Speech Of Young Children Research Articles

Multi-sensory stimulation in speech development for neuroatypical children: A therapist’s perspective

The speech of young children is a rich area of study and discussion because it serves as a remarkable tool for communication and interaction with their environment. Consequently, disorders in speech acquisition draw considerable attention from speech therapists. This article explores the issue of polysensory stimulation, considering developmental sequences in speech acquisition. It describes the therapeutic use of sound-imitative expressions, natural gestures, and systemic gestures (e.g., Makaton). The article emphasizes the importance of music in developing speech and sensory stimulation, particularly focusing on vestibular and proprioceptive senses. It also presents measurable outcomes of therapeutic interventions through individual case studies.

Factors affecting the speech intelligibility of children with hearing impairment

Background: Children with hearing impairment have difficulties affecting their ability to understand speech and general communication development. It is essential to understand the background of the factors affecting young children's speech intelligibility in the Pakistani setting. Objective: To explore the factors affecting speech intelligibility among children with hearing impairment. Methods: A total of n=107 individuals were selected for the 6-month study at GMT clinic, Siemens Hearing Clinic, Hearing and Speech Care Clinic, and RHS in Islamabad using non-probability convenience sampling. Children between the ages of 6 and 12 who had mild to profound sensorineural hearing loss and could express themselves at the phrase level met the inclusion criteria. Speech-impairing conditions and progressive or conductive hearing loss were included in the exclusion criteria. Using the Assessing Intelligibility Worksheet, data was collected, in which 17 utterances with 57 words spoken by the therapist participants were repeated and the responses were noted by the therapist. Multiple linear regression, descriptive statistics, and percentage distribution were all analyzed using SPSS 21. Results: A multiple regression model was run to predict intelligibility utterance from age, gender, type of hearing aid, technology of hearing aid, degrees of hearing loss, and talkativeness. This model significantly predicted speech intelligibility of hearing aid users {F (8, 98) = 42.905, p<0.001}. All variables cause 77.8% (Adj. R2=.778) variance in speech intelligibility of hearing aid users. Conclusion: The study concludes that there is a considerable impact of gender, the technology of hearing aids, degree of hearing loss, and talkativeness level on speech intelligibility while no significant impact of types of hearing aids concerning Behind the ear and receiver in the canal on children's speech intelligibility.

Two-word Utterances in the Speech of Young Children: Gender Aspect according to MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories

Two-word Utterances in the Speech of Young Children: Gender Aspect according to MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories

What is the impact of a multi‐modal pedagogical conversational AI system on parents' concerns about technology use by young children?

AbstractPrevious research showed that the parents acknowledged the technology's benefits for their young children's learning, however, they are still worried about the extended screen time, lack of physical activity and lack of social interactions. To address these concerns, we developed Kid Space to enable pedagogically appropriate technology use for children in early childhood education by combining various sensing technologies with a multi‐modal conversational artificial intelligence system that can interact with children, understand individual progress and provide personalised learning experiences. To understand the impact of Kid Space on the parents' initial concerns about technology use by their young children, we conducted a multi‐method user study: (1) a quasi‐experimental design and (2) formative research method using an exploratory case study with a set of children and their parents experiencing Kid Space in their homes. The results show that after experiencing Kid Space with their children, the parents felt significantly less concerned about screen time, social interactions and physical activity and reported positive perceptions towards pedagogical value of Kid Space. Detailed analysis on the multi‐modal data quantitatively and qualitatively validated why Kid Space alleviated these concerns. Future research is needed to validate long‐term educational value of Kid Space and generate insights for improvement for next iterations. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Play‐based learning is critical for young children's education, but digital games create major concerns around extended screen time, lack of physical activity and lack of social interactions. Blending digital and physical spaces could support pedagogically appropriate technology use for young children. Towards this end, there are some exemplary studies in the state–of‐the‐art reporting positive educational outcomes as an effect of utilising such spaces. However, none of these studies supported children's most natural mode of communication in their interactions with the systems—speaking. Pedagogical conversational agents (PCAs) are promising, but they are tricky when it comes to young children's speech because of unique technical challenges resulted from how children use language and communicate with digital systems. What this paper adds To our best knowledge, Kid Space is one of the earliest implementations of a PCA with a multi‐modal artificial intelligence (AI) system utilising physical and digital learning manipulatives for maths learning with a focus on early childhood education. The key contributions of this paper are (1) the design and development of an end‐to‐end multi‐modal system enabling Wizard‐of‐Oz experimentation for initial evaluations with users, (2) the creation of a multi‐modal, in‐the‐wild labelled dataset with children–agent, children–parent and children–physical/digital space interactions enabling advancements for AI components for later evaluations with users and (3) the generation of rich insights from an initial research study on user perceptions and engagement as well as actionable findings to improve Kid Space experiences for next iterations and inform key design features for similar systems. Implications for practice and/or policy The results of the study implied a set of areas for improvement—or design features—for Kid Space and other similar pedagogical conversational systems developed for children's home usages: (1) easier setup and usage with optimised setup size addressing diverse space limitations at homes, (2) minimised latency between Oscar (the conversational pedagogical agent) and child interactions (eg, adding multimodal dialogue system to reduce the need for a human wizard), (3) more advanced personalisation, social (including more verbal interactions) and pedagogical skills for Oscar with increased contextual awareness (eg, sending children's engagement), (4) scalability and higher visual quality of content with diverse games and learning outcomes, (5) parental control features over Kid Space platform and Oscar (eg, time limit, content, etc.) and (6) accessibility features (eg, captions turned on for multilingual children) and support for neurodiversity.

