis director) / Dixon, Dixon (Committee member) / Barlow, Jessica (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
In this study, the Bark transform and Lobanov method were used to normalize vowel formants in speech produced by persons with dysarthria. The computer classification accuracy of these normalized data were then compared to the results of human perceptual classification accuracy of the actual vowels. These results were then analyzed to determine if these techniques correlated with the human data.
ContributorsJones, Hanna Vanessa (Author) / Liss, Julie (Thesis director) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Borrie, Stephanie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Research on /r/ production previously used formant analysis as the primary acoustic analysis, with particular focus on the low third formant in the speech signal. Prior imaging of speech used X-Ray, MRI, and electromagnetic midsagittal articulometer systems. More recently, the signal processing technique of Mel-log spectral plots has been used to study /r/ production in children and female adults. Ultrasound imaging of the tongue also has been used to image the tongue during speech production in both clinical and research settings. The current study attempts to describe /r/ production in three different allophonic contexts; vocalic, prevocalic, and postvocalic positions. Ultrasound analysis, formant analysis, Mel-log spectral plots, and /r/ duration were measured for /r/ production in 29 adult speakers (10 male, 19 female). A possible relationship between these variables was also explored. Results showed that the amount of superior constriction in the postvocalic /r/ allophone was significantly lower than the other /r/ allophones. Formant two was significantly lower and the distance between formant two and three was significantly higher for the prevocalic /r/ allophone. Vocalic /r/ had the longest average duration, while prevocalic /r/ had the shortest duration. Signal processing results revealed candidate Mel-bin values for accurate /r/ production for each allophone of /r/. The results indicate that allophones of /r/ can be distinguished based the different analyses. However, relationships between these analyses are still unclear. Future research is needed in order to gather more data on /r/ acoustics and articulation in order to find possible relationships between the analyses for /r/ production.
ContributorsHirsch, Megan Elizabeth (Author) / Weinhold, Juliet (Thesis director) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
In this pilot study, the purpose was to determine if certain language interventions could help bilingual children reduce maze use and improve their story retell abilities. We used language intervention, Story Champs, and its Spanish version, Puente de Cuentos to help bilingual children improve their story retell abilities. We conducted the intervention over the course of three days in both Spanish and English. The children participated in three stories in each language each day. They also received a narrative measure before and after the intervention to measure gains in story ability and to measure maze use. Results of the study indicated that there were no statistically-significant differences in the children's story retell abilities or maze use before and after the intervention. Nevertheless, we are encouraged by our results for future further study because of some improvements the children made.
ContributorsWhiteley, Aaron Kyle (Author) / Restrepo, Maria (Thesis director) / Dixon, Maria (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This pilot study evaluated whether Story Champs and Puente de Cuentos helped bilingual preschoolers increase their usage of emotional terms and ability to tell stories. Participants in this study included 10 Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers. Intervention was conducted in 9 sessions over 3 days using the Test of Narrative Retell to measure results. Results did not find significant gains in either emotional term usage or ability to tell stories, but the results were promising as a pilot study.
ContributorsSato, Leslie Mariko (Author) / Restrepo, Maria (Thesis director) / Dixon, Maria (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Hearing and vision are two senses that most individuals use on a daily basis. The simultaneous presentation of competing visual and auditory stimuli often affects our sensory perception. It is often believed that vision is the more dominant sense over audition in spatial localization tasks. Recent work suggests that visual information can influence auditory localization when the sound is emanating from a physical location or from a phantom location generated through stereophony (the so-called "summing localization"). The present study investigates the role of cross-modal fusion in an auditory localization task. The focuses of the experiments are two-fold: (1) reveal the extent of fusion between auditory and visual stimuli and (2) investigate how fusion is correlated with the amount of visual bias a subject experiences. We found that fusion often occurs when light flash and "summing localization" stimuli were presented from the same hemifield. However, little correlation was observed between the magnitude of visual bias and the extent of perceived fusion between light and sound stimuli. In some cases, subjects reported distinctive locations for light and sound and still experienced visual capture.
ContributorsBalderas, Leslie Ann (Author) / Zhou, Yi (Thesis director) / Yost, William (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Pitch and timbre perception are two important dimensions of auditory perception. These aspects of sound aid the understanding of our environment, and contribute to normal everyday functioning. It is therefore important to determine the nature of perceptual interaction between these two dimensions of sound. This study tested the interactions between pitch perception associated with the fundamental frequency (F0) and sharpness perception associated with the spectral slope of harmonic complex tones in normal hearing (NH) listeners and cochlear implant (CI) users. Pitch and sharpness ranking was measured without changes in the non-target dimension (Experiment 1), with different amounts of unrelated changes in the non-target dimension (Experiment 2), and with congruent/incongruent changes of similar perceptual salience in the non-target dimension (Experiment 3). The results showed that CI users had significantly worse pitch and sharpness ranking thresholds than NH listeners. Pitch and sharpness perception had symmetric interactions in NH listeners. However, for CI users, spectral slope changes significantly affected pitch ranking, while F0 changes had no significant effect on sharpness ranking. CI users' pitch ranking sensitivity was significantly better with congruent than with incongruent spectral slope changes. These results have important implications for CI processing strategies to better transmit pitch and timbre cues to CI users.
ContributorsSoslowsky, Samara Miranda (Author) / Luo, Xin (Thesis director) / Yost, William (Committee member) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12