Clinical Phonetics Research Articles

The DELAD initiative for sharing language resources on speech disorders

Sharing research data between researchers is becoming a requirement for open science in the field of clinical phonetics and speech and language pathology. An initiative entitled DELAD was started in 2015 to provide researchers a platform to discuss ongoing technical, legal and ethics issues related to sharing recordings of speech disorders, and to assist them in archiving their data for sharing with colleagues in the field. The ultimate goal of data sharing is to enhance research and teaching in the area of speech disorders. This paper first presents DELAD and its history and previous accomplishments. Then the recent work achieved by the DELAD steering group in providing information or recommendations in three areas are discussed: (1) speech annotation and automatic annotation mining, (2) consent and data storage, and (3) a role-play activity for learning data protection assessment. DELAD is an active community and researchers who share similar interests are welcome to join the (ad)venture.

Interpreting Deep Representations of Phonetic Features via Neuro-Based Concept Detector: Application to Speech Disorders Due to Head and Neck Cancer

The popularity of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is growing significantly, and so is the interest in gaining a better understanding of their functioning. In this work, it is even more interesting to reveal the behavior of these black-boxes since we are involved in a clinical context. To this end, we propose a general analytic framework, named <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Neuro-based Concept Detector (NCD)</i> , for interpreting deep representations of a DNN. Based on the activation patterns of the hidden neurons, this framework highlights the capacity of neurons to detect a specific concept related to the final task. The key strength of our framework is that it provides an interpretability tool for any type of DNN performing a classification task regardless of the application field. In this paper, we evaluate this framework on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained for the task of French phone classification. This choice was guided by the final objective of a long-term research project, which aims to identify the linguistic units best contributing to the maintenance or loss of intelligibility in the context of speech disorders. Through <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">NCD</i> , we demonstrate the emergence of phonetic features in the classification layers of the CNN-based model, while applied on healthy speech, a concept with a great interest in the field of clinical phonetics. Indeed, we further show that these interesting findings shed light on the characteristics of speech disorders in terms of altered phonetic features and provide relevant information for clinical practice, notably, patients' rehabilitation and follow-up.

30 ans de recherches en phonétique clinique au LPL

30 ans de recherches en phonétique clinique au LPL

SPECTRAL AND TEMPORAL PROCESSING IN BALINESE VOWEL OF NON-FLUENT APHASIA

Acoustic investigation on Balinese vowel of non-fluent aphasia (NFA) has not been previously paid attention yet. Thus, this study examined the acoustic abnormalities of vowel articulation for patients with NFA. Therefore, spectral and temporal charateristic of their vowel sound are essentially searched by comparing the formant value and prosodic features with the normal vowel articulation. Speech output of two patients were observed and analyzed by using Praat and the data were described by implementing the theory of clinical phonetics and acoustics. The spectral analysis showed that the inaccurate constriction of the tongue in vowel articulation affected the range of oral tract (F2), pharynx space (F1), and shape of the lips (F3). Furthermore, the lesion in Broca’s area affected the temporal features of the sounds, such as the lower pitch, lower intensity and longer timing especially voicing environment. The vowels preceded by voiced consonants were significantly longer than those preceded by voiceless ones. So, the highly complex vowels tend to be articulated inaccurately due to articulatory implementation deficit. This finding is consistent with previous results that the spectral and temporal distortion are primarily phonetics rather than phonological planning program.

Perception of Children’s Productions of /l/: Acoustic Correlates and Effects of Listener Experience

