Validating the Influences of Methodological Decisions on Assessing the Spatiotemporal Stability of Speech Movement Sequences Using Children's Speech Data.

Purpose: Prior research introduced quantifiable effects of three methodological parameters (number of repetitions, stimulus length, and parsing error) on the spatiotemporal index (STI) using simulated data. Critically, these parameters often vary across studies. In this study, we validate these effects, which were previously only demonstrated via simulation, using children's speech data.

The Impact of Stimulus Length in Tongue and Lip Movement Pattern Stability in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the effect of stimulus signal length on tongue and lip motion pattern stability in speakers diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) compared to healthy controls.

Method: Electromagnetic articulography was used to derive articulatory motion patterns from individuals with mild ( = 27) and severe ( = 16) ALS and healthy controls ( = 25). The spatiotemporal index (STI) was used as a measure of articulatory stability.

A developmental account of the role of sequential dependencies in typical and atypical language learners.

The Gerken lab has shown that infants are able to learn sound patterns that obligate local sequential dependencies that are no longer readily accessible to adults. The Goffman lab has shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) exhibit deficits in learning sequential dependencies that influence the acquisition of words and grammar, as well as other types of domain general sequences. Thus, DLD appears to be an impaired ability to detect and deploy sequential dependencies over multiple domains.

Neuromuscular adaptations of swallowing and speech in unilateral cerebral palsy: shared and distinctive traits.

Our aims were to ) examine the neuromuscular control of swallowing and speech in children with unilateral cerebral palsy (UCP) compared with typically developing children (TDC), ) determine shared and separate neuromuscular underpinnings of the two functions, and ) explore the relationship between this control and behavioral outcomes in UCP. Surface electromyography (sEMG) was used to record muscle activity from the submental and superior and inferior orbicularis oris muscles during standardized swallowing and speech tasks. The variables examined were normalized mean amplitude, time to peak amplitude, and bilateral synchrony.

Children With Developmental Language Disorder Show Deficits in the Production of Musical Rhythmic Groupings.

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show evidence of domain-general deficits in sequentially patterned motor skills. This study focuses on the production of rhythmically grouped sequences drawn from a music task, with the hypothesis that children with DLD will show a sequential pattern learning deficit that crosses language and action domains.

Method: Fifty-seven 4- to 5-year-old children (36 with DLD) drummed and clapped a developmentally appropriate musical rhythmic sequence 24 times (clapped 12 times, drummed 12 times).

Shared and Separate Neuromuscular Underpinnings of Swallowing and Motor Speech Development in the School-Age Years.

Purpose: Despite co-occurrence of swallowing and speech disorders in childhood, there is limited research on shared and separate neuromuscular underpinnings of these functions. The purpose of this study was to (a) compare neuromuscular control of swallowing and speech between younger and older children and (b) determine similarities and differences in neuromuscular control of swallowing and speech.

Method: Twenty-six typically developing children (thirteen 7- to 8-year-olds and thirteen 11- to 12-year-olds) completed this cross-sectional study.

Phonological and Articulatory Deficits in the Production of Novel Signs in Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose: Sign language, like spoken language, incorporates phonological and articulatory (or motor) processing components. Thus, the learning of novel signs, like novel spoken word forms, may be problematic for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). In the present work, we hypothesize that phonological and articulatory deficits in novel sign repetition and learning would differentiate preschool-age children with DLD from their typical peers.

Acoustic and Kinematic Methods of Indexing Spatiotemporal Stability in Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose: The spatiotemporal index (STI) is a standard metric for quantifying the stability and patterning of speech movements. The STI has often been applied to individual speech articulators, but an STI derived from the acoustic signal offers a composite and easily obtained measure that incorporates multiple components of the speech production complex. In this work, we examine the relationship between kinematic and acoustic STIs in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD), with the aim of determining whether the acoustic and kinematic STIs reflect similar degrees of production variability.