Preventive speech therapy work with young children in a preschool educational organization

The article deals with the organization of preventive speech therapy work with young children in a preschool educational organization; the possibility of using productive activities in identifying and correcting speech disorders in young children is revealed; the results of a speech examination of children of the first junior group of three preschool educational institutions of the Tutaevsky municipal district (Yaroslavl region) in the amount of 70 people (32 boys, 38 girls) are described. The age of the studied children is from 1 year 9 months to 2 years 1 month. The study involved teachers (6 senior educators, 10 educators of groups for young children and 6 speech therapists) and 68 parents (legal representatives). The experimental work was built within the framework of preventive speech therapy work with young children based on the use of productive activities. The authors have developed a cycle of correctional and developmental classes in drawing and application in order to correct various aspects of the speech of young children, which meets the requirements of the educational program of a preschool educational organization, takes into account the level of psychoverbal development of children, involves the participation of educators, speech therapist and parents (legal representatives) on stages of diagnosis, correction and patronage. The authors use the term «speech-creative process», which involves the implementation of an interconnected speech and visual activity of the child, contributes to the prevention and / or correction of speech and motor disorders in children. The effectiveness of the experimental work is confirmed by the data of repeated diagnostics of the level of development of speech in young children. Conclusions are drawn about the need to conduct preventive speech therapy work in a preschool educational organization, to increase the staffing of speech therapists in a preschool educational institution, and to create advanced training programs for teaching staff working with young children. The tasks of implementing this area of work in the conditions of a preschool educational organization are outlined.

Lexical Predictors of Intelligibility in Young Children's Speech.

Speech perception is a probabilistic process, integrating bottom-up and top-down sources of information, and the frequency and phonological neighborhood of a word can predict how well it is perceived. In addition to asking how intelligible speakers are, it is important to ask how intelligible individual words are. We examined whether lexical features of words influenced intelligibility in young children. In particular, we applied the neighborhood activation model, which posits that a word's frequency and the overall frequency of a word's phonological competitors jointly affect the intelligibility of a word. We measured the intelligibility of 165 children between 30 and 47 months in age on 38 different single words. We performed an item response analysis using generalized mixed-effects logistic regression, adding word-level characteristics (target frequency, neighborhood competition, motor complexity, and phonotactic probability) as predictors of intelligibility. There was considerable variation among the words and the children, but between-word variability was larger in magnitude than between-child variability. There was a clear positive effect of target word frequency and a negative effect of neighborhood competition. We did not find a clear negative effect of motor complexity, and phonotactic probability did not have any effect on intelligibility. Word frequency and neighborhood competition both had an effect on intelligibility in young children's speech, so listener expectations are an important factor in the selection of items for children's intelligibility assessment.

Early diagnostic indicators of childhood apraxia of speech in young children with 7q11.23 duplication syndrome: preliminary findings

ABSTRACT Limited evidence for early indicators of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) precludes reliable diagnosis before 36 months, although a few prior studies have identified several potential early indicators. We examined these possible early indicators in 10 toddlers aged 14–24 months at risk for CAS due to a genetic condition: 7q11.23 duplication syndrome (Dup7). Phon Vocalisation analyses were conducted on phonetic transcriptions of each child’s vocalisations during an audio-video recorded 30-minute play session with a caregiver and/or a trained research assistant. The resulting data were compared to data previously collected by Overby from similar-aged toddlers developing typically (TD), later diagnosed with CAS (LCAS), or later diagnosed with another speech sound disorder (LSSD). The Dup7 group did not differ significantly from the LCAS group on any measure. In contrast, the Dup7 group evidenced significant delays relative to the LSSD group on canonical babble frequency, volubility, consonant place diversity, and consonant manner diversity and relative to the TD group not only on these measures but also on canonical babble ratio, consonant diversity, and vocalisation structure diversity. Toddlers with Dup7 also demonstrated expressive vocabulary delay as measured by both number of word types orally produced during the play sessions and primary caregivers’ responses on a standardised parent-report measure of early expressive vocabulary. Examining babble, phonetic, and phonotactic characteristics from the productions of young children may allow for earlier identification of CAS and a better understanding of the nature of CAS.

