Assessing speech correction abilities with acoustic analyses: Evidence of preserved online correction in persons with aphasia.
Caroline A Niziolek, Swathi Kiran
PMID 30348017WHAT IT FOUND
Every participant in this small study showed within-syllable speech correction.
Their vowel sounds moved closer to their own average target by mid-word. In this small sample, online correction appeared to remain working even when speech errors were frequent.
Key findings
01All participants showed vowel centering: deviant correct productions moved closer to the speaker's own median by mid-utterance beyond what regression to the mean would predict.
02The aphasia group showed 28 mels of average centering, compared with 18 mels in previously reported typical speakers, while onset variability was 34 mels versus 28 mels.
03Across participants, larger initial acoustic variability was associated with larger vowel centering (r = 0.502; p = 0.028), but neither measure correlated significantly with standardised aphasia or repetition scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only eight people with aphasia were studied, and they were selected because they made repetition errors, so this cannot represent all people with aphasia. The aphasia subtypes were mixed: four anomic, three Broca's, one conduction, and one participant had mild-to-moderate apraxia of speech. There was no control group collected in this study; comparisons were made with previous healthy speakers who were mostly younger and not age-matched. The analysis used only correct trials, so it does not show what happens during overt errors. The method requires many spoken trials and stable formant tracking, which may limit use with people who cannot read or produce enough speech.
Declared interests
The supplied metadata lists research support from the National Institutes of Health, Extramural. No author disclosure or conflict-of-interest statement is included in the supplied text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these results as proof that all people with aphasia can correct speech online, or that this acoustic method can guide treatment. The study included a small selected sample, mixed aphasia subtypes, and no age-matched control group collected alongside them.