The Effect of Somatosensory Input on Word Recognition in Typical Children and Those With Speech Sound Disorder.

Purpose: Recent work suggests that speech perception is influenced by the somatosensory system and that oral sensorimotor disruption has specific effects on the perception of speech both in infants who have not yet begun to talk and in older children and adults with ample speech production experience; however, we do not know how such disruptions affect children with speech sound disorder (SSD). Response to disruption of would-be articulators during speech perception could reveal how sensorimotor linkages work for both typical and atypical speech and language development. Such linkages are crucial to advancing our knowledge on how both typically developing and atypically developing children produce and perceive speech.

Swallowing and Motor Speech Skills in Unilateral Cerebral Palsy: Novel Findings From a Preliminary Cross-Sectional Study.

Purpose: Our purpose was to start examining clinical swallowing and motor speech skills of school-age children with unilateral cerebral palsy (UCP) compared to typically developing children (TDC), how these skills relate to each other, and whether they are predicted by clinical/demographic data (age, birth history, lesion type, etc.).

Method: Seventeen children with UCP and 17 TDC (7-12 years old) participated in this cross-sectional study.

Phonological characteristics of novel gesture production in children with developmental language disorder: Longitudinal findings.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD; aka specific language impairment) are characterized based on deficits in language, especially morphosyntax, in the absence of other explanatory conditions. However, deficits in speech production, as well as fine and gross motor skill, have also been observed, implicating both the linguistic and motor systems. Situated at the intersection of these domains, and providing insight into both, is manual gesture.

Influences of Methodological Decisions on Assessing the Spatiotemporal Stability of Speech Movement Sequences.

Purpose: The spatiotemporal index (STI) is a widely used approach for measuring speech pattern stability across multiple repetitions of a stimulus. In this study, we examine how methodological choices in the implementation of the STI (including the number of repetitions, length of stimuli, and parsing procedure) can affect its value.

Method: To evaluate how each methodological decision affects the STI, we use a synthetic data framework that allows for the generation of random productions of the template phrase "Buy Bobby a Puppy" at different stability levels.

Contributions of early motor deficits in predicting language outcomes among preschoolers with developmental language disorder.

We assessed the extent to which language, speech, and fine/gross motor skills in preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD; also referred to as specific language impairment) predicted language outcome two years later. Participants with DLD ( 15) and typical development (TD;  = 14) completed language, speech, and fine/gross motor assessments annually, beginning as 4- to 5-year-olds (Year 1 timepoint) and continuing through 6 to 7 years of age (Year 3 timepoint). We performed Pearson correlation and hierarchical regression analyses to examine the relative contributions of Year 1 language, speech, and motor skills to Year 3 language outcome in each group.

A longitudinal study of the phonological organisation of novel word forms in children with developmental language disorder.

Deficits in the production of novel words, such as in nonword repetition tasks, are one of the early hallmarks of developmental language disorder (DLD). In children with DLD, the production of novel nonwords is characterised by speech sound inaccuracy. The focus of the present study is on the stable organisation of phonological sequences.

Not All Procedural Learning Tasks Are Difficult for Adults With Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose The experiment reported here compared two hypotheses for the poor statistical and artificial grammar learning often seen in children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as specific language impairment). The states that implicit learning of rule-based input is impaired, whereas the states that poor performance is only seen when learners must implicitly compute sequential dependencies. The current experiment tested learning of an artificial grammar that could be learned via feature activation, as observed in an associatively organized lexicon, without computing sequential dependencies and should therefore be learnable on the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis, but not on the procedural learning deficit hypothesis.

Lexical-Semantic Cues Induce Sound Pattern Stability in Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose When learning novel word forms, preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as ) produce speech targets inaccurately and with a high degree of intraword variability. The aim of the current study is to specify whether and how layering lexical-semantic information onto novel phonological strings would induce increased organization of sound production patterns. Method Twenty-one preschoolers with DLD and 21 peers with typical language (ranging in age from 4;1 to 5;11 [years;months]) imitated multiple renditions of novel words, half with (i.

