Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: Vowels
- All Subjects: Babble Boot Camp
- Creators: Peter, Beate
- Creators: Jones, Hanna Vanessa
- Creators: Liss, Julie M
Description
Distorted vowel production is a hallmark characteristic of dysarthric speech, irrespective of the underlying neurological condition or dysarthria diagnosis. A variety of acoustic metrics have been used to study the nature of vowel production deficits in dysarthria; however, not all demonstrate sensitivity to the exhibited deficits. Less attention has been paid to quantifying the vowel production deficits associated with the specific dysarthrias. Attempts to characterize the relationship between naturally degraded vowel production in dysarthria with overall intelligibility have met with mixed results, leading some to question the nature of this relationship. It has been suggested that aberrant vowel acoustics may be an index of overall severity of the impairment and not an "integral component" of the intelligibility deficit. A limitation of previous work detailing perceptual consequences of disordered vowel acoustics is that overall intelligibility, not vowel identification accuracy, has been the perceptual measure of interest. A series of three experiments were conducted to address the problems outlined herein. The goals of the first experiment were to identify subsets of vowel metrics that reliably distinguish speakers with dysarthria from non-disordered speakers and differentiate the dysarthria subtypes. Vowel metrics that capture vowel centralization and reduced spectral distinctiveness among vowels differentiated dysarthric from non-disordered speakers. Vowel metrics generally failed to differentiate speakers according to their dysarthria diagnosis. The second and third experiments were conducted to evaluate the relationship between degraded vowel acoustics and the resulting percept. In the second experiment, correlation and regression analyses revealed vowel metrics that capture vowel centralization and distinctiveness and movement of the second formant frequency were most predictive of vowel identification accuracy and overall intelligibility. The third experiment was conducted to evaluate the extent to which the nature of the acoustic degradation predicts the resulting percept. Results suggest distinctive vowel tokens are better identified and, likewise, better-identified tokens are more distinctive. Further, an above-chance level agreement between nature of vowel misclassification and misidentification errors was demonstrated for all vowels, suggesting degraded vowel acoustics are not merely an index of severity in dysarthria, but rather are an integral component of the resultant intelligibility disorder.
ContributorsLansford, Kaitlin L (Author) / Liss, Julie M (Thesis advisor) / Dorman, Michael F. (Committee member) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Lotto, Andrew J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the quality of life in the participating families of the Babble Boot Camp. The Babble Boot Camp provides speech therapy for children with classic galactosemia starting as early as two months old. The child’s speech progress is evaluated along with other metrics such as parental and child stress levels and quality of life. In this study, the quality of life of the participants in the Babble Boot Camp was evaluated using the Pediatric Quality of Life questionnaire (Varni, 1998). A comparative study was conducted between mothers and fathers, families with children with classic galactosemia, and with typically developing children, and the effects of speech therapy earlier in a child’s life versus later. The questions looked into in this study were if mothers and fathers report different quality of life scores, if there is a correlation between the scores the children have for the quality of life and the scores the parents received for the quality of life, differences in quality of life scores of parents with children with classic galactosemia and parents with typically developing children, and if the quality of life scores of parents and children improve in the Babble Boot Camp. The main results were that mothers report a lower quality of life than fathers, mothers have a stronger correlation with their children in regards to their quality of life scores, parents with children with classic galactosemia have a lower quality of life scores than parents with typically developing children and parents and children who were in the group who received speech therapy from earlier have a higher quality of life scores than the late group.
ContributorsTamhankar, Avani (Author) / Peter, Beate (Thesis director) / Bruce, Laurel (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor)
Created2022-12
Description
Classic Galactosemia (CG) is a rare recessive metabolic disease resulting in the inability to digest galactose. Despite early detection via newborn screening and strict diet management, infants with CG are at high risk for severe speech (60%) and language (90%) disorders (Waggoner, D., Buist, N., & Donnell, 1990). Although this risk is known since birth, no preventive treatment approaches in the area of speech and language have been developed. The Babble Boot Camp (BBC) is the first experimental proactive intervention for infants with CG ages 2 to 24 months. It is designed to stimulate early vocalization, coo, babble, first words, vocabulary growth, and syntactic complexity, with the goal of preventing or at least ameliorating the expected speech and language difficulties. All children undergo close monitoring. Day-long audio recordings, collected once per month using the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system, are the source material for pre-speech and speech measures including Mean Babbling Level (MBL), Syllable Structure Level (SSL), and phonetic and phonemic inventory complexity.
Parent questionnaires are analyzed for expressive vocabulary size. Here, findings are described for the first 9 children who underwent the BBC and an untreated control child, all with CG. The initial results are consistent with higher MBL and SSL scores in the treatment cohort, compared to the untreated control infant. In addition, most children in the treatment cohort achieved larger vocabulary sizes than the control child. Of the four oldest children in the treatment cohort, three had expressive vocabularies within normal limits at 21 months. Phonetic
inventory complexity at 11 months predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months. Given the high risk for speech and language disorders in children with CG, these results are encouraging, but an appropriately powered clinical trial is necessary to validate these findings. The BBC is on its way to a full clinical trial with 75 families, fully funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Parent questionnaires are analyzed for expressive vocabulary size. Here, findings are described for the first 9 children who underwent the BBC and an untreated control child, all with CG. The initial results are consistent with higher MBL and SSL scores in the treatment cohort, compared to the untreated control infant. In addition, most children in the treatment cohort achieved larger vocabulary sizes than the control child. Of the four oldest children in the treatment cohort, three had expressive vocabularies within normal limits at 21 months. Phonetic
inventory complexity at 11 months predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months. Given the high risk for speech and language disorders in children with CG, these results are encouraging, but an appropriately powered clinical trial is necessary to validate these findings. The BBC is on its way to a full clinical trial with 75 families, fully funded by the National Institutes of Health.
ContributorsDonenfeld-Peled, Inbal (Author) / Peter, Beate (Thesis director) / Weinhold, Juliet (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Past studies have shown that auditory feedback plays an important role in maintaining the speech production system. Typically, speakers compensate for auditory feedback alterations when the alterations persist over time (auditory motor adaptation). Our study focused on how to increase the rate of adaptation by using different auditory feedback conditions. For the present study, we recruited a total of 30 participants. We examined auditory motor adaptation after participants completed three conditions: Normal speaking, noise-masked speaking, and silent reading. The normal condition was used as a control condition. In the noise-masked condition, noise was added to the auditory feedback to completely mask speech outputs. In the silent reading condition, participants were instructed to silently read target words in their heads, then read the words out loud. We found that the learning rate in the noise-masked condition was lower than that in the normal condition. In contrast, participants adapted at a faster rate after they experience the silent reading condition. Overall, this study demonstrated that adaptation rate can be modified through pre-exposing participants to different types auditory-motor manipulations.
ContributorsNavarrete, Karina (Author) / Daliri, Ayoub (Thesis director) / Peter, Beate (Committee member) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05