Phonological Abilities Research Articles

Correlation of Phonological Skills and Reading Skills in Children at Risk of Reading Difficulty

This study aims to determine the correlation between phonological ability and reading ability in children at risk of reading difficulties, utilizing quantitative methods with a correlation research design to obtain accurate data on the relationship between these two variables. The results indicated a strong and positive relationship between phonological ability (Variable 1) and reading ability (Variable 2), with a Kendall tau correlation coefficient of 0.527 and a significance value of 0.002. The findings emphasize that enhancing phonological skills in children at risk of reading difficulties can significantly improve their reading ability. Consequently, it is recommended to implement early phonological skill development training and to conduct further research with larger samples and more diverse methodologies to reinforce these findings. This study aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), which advocates for inclusive and equitable quality education and promotes lifelong learning opportunities for all.

The relationship between semantics, phonology, and naming performance in aphasia: a structural equation modeling approach

ABSTRACT The exploration of naming error patterns in aphasia provides insights into the cognitive processes underlying naming performance. We investigated how semantic and phonological abilities correlate and how they influence naming performance in aphasia. Data from 296 individuals with aphasia, drawn from the Moss Aphasia Psycholinguistics Project Database, were analyzed using a structural equation model. The model incorporated latent variables for semantics and phonology and manifest variables for naming accuracy and error patterns. There was a moderate positive correlation between semantics and phonology after controlling for overall aphasia severity. Both semantic and phonological abilities influenced naming accuracy. Semantic abilities negatively related to semantic, mixed, unrelated errors, and no responses. Interestingly, phonology positively affected semantic errors. Additionally, phonological abilities negatively related to each of phonological and neologism errors. These results highlight the role of semantic and phonological skills on naming performance in aphasia and reveal a relationship between these cognitive processes.

Neuropsychopedagogical Motor Intervention Program Strengthening Inhibitory Control, Working Memory, and Language Abilities in Post-COVID-19 School Returnees

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of a neuropsychopedagogical motor intervention program (NMIP) on the cognitive functioning and academic achievement of students. 201 students aged 7 to 10 participated, randomly assigned to either the control group (103 students underwent two assessments during the NMIP period) or the experimental group (98 students underwent NMIP interspersed with two assessments). The NMIP utilized the Coordinating Methodology, focusing on motor development, executive functions, and mindfulness. It consisted of 36 sessions, each lasting 15 minutes, involving the coding and decoding of figures and colors with parts of the glass human body, implemented by the class teacher in the school setting. Cognitive functioning and academic achievement were assessed using the Children's Scale for Inhibitory Control Screening (CSICS), Neuropsychopedagogical Scale for Working Memory Screening (NSWMS), Scale for Screening Phonological Abilities (SSPA), and Children's Scale for Reading and Writing Screening (CSRWS) before and after the NMIP. The results showed significant improvements in the experimental group: ±19% (p<0.01) in CSICS, ±29% (p<0.01) in NSWMS, ±23% (p<0.01) in SSPA, and a reduction of ±52% (p<0.01) in reading and writing difficulties measured by CSRWS. Additionally, ANOVA analysis indicated superior performance (p<0.01) in cognitive functions and academic skills among children in the experimental group post-NMIP compared to those in the control group. In conclusion, the NMIP demonstrated substantial positive effects on both cognitive functioning and academic achievement in elementary school students.

Assessing the Phonological Abilities of Jordanian Arabic-speaking Children with Phonological Disorders

