A First Step toward the Clinical Application of Landmark-Based Acoustic Analysis in Child Mandarin.

Chin-Ting Liu

doi:10.3390/children8020159

Abstract

As an initial step for the clinical application of landmark-based acoustic analysis in child Mandarin, the study quantified the developmental trajectories of consonants produced by four-to-seven-year-old children who acquired Taiwanese Mandarin as their first language. The results from a total of 80 children (20 in each age group, with gender balanced) indicated that younger age groups produced more +b landmark features than seven-year-olds did, showing that the development of obstruents was not completed by the age of six. A multiple regression showed that the participants’ speech intelligibility scores could be predicted by landmark features. Additionally, the +b landmark feature demonstrated the strongest net effect on speech intelligibility scores. The findings indicated that: (a) the landmark feature +b was an essential indicator of speech development in child Mandarin and; (b) the consonantal development in child Mandarin could be predicted by the physiological complexity of the articulatory gestures. Future studies focusing on a wider range of population (e.g., typically developing adults, aging and other clinical groups) with different language backgrounds are encouraged to apply landmark-based acoustic analysis to trace the linguistic development of a particular group.

Highlights

A massive body of literature has pointed out that the traditional manual segmentation and acoustical analyses of speech are too laborious and time-consuming (c.f. [1,2,3,4,5,6], among many others)
As the first step toward the clinical application of landmark-based acoustic analysis in child Mandarin, the purpose of the current study is to quantify the consonantal productions from four-to-seven-year-old Mandarin-acquiring typically developing (TD) children in Taiwan by using landmark-based acoustic analysis
The results of the landmark-based acoustic analysis and the intelligibility scores were summarized in Tables 3 and 4, respectively

Summary

Introduction

A massive body of literature has pointed out that the traditional manual segmentation and acoustical analyses of speech are too laborious and time-consuming (c.f. [1,2,3,4,5,6], among many others). A massive body of literature has pointed out that the traditional manual segmentation and acoustical analyses of speech are too laborious and time-consuming [1,7]) This issue is critical for pediatricians and language therapists because young children with high risks of speech disorders usually have limited energy and attention span. The speech evaluation sessions are less likely to be long enough to include a larger corpus of speech data produced by the children. In view of this limitation, several newly created devices and software have emerged with the aim of enabling researchers to analyze a larger body of samples with high validity and reliability without consuming too much time. SpeechMark© (Boston, MA, USA) [8] is one of those products and is built upon previous works by Liu [9] and Howitt [10]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion