Gradient speech change during intervention for school-aged children and adults with cleft palate ± lip.

Gradient speech change, where speech sound production develops in a broadly step-wise fashion towards the standard adult form, is a well-recognised phenomenon in children developing typical speech, but is much less studied in speakers with developmental speech sound disorders. Instrumental techniques, such as electropalatography (EPG), may be useful for identifying gradient speech change and may supplement phonetic transcription in important ways. This study investigated whether gradient speech change occurred in six participants with cleft palate ± lip undergoing intervention within a usage-based phonology framework (2/6 participants with speech distortions; 4/6 with pattern-based speech substitutions; combined total of 25 speech sounds targeted for intervention).

Clinical application of usage-based phonology: Treatment of cleft palate speech using usage-based electropalotography.

Purpose: To investigate whether a novel electropalatography (EPG) therapy, underpinned by usage-based phonology theory, can improve the accuracy of target speech sounds for school-aged children and adults with persistent speech sound disorder (SSD) secondary to cleft palate +/- lip.

Method: Six consecutively treated participants (7-27 years) with long-standing speech disorders associated with cleft palate enrolled in a multiple baseline (ABA) within-participant case series. The usage-based EPG therapy technique involved high-volume production of words.

The space between words: on the description of Parkinson's disease in Jonathan Franzen's ''.

Disability or health-related literature has potential to shape public understanding of disability and can also play an important role in medical curricula. However, there appears to be a gap between a health humanities approach which may embrace fictional accounts and a cultural disability studies approach which is deeply sceptical of fiction written by non-disabled authors. This paper seeks to reconcile these perspectives and presents an analysis of the language used by Jonathan Franzen in his description of Parkinson's disease in the novel We use detailed linguistic analysis, specifically stylistics, to identify the techniques Franzen adopts to represent aspects of impairment and disability.

The acquisition of newly emerging sociophonetic variation: /str-/ in American English.

Eight children aged 4;1-8;1 and their primary caregivers participated in a study designed to evaluate their use of the onset cluster /str-/ in both read and conversational speech. The cluster is currently undergoing a reported sound change in many varieties of English, with the initial /s/ being retracted to [ʃ]. The study compared the initial fricative of the cluster in both the children and their mothers.

Repair sequences in dysarthric conversational speech: a study in interactional phonetics.

This paper presents some findings from a case study of repair sequences in conversations between a dysarthric speaker, Chris, and her interactional partners. It adopts the methodology of interactional phonetics, where turn design, sequence organization, and variation in phonetic parameters are analysed in unison. The analysis focused on the use of segmental and prosodic variation found during attempts by Chris to repair a previously identified trouble source.

The importance of narrow phonetic transcription for highly unintelligible speech: some examples.

The importance of the use of narrow phonetic transcription in transcribing a variety of speech disorders is emphasized. This point is illustrated with clinical data from the authors' own research. The examples used are the transcription of a severely disfluent client, a child with progressive hearing loss, repair sequences in dysarthric speakers, a child with idiosyncratic velar articulations, and an adult with progressive speech degeneration.