Objectives: This study investigated the validity of four language measures, i.e., phonological mean length of utterance (PMLU), the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP), the proportion of whole-word correctness (PWC), and percentage of correct consonants, in assessing phonological development in Jordanian Arabic (JA) speaking children with phonological disorders in comparison with typically developing (TD) children.Methods: The study involved 88 monolingual JA-speaking children within the age range of 5 to 6 years, with 44 children diagnosed with phonological disorders and 44 TD children. Each group was further categorized into two age groups, namely 5;0-5;6 and 5,7-6,0. Data were gathered by observing the interactions between the children and their caregivers or parents using age-appropriate toys. A minimum of 100 utterances were collected from each participant.Results: The study found that TD children performed better than the children with phonological disorders on all measures, indicating delayed phonological performance in the phonological disorders group. Positive correlations between the measures were also observed, indicating their ability to provide significant information about children’s phonological abilities. Specific speech sound errors and substitution patterns exhibited by children with phonological disorders were identified, highlighting the motor control and articulatory challenges experienced by this group. Age was found to be a significant factor in the development of TD children, while children with phonological disorders showed similar scores across different age groups.Conclusion: These findings support the usage of the four measures for understanding phonological development in children with phonological disorders, accurately diagnosing them and tracking their progress.

Urban-Rural Differences in Early Arithmetic Performance are Accounted for by Phonological Processing

ABSTRACT Urban and rural children have different levels of performance in arithmetic processing. This study investigated whether such a residence difference can be explained by phonological processing. A total of 1,501 Chinese primary school students from urban and rural areas were recruited to complete nine cognitive tasks: two in arithmetic performance (subtraction and multiplication), one in phonological processing (word rhyming), two in quantity processing (numerosity and number comparison), one in visuo-spatial processing (mental rotation), as well as a mathematical reasoning task (number-series completion) as a contrast with arithmetic processing and two general cognitive tasks (choice reaction time and Raven’s progressive matrices). The results showed that Chinese urban children had superior performance in arithmetic, which was eliminated after controlling for phonological ability, but not after controlling for quantity or visuo-spatial performance or general cognitive factors. Urban children also showed better performance in mathematical reasoning than did rural children, but residence difference in mathematical reasoning was not eliminated by any of the cognitive factors. The above result suggests that phonological processing explains the relationship between residence and arithmetic performance.

Development of a vocabulary list for the Persian version of the profile of early expressive phonological skills: a pilot study

ABSTRACT This research presents a two-phase study aimed at developing and validating the Profile of Early Expressive Phonological Skills for Persian (PEEPS-P) as an assessment tool for evaluating phonological abilities in toddlers. In Phase 1, a total of 60 words were meticulously selected for inclusion in both the basic and expanded word lists, taking into account factors such as age of acquisition (AoA) and phonological complexity. The word lists included monosyllabic and multisyllabic words with diverse consonant clusters, covering various semantic categories. Moving on to Phase 2, data were collected from a sample of 81 toddlers belonging to different age groups. Three elicitation methods were employed to gather data for both the basic and expanded word lists. The study also examined the time required to complete the test and Percentage of Consonant Correct (PCC) scores. The results revealed that, as children's age increased, there was an increase in the percentage of words produced, accompanied by a decrease in the time taken to complete the test. For instance, the youngest age group (18–23 months) produced approximately 46.83% of words in the basic word list, taking an average of about 22 minutes and 3 seconds, while the oldest age group (30–35 months) produced approximately 95.5% of words in both word lists in less than 17 minutes. Ultimately, the findings suggest that the PEEPS-P has the potential to serve as a valuable tool for assessing phonological abilities in toddlers aged 18–35 months.

Patterns of performance on the animal fluency task in logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia: A reflection of phonological and semantic skills

PurposeThis study aimed to characterize the quantitative (total number of correct words generated) and qualitative (psycholinguistic properties of correct words generated) performance patterns on the animal fluency task in individuals with the logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia and to investigate the influence of phonological and semantic abilities to these patterns. MethodsFifteen participants with lvPPA and twenty neurotypical adults completed the animal fluency task and an assessment battery to characterize their phonological and semantic abilities. We recorded the total number of correct words produced and their psycholinguistic properties. Group differences were analyzed using independent samples t-tests and analysis of covariance. Stepwise and multiple linear regression analyses were implemented to investigate the contribution of psycholinguistic properties on word generation as well as the role of phonological and semantic abilities on performance. We also investigated the mediating role of phonological and semantic abilities on the relationship between relevant psycholinguistic properties and word generation output. ResultsCompared to neurotypical controls, participants with lvPPA produced fewer correct responses and more words with lower age of acquisition. The total number of correct words generated was predicted by the age of word acquisition, such that individuals who generated more responses, produced words acquired later in life. Phonology and semantics influenced the number of correct words generated and their frequency, age of acquisition, and semantic neighborhood density. Familiarity and arousal were driven by semantic abilities. Phonological abilities partially mediated the relationship between age of acquisition and word generation output. ConclusionsThis study provides valuable insights into the performance patterns of the animal fluency task in lvPPA. Individuals with lvPPA with more intact phonological and semantic abilities generated greater number of words with more complex psycholinguistic properties. Our findings contribute to the understanding of language processes underlying word retrieval in lvPPA.

The development of symbolic and non-symbolic SNARC effects: The roles of phonological abilities, visuospatial abilities and working memory

The development of symbolic and non-symbolic SNARC effects: The roles of phonological abilities, visuospatial abilities and working memory

Investigating the Effect of Persian Phonemic Synthesis Program in Cochlear Implant Users with Phoneme Processing Dificulities

Background and Aim: Children with severe to profound sensory-neural hearing loss who use a hearing aid or a Cochlear Implant (CI) are likely to have Decoding (DEC) problems. Various studies recommend auditory processing training to improve auditory processing difficulties in CI users. The aim of the present study was to evaluate phoneme processing difficulties in CI users and to investigate the efficacy of the Persian version of the Phonemic Synthesis Program (P-PSP) in improving phonological abilities in this population. Methods: A total of 28 prelingually hearing-impaired children aged 8–12 who underwent unilateral (right ear) cochlear implantation were included in this study. They were divided into experimental and control groups. The P-PSP was implemented on the experimental group, and the results were analyzed over three phases: baseline, intervention, and follow- up. Results: The present study’s results indicate that P-PSP training is suitable for CI children, particularly for the DEC subcategory. Moreover, the Persian Phonemic Synthesis Test (P-PST) results significantly improved after the intervention phase compared to the baseline evaluations (p<0.05). There was no significant difference between the intervention and follow-up phases’ results (p>0.05), indicating no recurrence of auditory processing difficulties after discontinuing training. Conclusion: Based on the study’s findings, the Persian version of PSP enhances phonological processing abilities in CI users. Therefore, the use of auditory phonological training in post- implantation rehabilitation programs appears to be highly important. Keywords: Auditory processing; decoding disorder; cochlear implant; auditory training

Phonological ability and neural congruency: Phonological loop or more?

ObjectiveWe explored neural components in Electroencephalography (EEG) signals during a phonological processing task to assess (a) the neural origins of Baddeley’s working-memory components contributing to phonological processing, (b) the unitary structure of phonological processing and (c) the neural differences between children with dyslexia (DYS) and controls (CAC). MethodsEEG data were collected from sixty children (half with dyslexia) while performing the initial- and final- phoneme elision task. We explored a novel machine-learning-based approach to identify the neural components in EEG elicited in response to the two conditions and capture differences between DYS and CAC. ResultsOur method identifies two sets of phoneme-related neural congruency components capturing neural activations distinguishing DYS and CAC across conditions. ConclusionsNeural congruency components capture the underlying neural mechanisms that drive the relationship between phonological deficits and dyslexia and provide insights into the phonological loop and visual-sketchpad dimensions in Baddeley’s model at the neural level. They also confirm the unitary structure of phonological awareness with EEG data. SignificanceOur findings provide novel insights into the neural origins of the phonological processing differences in children with dyslexia, the unitary structure of phonological awareness, and further verify Baddeley’s model as a theoretical framework for phonological processing and dyslexia.

I remembered the chorm! Word learning abilities of children with and without phonological impairment.