Medical Aspects for Risk Factors of Acute Otitis Media in Early Age Kids of Play Group, A Clinical Study

Task: The diagnosis of acute otitis media is very common in young children. Its chronic condition may cause hearing impairment and delayed speech in young children. Aims and Objectives: The aims and objectives of current study were to provide health awareness against risk factors of acute otitis media in our community.

Vin nacvalsaxelis mravlobiti ricxvis sakitxisatvis tanamedrove kartulshi /ვინ ნაცვალსახელის მრავლობითი რიცხვის საკითხისათვის თანამედროვე ქართულში [On the Issue of the Plural Form of the Pronoun ‘vin’ (‘who’) in Modern Georgian

The pronoun ‘vin’ (‘who’) is an ancient lexical item. It has neither a complete paradigm of declension nor a category of number; abundance can be expressed by doubling the stem: vin movida? – vin da vin movidnen? (tamari da nino movidnen) (Who came? – Who and who came? (Tamar and Nino came). From the 19th century, the –‘eb’ form of the pronoun ‘vin’ – ‘vinebi’ (‘whos’) emerges in the mountainous dialects of the Georgian language, as “ an attempt to create a plural form’’ of the ‘vin’ pronoun (A. Shanidze). From the following period, ‘vinebi’ (the ‘whos’) spread to other dialects, in general, to the Georgian language, and here and there even in fiction. Today it is especially noticeable in the speech of young people and children. It seems that the media, social network, and other means of communication also contribute to this process. In our opinion, the basis for the emergence and further spread of the ‘vinebi’ can be: 1. The need for formal agreement (apart from the semantic one) of the pronoun ‘vin’ (‘vints’) (who ([the one] who) with the verb and the corresponding word (vin iq’o stumari -vin iq’o stumrebi>vin iq’vnen stumrebi || vin da vin iq’vnen stumrebi || vinebi iq’vnen stumrebi) (Who was the guest – Who was the guests > Who were the guests || Who and who were the guests || Whos were the guests); 2. The analogy of the production of other pronouns formed with the suffix -eb (ra - ra-n-i, ra da ra || raebi. (‘what’) Cf. vin-vin and vin || vinebi (‘who’); also dialect forms: amaebi, magaebi, magnebi, agenebi, eseebi, isebi/isnebi… (these/those); 3. The general regularity of a language involves giving more space to organic production compared to the descriptive one and facilitating the pronunciation, etc. (ra da ra moitkhoves? vin da vin ts’avidnen? Cf. raebi moitkhoves? vinebi ts’avidnen?). (What and what did they demand? Who and who went? Cf. What did they demand? Who left?). The form ‘vinebi’ (‘whos’) which is incorrect for the literary language is a new reality. Its future will probably be determined by the language itself. საკვანძო სიტყვები: ქართული ენის მორფოლოგია, ნაცვალსახელის წარმოება, ნაცვალსახელის მრავლობითი რიცხვის გამოხატვა. Keywords: Morphology of the Georgian language, pronoun formation, expressing plural in pronouns.

Audiovisual Speech Processing in Relationship to Phonological and Vocabulary Skills in First Graders.

It is generally accepted that adults use visual cues to improve speech intelligibility in noisy environments, but findings regarding visual speech benefit in children are mixed. We explored factors that contribute to audiovisual (AV) gain in young children's speech understanding. We examined whether there is an AV benefit to speech-in-noise recognition in children in first grade and if visual salience of phonemes influences their AV benefit. We explored if individual differences in AV speech enhancement could be explained by vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, or general psychophysical testing performance. Thirty-seven first graders completed online psychophysical experiments. We used an online single-interval, four-alternative forced-choice picture-pointing task with age-appropriate consonant-vowel-consonant words to measure auditory-only, visual-only, and AV word recognition in noise at -2 and -8 dB SNR. We obtained standard measures of vocabulary and phonological awareness and included a general psychophysical test to examine correlations with AV benefits. We observed a significant overall AV gain among children in first grade. This effect was mainly attributed to the benefit at -8 dB SNR, for visually distinct targets. Individual differences were not explained by any of the child variables. Boys showed lower auditory-only performances, leading to significantly larger AV gains. This study shows AV benefit, of distinctive visual cues, to word recognition in challenging noisy conditions in first graders. The cognitive and linguistic constraints of the task may have minimized the impact of individual differences of vocabulary and phonological awareness on AV benefit. The gender difference should be studied on a larger sample and age range.