Introduction: The aim of the current study was to examine the effect of listeners’ experience with child speech and phonetic training on perceptual judgment of children’s word-initial /l/ productions. The acoustic correlates of acceptable and misarticulated productions of /l/ and their relation to listeners’ experience with child speech were explored. Methods: Three listener groups listened to children’s word-initial /l/ productions embedded in monosyllabic words and judged the “/l/-likeness” of the productions using a Visual Analog Scale (VAS). Three listener groups included (a) speech-language pathologists with at least 10 years of experience (SLP group), (b) graduate students in speech-language pathology (GS group), and (c) naïve listeners with no clinical phonetics experience (NL group). Acoustic correlates (both static and dynamic measures) of listeners’ perception of /l/ sounds were also investigated. Results: While mean VAS ratings did not differ significantly by listener group, the SLP group used a wider range of the VAS than the GS and NL groups. Correlational analysis between the static measure (F2-F1 values) and mean listener ratings showed that listeners tend to perceive sounds with the highest F2-F1 values more as /j/ than /l/, while those with the lowest F2-F1 value were perceived more as /w/ than /l/, especially for sounds that are in between phonemic categories. Listener ratings were not highly correlated with dynamic measures. Conclusion: These results suggest that experienced listeners use the VAS more continuously than less experienced listeners to indicate perception of subphonemic features of children’s productions of /l/, and that their ratings correlate with acoustic measures. Furthermore, listeners with experience with child speech and phonetic training are more sensitive to subphonemic features of children’s productions of /l/, especially for misarticulated productions. This supports the clinical use of VAS for perceptual judgments of children's /l/ productions.

The latest development of the DELAD project for sharing corpora of speech disorders

ABSTRACT Corpora of speech of individuals with communication disorders (CSD) are invaluable resources for education and research, but they are costly and hard to build and difficult to share for various reasons. DELAD, which means ‘shared’ in Swedish, is a project initiated by Professors Nicole Müller and Martin Ball in 2015 that aims to address this issue by establishing a platform for researchers to share datasets of speech disorders with interested audiences. To date four workshops have been held, where selected participants, covering various expertise including researchers in clinical phonetics and linguistics, speech and language therapy, infrastructure specialists, and ethics and legal specialists, participated to discuss relevant issues in setting up such an archive. Positive and steady progress has been made since 2015, including refurbishing the DELAD website (http://delad.net/) with information and application forms for researchers to join and share their datasets and linking with the CLARIN K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (https://ace.ruhosting.nl/) where CSD can be hosted and accessed through the CLARIN B-Centres, The Language Archive (https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/) and TalkBank (https://talkbank.org/). The latest workshop, which was funded by CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) was held as an online event in January 2021 on topics including Data Protection Impact Assessments, reviewing changes in ethics perspectives in academia on sharing CSD, and voice conversion as a mean to pseudonomise speech. This paper reports the latest progress of DELAD and discusses the directions for further advance of the initiative, with information on how researchers can contribute to the repository.

Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics in Bulgaria – from Isolation to Interdisciplinary Approach

Clinical linguistics and phonetics is one of the fast growing scientific fields in the past decades. Its role is important either for developing methods and interdisciplinary ap-proach in linguistics and phonetics or studying the nature of communicative disorders. It could also include collaborative work with specialists from other fields as computational linguistics, neuroscience, etc. In this broad context clinical linguistics and phonetics is a challenge for the Humanities in Bulgaria. The reason is that with regard to interdiscipli-nary research in this area there is still much to be done. A few are the studies in Bulgaria which could be related to Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics but many of them have the disadvantage of a research in isolation, i.e. with no collaboration with the appropriate specialists. When it is up to communication an interdisciplinary and even multidisciplinary approach is needed having in mind that communication itself is a complicated process and its disorders are a challenge for all scientists who work in the field of communication.

Revisions to the extIPA chart

This paper describes changes to the extIPA (Extensions to the IPA) symbol set, the motivation for these changes, and areas where future changes by the IPA might be helpful to clinical transcribers. The extIPA symbol set was introduced some twenty-five years ago. Since that time, some minor changes have been introduced to the extIPA chart but no major rearrangement has been attempted. The 2010 Oslo meeting of ICPLA (International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association) started a revision of the extIPA chart, and this process was recently completed. A revised extIPA chart was approved at the 2016 ICPLA meeting. The revision involved the addition, modification and removal of categories and symbols. All changes derive from the need to denote sounds encountered in disordered speech that were not covered by the original chart.