Children with phonological impairment present with pattern-based errors in their speech production. While some children have difficulties with speech perception and/or the establishment of robust underlying phonological representations, the nature of phonological impairment in children is still not well understood. Given that phonological and lexical development are closely linked, one way to better understand the nature of the problem in phonological impairment is to examine word learning abilities in children. To examine word learning and its relationship with speech perception, speech production and vocabulary knowledge in children aged 4-5 years. There were two variables of interest: speech production abilities ranging from phonological impairment to typical speech; and vocabulary abilities ranging from typical to above average ('lexically precocious'). Participants were 49 Australian-English-speaking children aged 48-69 months. Children were each taught four novel non-words (out of a selection of eight) through stories, and word learning was assessed at 1 week post-initial exposure. Word learning was assessed using two measures: confrontation naming and story retell naming. Data were analysed by group using independent-samples t-tests and Mann-Whitney U-tests, and continuously using multiple linear regression. There was no significant difference in word learning ability of children with and without phonological impairment, but regardless of speech group, children with above average vocabulary had significantly better word learning abilities than children with average vocabulary. In multiple linear regression, vocabulary was the only significant predictor of variance in word learning ability. Children with phonological impairment can be lexically precocious and learn new words like their peers without phonological impairment. Contrary to expectations, vocabulary knowledge rather than expressive phonological ability explained variance in measures of word learning. These findings question an assumption that children with phonological impairment have underspecified phonological representations. They also highlight the heterogeneity among children with phonological impairment and the need to better understand the nature of their difficulty learning the phonological system of the ambient language. What is already known on the subject There is limited research examining the word learning abilities of children with phonological impairment. Most previous research focuses on word properties such as phonotactic probability and neighbourhood density. Within the existing literature there are different reports and conclusions regarding the word learning abilities of children with phonological impairment and whether their word learning differs from that of children with typically developing speech. What this study adds to existing knowledge This study found that vocabulary was the strongest predictor of word learning across children with and without phonological impairment. There was no significant difference in word learning ability between children with and without phonological impairment. However, children with lexically precocious vocabulary abilities were significantly better at word learning than children with average vocabulary abilities. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Findings from this study support the importance of assessing and considering measures of word learning-including vocabulary-when working with children with phonological impairment. This study indicates that it is possible to use stories coupled with measures of confrontation naming and story retell to gain deeper insight into children's word learning abilities.

The Role of Narrative Ability on Emergent Literacy Skills and Early Word Reading of Early Childhood Students

Narrative ability is one of the abilities included in emergent literacy and plays a very important role in the development of students' early reading skills. However, research examining the relationship between narrative skills, emergent literacy skills and word reading skills is still limited. Through this research, the researcher investigates the role of narrative ability on emergent literacy ability and reading ability. Besides that, the study investigates the predictive relationship between students' narrative ability, emergent literacy ability, and early word reading ability. The method used in this study was factorial design analysis with several types of data analysis, namely descriptive, correlation, and regression to see the role and relationship of narrative ability, emergent literacy ability, and students' initial word reading ability. Participants in this study were early childhood students, totaling 250 students with an age range of 2-5 years. The research findings show that narrative ability has a significant positive correlation with all aspects of emergent literacy measures. Narrative ability is able to predict the ability to read words in the univariate model. Storybook retelling instructions result in a story that is longer than the original story. This change in story length can have an impact on the use of complex language and decontextualization such as vocabulary development, development of linguistics units, understanding of characters in stories, and story organization. Furthermore, this study also shows that the relationship between students' narrative ability and word reading ability can be mediated by emergent literacy skills, including syntactic abilities, knowledge of letters, phonological abilities, pronunciation of letter sounds, and print conventions. Although the relationship between narrative ability and students' initial reading ability is not direct, this narrative ability makes a significant contribution because narrative ability has a significant impact on emergency literacy skills which, in turn, supports the development of students' reading skills. This research implies that parents or teachers need to consider various alternatives in developing students' reading skills by optimizing narrative skills and other emergency literacy skills so that students are better prepared when they enter school age.