Reconsidering variability in child speech production

Child speech is highly variable between and within speakers. This pattern has traditionally been explained by a lack of motor routine and articulatory control in the developing speech-motor apparatus. But the assumption that child speech is inherently variable—and the result of motor development and control—may be premature. Recent work suggests that some child speech variation may instead be attributable to errors in measurement: children's high fundamental frequencies make many traditional acoustic measures, such as formant tracking, unreliable and variable. Additionally, child speech variation can often be explained by experiential factors, such as the size of the lexicon or the type and quantity of language exposure. This talk will report on these and other recent findings that suggest a need to reconsider the prevalence of, and reasons for, variability in young children's speech.

지속가능한 유아 환경교육에서 교사 발화의 의미연결망 분석

지속가능한 유아 환경교육에서 교사 발화의 의미연결망 분석

Recording and analyzing kinematic data in children and adults with SOLLAR: Sonographic & Optical Linguo-Labial Articulation Recording system

Understanding the development of spoken language in young children has become increasingly important for advancing basic theories of language acquisition and for clinical practice. However, such a goal requires refined measurements of speech articulation (e.g., from the tongue), which are difficult to obtain from young children. In recent years though, technological advances have allowed developmental researchers to make significant steps in that direction. For instance, movements of the tongue, an articulator that is essential for spoken language, can now be tracked and recorded in children with ultrasound imaging. This technique has opened novel research avenues in (a)typical language acquisition, enabling researchers to reliably capture what has long remained invisible in the speech of young children. Within this context, we have designed an experimental platform for the recording and the processing of kinematic data: SOLLAR (Sonographic and Optical Linguo-Labial Articulatory Recording system). The method has been tailored for children, but it is suitable for adults. In the present article, we introduce the recording environment developed to record over 100 children and 30 adults within SOLLAR. We then describe SOLLAR’s data processing framework, providing examples of data visualization and a summary of strengths and limitations.

A lexical advantage in four-year-old children's word repetition.

This study examined a potential lexicality advantage in young children's early speech production: do children produce sound sequences less accurately in nonwords than real words? Children aged 3;3-4;4 completed two tasks: a real word repetition task and a corresponding nonword repetition task. Each of the 23 real words had a paired consonant-vowel sequence in the nonword in word-initial position (e.g., 'su' in ['sutkes] 'suitcase' and ['sudrɑs]). The word-initial consonant-vowel sequences were kept constant between the paired words. Previous work on this topic compared different sequences of paired sounds, making it hard to determine if those results were due to a lexical or phonetic effect. Our results show that children reliably produced consonant-vowel sequences in real words more accurately than nonwords. The effect was most pronounced in children with smaller receptive vocabularies. Together, these results reinforce theories arguing for interactions between vocabulary size and phonology in language development.

In the clear

What are the effects of dummy use on young children's speech and language development? Radhika Kovendrakumar gives advice, based on research she did for her pre-school

Argumentação, humor e incongruência na linguagem da criança

Este artigo tem por objetivo discutir a questão da incongruência nos discursos humorístico e argumentativo, tratando da definição de cada um desses termos e, além disso, de sua emergência na fala das crianças. Para tanto, trazemos, para embasar as discussões, alguns dados produzidos por duas crianças brasileiras monolíngues – português, G. e S., gravadas em situação de interação com os pais e nos contextos cotidianos, como o jantar, durante suas brincadeiras, entre outros. Trata-se de investigar de que modo a argumentação e o humor estão relacionados na fala dessas crianças, interligadas muitas vezes pela incongruência, fenômenos ainda pouco estudados nas pesquisas sobre a aquisição de linguagem, especialmente sobre as intersecções desses elementos na fala de crianças pequenas. Nossas primeiras observações demonstram que as crianças utilizam precocemente estratégias linguísticas, tanto para defender seu ponto de vista quanto para escapar da repreensão de seus pais e, muitas vezes, elas as fazem utilizando o humor.

The most frequently used words: Comparing child-directed speech and young children's speech to inform vocabulary selection for aided input

Transactional theories of communication development focus on the interplay among child, caregiver, and environmental variables. Typically, this interplay involves symmetry between receptive and expressive modes (i.e., speech), but is asymmetrical for children with complex communication needs who hear speech but use graphic symbols expressively. Aided input, during which a communication partner points to graphic symbols while talking, may increase symmetry, but it is challenging to determine which words to represent with graphic symbols to ensure adequate aided input is provided. In this study, secondary analysis of transcripts of 16 mothers who interacted with their children with typical development across six time points (between 9 and 15 months) revealed 267 words that comprised 80% of the 257,480 words the mothers used. This list of words that mothers used most frequently was compared to three existing lists of the expressive vocabulary used most frequently by 65 toddlers and preschoolers with typical development, indicating substantial overlap. The results suggest that there is a common set of frequently occurring words that mothers use in their daily interactions with infants and toddlers, and that these same words also comprise a significant proportion of the words most frequently used by young children. Implications for representing these frequently occurring words with graphic symbols on the communication systems of children with complex communication needs are discussed.

Speech disfluencies in children with Down Syndrome

PurposeSpeech and language development in individuals with Down syndrome is often delayed and/or disordered and speech disfluencies appear to be more common. These disfluencies have been labeled over time as stuttering, cluttering or both. Findingswere usually generated from studies with adults or a mixed age group, quite often using different methodologies, making it difficult to compare findings. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to analyze and describe the speech disfluencies of a group, only consisting of children with Down Syndrome between 3 and 13 years of age. MethodParticipants consisted of 26 Dutch-speaking children with DS. Spontaneous speech samples were collected and 50 utterances were analyzed for each child. Types of disfluencies were identified and classified into stuttering-like (SLD) and other disfluencies (OD). The criterion of three or more SLD per 100 syllables (cf. Ambrose & Yairi, 1999) was used to identify stuttering. Additional parameters such as mean articulation rate (MAR), ratio of disfluencies, and telescoping (cf. Coppens-Hofman et al., 2013) were used to identify cluttering and to differentiate between stuttering and cluttering. Results & conclusionApproximately 30 percent of children with DS between 3 and 13 years of age in this study stutter, which is much higher than the prevalence in normally developing children. Moreover, this study showed that the speech of children with DS has a different distribution of types of disfluencies than the speech of normally developing children. Although different cluttering-like characteristics were found in the speech of young children with DS, none of them could be identified as cluttering or cluttering-stuttering.

Reciprocal relations between syntax and tense/agreement morphology in children’s interpretation of input: A look at children with specific language impairment

There is growing evidence that the grammatical errors reflected in the speech of young children are often related to the nature of the input in the ambient language. Although theoretical frameworks differ in the degree to which input plays a role, there is acknowledgment that children require more input than previously assumed to resolve apparent grammatical ambiguities in the sentences they hear. In languages such as English, tense and agreement morphology seems especially at the mercy of correct interpretation of the input. This review discusses possible input-related reasons for the relatively late mastery of tense and agreement (and related) morphology in English-speaking children, and the especially protracted period of tense and agreement inconsistency in the speech of children with specific language impairment. It is noted that there is a reciprocal relation here. On the one hand, the children’s failure to grasp particular syntactic structures can lead to the extraction and inappropriate use of verbs lacking tense and agreement. On the other hand, the tense and agreement (and related) morphemes in these structures can serve as important cues for interpreting the syntactic structure.

Velopharyngeal Structural and Functional Assessment of Speech in Young Children Using Dynamic Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate a novel method for examining the velopharyngeal mechanism using static and dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at the sentence-level production in young children with normal anatomy. This study examined whether velopharyngeal events occurring in the midsagittal plane are correlated to muscle events occurring along the plane of velopharyngeal closure. Adenoid involvement in velopharyngeal function was also explored. A high-resolution, T2-weighted turbo-spin-echo three-dimensional anatomical scan was used to acquire static velopharyngeal data and a fast-gradient echo fast low angle shot multishot spiral technique (15.8 frames per second) was used to acquire dynamic data on 11 children between 4 and 9 years old. Changes in velar knee height from rest to the bilabial /p/ production was strongly correlated with changes in the velar configuration (r = 0.680, P = .021) and levator muscle contraction (r = 0.703, P = .016). Velar configuration was highly correlated to levator muscle changes (r = 0.685, P = .020). Mean alpha angle during bilabial /p/ production was 176°, which demonstrated that subjects achieve velopharyngeal closure at or just below the palatal plane. Subjects with a larger adenoid pad used significantly less (r = -0.660, P = .027) levator muscle contraction compared with individuals with smaller adenoids. This study demonstrates a potentially useful technique in dynamic MRI that does not rely on cyclic repetitions or sustained phonation. This study lends support to the clinical potential of dynamic MRI methods for cleft palate management.