“Measuring up” to ethical standards in service delivery to college students on the Autism Spectrum: A practical application of Powell’s model for ethical practices in clinical phonetics and linguistics

This paper examined an interdisciplinary college-based support programme, the Communication Coaching Program (CCP), designed for students diagnosed on the autism spectrum in light of six ethical constructs described by Powell. Collecting data to monitor the successes and ongoing needs of individual participants in the programme is of vital importance, of course, but only addresses a portion of the efficacy question. In addition, the authors, who co-direct the programme and represent different professional expertise and perspectives, recognize the importance of determining whether their evolving intervention model has also been successful in meeting the ethical standards of their respective professions. Careful review of the 4 years of the CCP’s operation in terms of ethical constructs has yielded evidence that the CCP, although based on sound principles of theory and scholarship, should be further individualized to meet the particular needs of participants diagnosed with deficits in social communication and executive functioning skills.

Toward an Interactional Clinical Phonetics and Phonology

In this paper we introduce two main areas of interactional research in the field of spoken language analysis, and describe with some brief preliminary studies, how these can be applied to the study of disordered speech. Interactional phonetics is a school of phonetic analysis that looks beyond the traditional concerns of phoneticians with the description of segmental speech features (especially those concerned with lexical contrast in a given speech variety) to those features (both supra- and subsegmental) that are used to signal events in talk in interaction. We demonstrate how this approach can be employed in disordered speech with two brief examples; one from an adult and one from a child. Systemic phonology deriving from work in Firthian prosodic phonology and situated within the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, brings the explicit concerns of the interactional context into the analysis of sound system choices. We illustrate this with disordered speech with an example from an adult with progressive speech deterioration.

Phonology as Human Behaviour: Clinical Phonetics, Phonology and Prosody

Phonology as Human Behaviour: Clinical Phonetics, Phonology and Prosody

Evidence-Based Phonological Assessment of Bilingual Children

Summary Evidence-based assessment ofphonological disorders in bilingualchildren should take into consider-ation recent theories of bilingualphonological representation. By as-sessing both languages and deter-mining how those languages inter-act, we can make a valid diagnosisand determine the child’s strengthsand weaknesses. Then we can uti-lize that information for planningintervention for bilingual childrenwith phonological disorders. References Fabiano, L. (2006). Phonological repre-sentation in bilingual Spanish-En-glish speaking children . Unpub-lished doctoral dissertation,Temple University, Philadelphia.Fabiano, L., & Goldstein, B. (2004a, Feb-ruary). Phonological cross-linguis-tic influence in sequential bilingualSpanish-English speaking children. Poster presented at the Interna-tional Clinical Phonetics and Lin-guistics Association Conference,Lafayette, LA.Fabiano, L., & Goldstein, B. (2004b,May). Phonological representationin simultaneous and sequential bi-lingual Spanish-English speakingchildren.

Evidence-Based Phonological Assessment of Bilingual Children

Summary Evidence-based assessment ofphonological disorders in bilingualchildren should take into consider-ation recent theories of bilingualphonological representation. By as-sessing both languages and deter-mining how those languages inter-act, we can make a valid diagnosisand determine the child’s strengthsand weaknesses. Then we can uti-lize that information for planningintervention for bilingual childrenwith phonological disorders. References Fabiano, L. (2006). Phonological repre-sentation in bilingual Spanish-En-glish speaking children . Unpub-lished doctoral dissertation,Temple University, Philadelphia.Fabiano, L., & Goldstein, B. (2004a, Feb-ruary). Phonological cross-linguis-tic influence in sequential bilingualSpanish-English speaking children. Poster presented at the Interna-tional Clinical Phonetics and Lin-guistics Association Conference,Lafayette, LA.Fabiano, L., & Goldstein, B. (2004b,May). Phonological representationin simultaneous and sequential bi-lingual Spanish-English speakingchildren.

A model for ethical practices in clinical phonetics and linguistics

The emergence of clinical phonetics and linguistics as an area of scientific inquiry gives rise to the need for guidelines that define ethical and responsible conduct. The diverse membership of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) and the readership of this journal are uniquely suited to consider ethical issues from diverse perspectives. Accordingly, this paper introduces a multi‐tiered six‐factor model for ethical practices to stimulate discussion of ethical issues.