Impaired extraction and consolidation of morphological regularities in developmental dyslexia: A domain general deficit?

The current study examined whether adults with Developmental Dyslexia are impaired in learning linguistic regularities in a novel language, and whether this may be explained by a domain general deficit in the effect of sleep on consolidation. We compared online learning and offline consolidation of morphological regularities in individuals with Developmental Dyslexia (N = 40) and typical readers (N = 38). Participants learned to apply plural inflections to novel words based on morpho-phonological rules embedded in the input and learned to execute a finger motor sequence task. To test the effects of time and sleep on consolidation, participants were assigned into one of two sleep-schedule groups, trained in the evening or in the morning and tested 12 and 24 h later. Unlike typical readers, Dyslexic readers did not extract the morpho-phonological regularities during training and as a group they did not show offline gains in inflecting trained items 24 h after training, suggesting that the deficit in extraction of regularities during training may be related to the deficit in consolidation. The offline gains in dyslexic readers, were correlated with their prior phonological abilities, and were less affected by sleep than those of typical readers. Although no deficit was found in the consolidation of the motor task, dyslexic readers were again less successful in generating an abstract representation of the motor sequence, reflected in a difficulty to generalize the motor sequence knowledge acquired using one hand to the untrained hand. The results suggest that individuals with Developmental Dyslexia have a domain general deficit in extracting statistical regularities from an input. Within the language domain this deficit is reflected in reduced benefits of consolidation, particularly during sleep, perhaps due to reduced prior phonological abilities, which may impede the individual's ability to extract the linguistic regularities during and after training and thus constrain the consolidation process.

Language Experience Predicts Eye Movements During Online Auditory Comprehension.

Experience-based theories of language processing suggest that listeners use the properties of their previous linguistic input to constrain comprehension in real time (e.g. MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002; Smith & Levy, 2013; Stanovich & West, 1989; Mishra, Pandey, Singh, & Huettig, 2012). This project investigates the prediction that individual differences in experience will predict differences in sentence comprehension. Participants completed a visual world eye-tracking task following Altmann and Kamide (1999) which manipulates whether the verb licenses the anticipation of a specific referent in the scene (e.g. The boy will eat/move the cake). Within this paradigm, we ask (1) are there reliable individual differences in language-mediated eye movements during this task? If so, (2) do individual differences in language experience correlate with these differences, and (3) can this relationship be explained by other, more general cognitive abilities? Study 1 finds evidence that language experience predicts an overall facilitation in fixating the target, and Study 2 replicates this effect and finds that it remains when controlling for working memory, inhibitory control, phonological ability, and perceptual speed.

Sustained musical beat perception develops into late childhood and predicts phonological abilities.

Sensitivity to auditory rhythmic structures in music and language is evident as early as infancy, but performance on beat perception tasks is often well below adult levels and improves gradually with age. While some research has suggested the ability to perceive musical beat develops early, even in infancy, it remains unclear whether adult-like perception of musical beat is present in children. The capacity to sustain an internal sense of the beat is critical for various rhythmic musical behaviors, yet very little is known about the development of this ability. In this study, 223 participants ranging in age from 4 to 23 years from the Las Vegas, Nevada, community completed a musical beat discrimination task, during which they first listened to a strongly metrical musical excerpt and then attempted to sustain their perception of the musical beat while listening to a repeated, beat-ambiguous rhythm for up to 14.4 s. They then indicated whether a drum probe matched or did not match the beat. Results suggested that the ability to identify the matching probe improved throughout middle childhood (8-9 years) and did not reach adult-like levels until adolescence (12-14 years). Furthermore, scores on the beat perception task were positively related to phonological processing, after accounting for age, short-term memory, and music and dance training. This study lends further support to the notion that children's capacity for beat perception is not fully developed until adolescence and suggests we should reconsider assumptions of musical beat mastery by infants and young children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Cognitive Makeup of Writing: Multivariate Analysis of Writing Impairments Following Stroke

