The impact of cerebral palsy on the intelligibility of pitch-based linguistic contrasts. (17/342)

This study investigated the perception of three Cantonese level tones produced by speakers with dysarthria associated with cerebral palsy. Four speakers with dysarthria were selected on the basis of their distinctive patterns of fundamental frequency (F0) values observed in the level tones they produced, which showed errors in either F0 level or, F0 contour, or both. Monosyllabic words which contrasted in tone level were used as stimuli in an identification task. Five expert listeners identified the tones among the six Cantonese contrastive tones. Results showed that the tones produced by the dysarthric speakers were predominantly perceived as level tones; although a majority was perceived as the wrong level tone. The most important finding is that only the level tones produced by dysarthric speakers could be identified as rising or falling contour tones. The frequent perceptual confusion among the level tones, and the perception of contour tones, shows that a disorder in the production of pitch-based linguistic contrasts can have a substantial impact on the communication abilities of individuals with cerebral palsy.  (+info)

Perceptual organization of onsets and offsets of sounds. (18/342)

Several illusory phenomena in auditory perception are accounted for by using the event construction model presented by Nakajima et al. (2000) in order to explain the gap transfer illusion. This model assumes that onsets and offsets of sounds are detected perceptually as if they were independent auditory elements. They are connected to one another according to the proximity principle to constitute auditory events. This model seems to contribute to a general cross-modal theory of perception where the idea of edge integration plays an important role. Potential directions in which we can connect the present paradigm with speech perception are indicated, and possibilities to improve artificial auditory environments are suggested.  (+info)

Acoustics and psychosocial environment in intensive coronary care. (19/342)

BACKGROUND: Stress, strain, and fatigue at the workplace have previously not been studied in relation to acoustic conditions. AIMS: To examine the influence of different acoustic conditions on the work environment and the staff in a coronary critical care unit (CCU). METHOD: Psychosocial work environment data from start and end of each individual shift were obtained from three shifts (morning, afternoon, and night) for a one-week baseline period and for two four-week periods during which either sound reflecting or sound absorbing tiles were installed. RESULTS: Reverberation times and speech intelligibility improved during the study period when the ceiling tiles were changed from sound reflecting tiles to sound absorbing ones of identical appearance. Improved acoustics positively affected the work environment; the afternoon shift staff experienced significantly lower work demands and reported less pressure and strain. CONCLUSIONS: Important gains in the psychosocial work environment of healthcare can be achieved by improving room acoustics. The study points to the importance of further research on possible effects of acoustics in healthcare on staff turnover, quality of patient care, and medical errors.  (+info)

Behavioral inhibition and clinical outcomes in children with cochlear implants. (20/342)

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS: Individual speech and language outcomes of deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) are quite varied. Individual differences in underlying cognitive functions may explain some of this variance. The current study investigated whether behavioral inhibition skills of deaf children were related to performance on a range of audiologic outcome measures. DESIGN: Retrospective analysis of longitudinal data collected from prelingually and profoundly deaf children who used CIs. METHODS: Behavioral inhibition skills were measured using a visual response delay task that did not require hearing. Speech and language measures were obtained from behavioral tests administered at 1-year intervals of CI use. RESULTS: Female subjects showed higher response delay scores than males. Performance increased with length of CI use. Younger children showed greater improvement in performance as a function of device use than older children. No other subject variable had a significant effect on response delay score. A series of multiple regression analyses revealed several significant relations between delay task performance and open set word recognition, vocabulary, receptive language, and expressive language scores. CONCLUSIONS: The present results suggest that CI experience affects visual information processing skills of prelingually deaf children. Furthermore, the observed pattern of relations suggests that speech and language processing skills are closely related to the development of response delay skills in prelingually deaf children with CIs. These relations may reflect underlying verbal encoding skills, subvocal rehearsal skills, and verbally mediated self-regulatory skills. Clinically, visual response delay tasks may be useful in assessing behavioral and cognitive development in deaf children after implantation.  (+info)