The Professions Around the World: New Web-Based Directory Goes Global

The Professions Around the World: New Web-Based Directory Goes Global

A note on systemic functional linguistics and the study of language disorders

(2005). A note on systemic functional linguistics and the study of language disorders. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics: Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 133-135.

Substitution patterns in the phonology of Spanish-speaking children

The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of substitution errors in typically developing Spanish-speaking children and those with phonological disorders. Previous research with English-speaking children has indicated that the frequency and types of substitution errors are two types of information that speech-language pathologists can use to differentially diagnose phonological disorders. In addition, previous studies with Italian speakers [Bortolini, U., & Leonard, L. (). The speech of phonologically disordered children acquiring Italian. Clinical Linguisitcs & Phonetics, 5, 1 – 12.] and Portuguese speakers [Yavas, M., & Lamprecht, R. (). Processes and intelligibility in disordered phonology. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 2, 329 – 345.] have indicated that substitution errors differ based on ambient language. No study has examined this phenomenon in Spanish-speaking children. In the current study, frequency and types of substitution errors in 39 typically developing children were compared ...

Pleiotropic Effects of a Chromosome 3 Locus on Speech-Sound Disorder and Reading

Speech-sound disorder (SSD) is a complex behavioral disorder characterized by speech-sound production errors associated with deficits in articulation, phonological processes, and cognitive linguistic processes. SSD is prevalent in childhood and is comorbid with disorders of language, spelling, and reading disability, or dyslexia. Previous research suggests that developmental problems in domains associated with speech and language acquisition place a child at risk for dyslexia. Recent genetic studies have identified several candidate regions for dyslexia, including one on chromosome 3 segregating in a large Finnish pedigree. To explore common genetic influences on SSD and reading, we examined linkage for several quantitative traits to markers in the pericentrometric region of chromosome 3 in 77 families ascertained through a child with SSD. The quantitative scores measured several processes underlying speech-sound production, including phonological memory, phonological representation, articulation, receptive and expressive vocabulary, and reading decoding and comprehension skills. Model-free linkage analysis was followed by identification of sib pairs with linkage and construction of core shared haplotypes. In our multipoint analyses, measures of phonological memory demonstrated the strongest linkage (marker D3S2465, P=5.6 x 10(-5), and marker D3S3716, P=6.8 x 10(-4)). Tests for single-word decoding also demonstrated linkage (real word reading: marker D3S2465, P=.004; nonsense word reading: marker D3S1595, P=.005). The minimum shared haplotype in sib pairs with similar trait values spans 4.9 cM and is bounded by markers D3S3049 and D3S3045. Our results suggest that domains common to SSD and dyslexia are pleiotropically influenced by a putative quantitative trait locus on chromosome 3.

Investigations in clinical phonetics and linguistics. Fay Windsor, M. Louise Kelly, and Nigel Hewitt (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002.

This volume consists of 38 papers presented at the summer 2000 meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association, hosted by Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh. The scope of the collection is ambitious in many respects. All levels of linguistic analysis are covered, from pragmatics through to acoustics, although approximately two thirds of the papers deal with phonology and phonetics. The full range of ages is represented, from a paper by John Locke on the functions of infant babbling through to Jacqueline Guendozi and Nicole Muller's paper on repair strategies in the conversation of an elderly subject with Alzheimer disease. The majority of the papers consider developmental and acquired disorders, although a few consider normal and bilingual language development. Although English is the most frequently studied language, data from Arabic, Greek, Korean, Portugese, Putonghua, Swedish, and several other languages are also featured. The editors are justly proud of the international feel to the research, with contributors working on five continents.

Retraction

Abu-Akel A., 1999, Phoricity as a measure of Clozaril's efficacy in treating disorganizedschizophrenia. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 13, 381–393.In Volume 13, number 5, 1999, the above-mentioned article was published in theJournal.It is the policy of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics to publish only original scholarship.It has been brought to our attention that a significant portion of this paper wasbased upon un-cited, and previously published works. This unfortunate situationhas only recently come to light.In view of this irregularity, we have taken the decision to retract the article in full.We hope that readers of the Journal will understand that this retraction is designedto maintain the integrity and originality of material published.Martin J. BallThomas W. PowellEditors