Writing is a recently acquired skill to human behavioral repertoire, essential in industrialized societies. In the clinic, writing impairment is evident in one-third of stroke patients. This study aimed to find out the cognitive features that contribute to writing impairment of stroke patients in two different writing systems (logographic and phonological). Cognitive profiles were assessed using the Birmingham Cognitive Screen in two cohorts, China (244 patients) and UK (501 patients). The datasets were analyzed separately using an identical procedure. Elastic net was used to rank the importance of different cognitive abilities (features) to writing skill; and linear support vector machine was used to identify the discriminative features needed to accurately identify the stroke patients with and without writing impairments. The prediction performance was evaluated with the area under the curve (AUC), accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), and specificity (SPE). For the China cohort, writing numbers, complex figure copy, and number calculation obtained good prediction performance on writing impairments with AUC 0.85 ± 0.06, ACC (89 ± 3) %, SEN (81 ± 10) %, and SPE (90 ± 27) %. Concerning the UK data, writing numbers, number calculation, non-word reading, and auditory sustain attention achieved AUC 0.79 ± 0.04, ACC (83 ± 3) %, SEN (74 ± 9) %, and SPE (84 ± 3) %. A small number of patients in both cohorts (China: 9/69, UK: 24/137), who were impaired in writing, were consistently misclassified. Two patients, one in each cohort, showed selective impairments in writing, while all remaining patients were impaired in attention, language, and/or praxis tasks. The results showed that the capability to write numbers and manipulate them were critical features for predicting writing abilities across writing systems. Reading abilities were not a good predictor of writing impairments across both cohorts. Constructive praxis (measured by complex figure copy) was relevant to impairment classification in characters-based writing (China), while phonological abilities (measured by non-word reading) were important features for impairment prediction in alphabetic writing (UK). A small proportion minority of cases with writing deficits were related to different impairment profiles. The findings in this study highlight the multifaceted nature of writing deficits and the potential use of computation methods for revealing hidden cognitive structures in neuropsychological research.

The TUNJO battery as a predictor of phonetic ability: A survey among English Philology students

Some learners are more successful in foreign language mastering than others. Among the plausible explanations discussed in the literature (Carroll 1981; Skehan 1991; Dörnyei 2005; Stansfield & Reed 2019; Griffiths & Soruç 2020), the concept of foreign language aptitude (FLA) is regarded as one of the key factors that can influence or predict learners’ success in the process of foreign language acquisition. The present pilot quantitative study aims to assess the extent to which learners’ level of foreign language aptitude can be correlated to their general phonological ability based on the example of first-year MA English Philology students (N=10). To assess the students’ level of aptitude, the Polish adaptation of the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT), called the Test of Aptitude for the Learning of Foreign Languages (Test Uzdolnień do Nauki Języków Obcych – TUNJO), was used. On the other hand, to measure their level of phonetic ability, the test, which focused on several chosen areas covered during practical and theoretical phonetics classes during the BA programme, was constructed and submitted to the group. The quantitative data gathered throughout those two stages were subsequently analysed and interpreted. The results obtained revealed no significant correlation between the students’ level of aptitude and their general phonetic ability. Other individual differences and affective factors in language learning, alongside the structure of the measuring tools and the measurement itself, may justify the apparent lack of correlation.

Sensitivity to orthographic vs. phonological constraints on word recognition: An ERP study with deaf and hearing readers