Speech intelligibility of pediatric cochlear implant recipients with 7 years of device experience. (21/342)

Speech intelligibility of 24 prelingually deaf pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients with 84 months of device experience was investigated. Each CI participant's speech samples were judged by a panel of 3 listeners. Intelligibility scores were calculated as the average of the 3 listeners' responses. The average write-down intelligibility score was 71.54% (SD = 29.89), and the average rating-scale intelligibility score was 3.03 points (SD = 1.01). Write-down and rating-scale intelligibility scores were highly correlated (r = .91, p < .001). Linear regression analyses revealed that both age at implantation and different speech-coding strategies contribute to the variability of CI participants' speech intelligibility. Implantation at a younger age and the use of the spectral-peak speech-coding strategy yielded higher intelligibility scores than implantation at an older age and the use of the multipeak speech-coding strategy. These results serve as indices for clinical applications when long-term advancements in spoken-language development are considered for pediatric CI recipients.  (+info)

Effect of high-frequency spectral components in computer recognition of dysarthric speech based on a Mel-cepstral stochastic model. (22/342)

Computer speech recognition of individuals with dysarthria, such as cerebral palsy patients, requires a robust technique that can handle conditions of very high variability and limited training data. In this study, a hidden Markov model (HMM) was constructed and conditions investigated that would provide improved performance for a dysarthric speech (isolated word) recognition system intended to act as an assistive/control tool. In particular, we investigated the effect of high-frequency spectral components on the recognition rate of the system to determine if they contributed useful additional information to the system. A small-size vocabulary spoken by three cerebral palsy subjects was chosen. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients extracted with the use of 15 ms frames served as training input to an ergodic HMM setup. Subsequent results demonstrated that no significant useful information was available to the system for enhancing its ability to discriminate dysarthric speech above 5.5 kHz in the current set of dysarthric data. The level of variability in input dysarthric speech patterns limits the reliability of the system. However, its application as a rehabilitation/control tool to assist dysarthric motor-impaired individuals such as cerebral palsy subjects holds sufficient promise.  (+info)

Production and perception of clear speech in Croatian and English. (23/342)

Previous research has established that naturally produced English clear speech is more intelligible than English conversational speech. The major goal of this paper was to establish the presence of the clear speech effect in production and perception of a language other than English, namely Croatian. A systematic investigation of the conversational-to-clear speech transformations across languages with different phonological properties (e.g., large versus small vowel inventory) can provide a window into the interaction of general auditory-perceptual and phonological, structural factors that contribute to the high intelligibility of clear speech. The results of this study showed that naturally produced clear speech is a distinct, listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech production in both languages. Furthermore, the acoustic-phonetic features of the conversational-to-clear speech transformation revealed cross-language similarities in clear speech production strategies. In both languages, talkers exhibited a decrease in speaking rate and an increase in pitch range, as well as an expansion of the vowel space. Notably, the findings of this study showed equivalent vowel space expansion in English and Croatian clear speech, despite the difference in vowel inventory size across the two languages, suggesting that the extent of vowel contrast enhancement in hyperarticulated clear speech is independent of vowel inventory size.  (+info)

Speech reading and learning to read: a comparison of 8-year-old profoundly deaf children with good and poor reading ability. (24/342)

Nine children with severe-profound prelingual hearing loss and single-word reading scores not more than 10 months behind chronological age (Good Readers) were matched with 9 children whose reading lag was at least 15 months (Poor Readers). Good Readers had significantly higher spelling and reading comprehension scores. They produced significantly more phonetic errors (indicating the use of phonological coding) and more often correctly represented the number of syllables in spelling than Poor Readers. They also scored more highly on orthographic awareness and were better at speech reading. Speech intelligibility was the same in the two groups. Cluster analysis revealed that only three Good Readers showed strong evidence of phonetic coding in spelling although seven had good representation of syllables; only four had high orthographic awareness scores. However, all 9 children were good speech readers, suggesting that a phonological code derived through speech reading may underpin reading success for deaf children.  (+info)