Vowel Accuracy and Segmental Variability Differentiate Children With Developmental Language Disorder in Nonword Repetition.

Purpose Poor nonword repetition accuracy is a hallmark of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, other diagnostic categories also show impaired nonword repetition performance relative to children with typical development (TD); therefore, this task is currently a sensitive but nonspecific index of DLD. In this study, we investigated segmental and kinematic aspects of nonword repetition performance to further specify the diagnostic utility of nonword repetition tasks (NRTs) in diagnosing DLD.

Language Skill Mediates the Relationship Between Language Load and Articulatory Variability in Children With Language and Speech Sound Disorders.

Purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between language load and articulatory variability in children with language and speech sound disorders, including childhood apraxia of speech.

Method: Forty-six children, ages 48-92 months, participated in the current study, including children with speech sound disorder, developmental language disorder (aka specific language impairment), childhood apraxia of speech, and typical development. Children imitated (low language load task) then retrieved (high language load task) agent + action phrases.

An Application of Network Science to Phonological Sequence Learning in Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose: Network science has been a valuable tool in language research for investigating relationships between complex linguistic elements but has not yet been applied to sound sequencing in production. In the present work, we used standard error-based accuracy and articulatory kinematic approaches as well as novel measures from network science to evaluate variability and sequencing errors in speech production in children with developmental language disorder (DLD; aka specific language impairment).

Method: Twelve preschoolers with DLD and 12 age-matched controls participated in a 3-day novel word learning study.

The impact of brief restriction to articulation on children's subsequent speech production.

This project explored whether disruption of articulation during listening impacts subsequent speech production in 4-yr-olds with and without speech sound disorder (SSD). During novel word learning, typically-developing children showed effects of articulatory disruption as revealed by larger differences between two acoustic cues to a sound contrast, but children with SSD were unaffected by articulatory disruption. Findings suggest that, when typically developing 4-yr-olds experience an articulatory disruption during a listening task, the children's subsequent production is affected.

Influence of Language Load on Speech Motor Skill in Children With Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show particular deficits in the generation of sequenced action: the quintessential procedural task. Practiced imitation of a sequence may become rote and require reduced procedural memory. This study explored whether speech motor deficits in children with SLI occur generally or only in conditions of high linguistic load, whether speech motor deficits diminish with practice, and whether it is beneficial to incorporate conditions of high load to understand speech production.

Perceptual statistical learning over one week in child speech production.

What cognitive mechanisms account for the trajectory of speech sound development, in particular, gradually increasing accuracy during childhood? An intriguing potential contributor is statistical learning, a type of learning that has been studied frequently in infant perception but less often in child speech production. To assess the relevance of statistical learning to developing speech accuracy, we carried out a statistical learning experiment with four- and five-year-olds in which statistical learning was examined over one week. Children were familiarized with and tested on word-medial consonant sequences in novel words.

Semantic richness and word learning in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Semantically rich learning contexts facilitate semantic, phonological, and articulatory aspects of word learning in children with typical development (TD). However, because children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differences at each of these processing levels, it is unclear whether they will benefit from semantic cues in the same manner as their typical peers. The goal of this study was to track how the inclusion of rich, sparse, or no semantic cues influences semantic, phonological, and articulatory aspects of word learning in children with ASD and TD over time.

Deficits in Coordinative Bimanual Timing Precision in Children With Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: Our objective was to delineate components of motor performance in specific language impairment (SLI); specifically, whether deficits in timing precision in one effector (unimanual tapping) and in two effectors (bimanual clapping) are observed in young children with SLI.

Method: Twenty-seven 4- to 5-year-old children with SLI and 21 age-matched peers with typical language development participated. All children engaged in a unimanual tapping and a bimanual clapping timing task.