The role of phonology in word recognition has previously been investigated using a masked lexical decision task and transposed letter (TL) nonwords that were either pronounceable (barve) or unpronounceable (brvae). We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate these effects in skilled deaf readers, who may be more sensitive to orthotactic than phonotactic constraints, which are conflated in English. Twenty deaf and twenty hearing adults completed a masked lexical decision task while ERPs were recorded. The groups were matched in reading skill and IQ, but deaf readers had poorer phonological ability. Deaf readers were faster and more accurate at rejecting TL nonwords than hearing readers. Neither group exhibited an effect of nonword pronounceability in RTs or accuracy. For both groups, the N250 and N400 components were modulated by lexicality (more negative for nonwords). The N250 was not modulated by nonword pronounceability, but pronounceable nonwords elicited a larger amplitude N400 than unpronounceable nonwords. Because pronounceable nonwords are more word-like, they may incite activation that is unresolved when no lexical entry is found, leading to a larger N400 amplitude. Similar N400 pronounceability effects for deaf and hearing readers, despite differences in phonological sensitivity, suggest these TL effects arise from sensitivity to lexical-level orthotactic constraints. Deaf readers may have an advantage in processing TL nonwords because of enhanced early visual attention and/or tight orthographic-to-semantic connections, bypassing the phonologically mediated route to word recognition.

Otizm Spektrum Bozukluğu Olan Çocukların Sesbilgisel Özelliklerinin İncelenmesi

Bu çalışmanın temel amacı, farklı dil düzeylerine sahip Otizm Spektrum Bozukluğu (OSB) olan çocuklarda sözel dil performansları ile sesbilgisel özelliklerin ilişkisinin incelenmesidir. Yaşları 2;0 - 7;11 arasındaki OSB olan 36 çocuğun dil düzeylerini belirlemek için Türkçe Erken Dil Gelişim Testi (TEDİL), sesbilgisel özelliklerini belirlemek için Ankara Artikülasyon Testi (AAT) uygulanmıştır. TEDİL sonucunda sözel dil performansı çok zayıf 15, zayıf 5, ortalama altı 6, ortalama 9, ortalama üstü 1 çocuk saptanmıştır. AAT sonucunda sesbilgisel becerilerde çocukların %83.33’inin yaş düzeylerinin altında, %5.56’nin yaş düzeyinde veya yaş düzeyine yakın, %11.11’ünün yaş düzeyinin üstünde performans gösterdikleri saptanmıştır. Çocukların sözel dil performansları ve sesbilgisel düzeyleri arasında ilişki olduğu ve sözel dil performansı arttıkça hata sayılarının azaldığı bulunmuştur. Hedef sesin atılması, yerine başka ses konması şeklindeki hataların ve hata yapılan ses birimlerin sıklıkları incelenmiştir. Çalışmanın bulguları genel dil düzeyi daha iyi olan OSB olan çocukların sesbilgisel performanslarının da daha iyi olduğunu göstermektedir.

Atypical prosodic realization by Mandarin-speaking autistic children: Evidence from tone sandhi and neutral tone

Introduction Atypical prosodic features have been widely reported in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), primarily in non-tonal language speakers. Nevertheless, the prosodic realizations in autistic people who speak tonal languages were relatively understudied. This study aimed to investigate the acoustic and phonetic patterns at the word-level speech in Mandarin-speaking autistic and typically developing (TD) children at different age ranges.Methods Thirty Mandarin-speaking autistic children (15 three- to five-year-olds and 15 six- to eight-year-olds) were recruited into the ASD group. The TD group consisted of 30 age- and gender-matched children. We employed a picture-naming task to elicit the spontaneous speech production of Mandarin disyllabic words in which tone change processes occur, namely Tone 3 (T3) sandhi and neutral tone (T0).Results The phonetic analysis showed that the ASD group generally could produce typical-like T3 sandhi and T0 in terms of pitch height. However, relative to the TD group, they exhibited flatter pitch contours during T3 sandhi production. Moreover, the acoustic pitch mean of citation tones in the ASD group was also significantly higher, accompanied by more rigid pitch curves in contour tones. In addition, the atypical temporal realization in the ASD group was manifested by the longer duration of T0 and the earlier inflection position of T3.Conclusions Mandarin-speaking autistic children under eight had the phonological ability to produce context-dependent tones based on connected tonal information at the word level. Nevertheless, their phonetic prosodic realization of tone change processes was atypical. Our findings provide evidence of atypical prosody in autistic children who speak tone languages. Clinically, these findings may be attributable to underlying neural differences in autistic children.