Modelling category goodness judgments in children with residual sound errors.
Sarah Hamilton Dugan, Noah Silbert, Tara McAllister and 3 others
PMID 29792525WHAT IT FOUND
Children with residual sound errors judge the goodness of /r/ sounds just like typically developing peers.
Both groups are less sensitive to acoustic cues than adults, accepting a wider range of errors. This suggests perception lags behind production in children.
Key findings
01Children with residual sound errors and typically developing children showed similar patterns of judging /r/ goodness, with no significant difference between the two groups.
02Both child groups were less sensitive to acoustic variations in /r/ than adults, resulting in less sharp boundaries between correct and incorrect productions.
03Vowel context significantly influenced judgments, with all listeners more likely to accept /r/ sounds as correct when they occurred in a front vowel context.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The children with residual sound errors had all received at least one year of speech therapy, which may have given them practice in judging speech sounds, potentially skewing their performance toward adult-like patterns or masking differences from typically developing peers. The study did not measure auditory short-term memory, which previous research suggests is important for discriminating similar sounds. Attention and focus during the listening tasks were not measured. The study used natural speech stimuli, so other uncontrolled acoustic variables besides formants may have influenced listener judgments.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) and non-U.S. government sources.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with residual sound errors have impaired speech perception compared to their peers. The study found they judged /r/ sounds just as well as typically developing children, and both groups were simply less sensitive to acoustic details than adults.