Vowel perception by adults and children with normal language and specific language impairment: Based on steady states or transitions?

Joan E. Sussman

60 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Reading and Literacy Development Phonetics and Phonology Research

Abstract

The current investigation studied whether adults, children with normally developing language aged 4-5 years, and children with specific language impairment, aged 5-6 years identified vowels on the basis of steady-state or transitional formant frequencies. Four types of synthetic tokens, created with a female voice, served as stimuli: (1) steady-state centers for the vowels [i] and [ae]; (2) voweless tokens with transitions appropriate for [bib] and [baeb]; (3) "congruent" tokens that combined the first two types of stimuli into [bib] and [baeb]; and (4) "conflicting" tokens that combined the transitions from [bib] with the vowel from [baeb] and vice versa. Results showed that children with language impairment identified the [i] vowel more poorly than other subjects for both the voweless and congruent tokens. Overall, children identified vowels most accurately in steady-state centers and congruent stimuli (ranging between 94%-96%). They identified the vowels on the basis of transitions only from "voweless" tokens with 89% and 83.5% accuracy for the normally developing and language impaired groups, respectively. Children with normally developing language used steady-state cues to identify vowels in 87% of the conflicting stimuli, whereas children with language impairment did so for 79% of the stimuli. Adults were equally accurate for voweless, steady-state, and congruent tokens (ranging between 99% to 100% accuracy) and used both steady-state and transition cues for vowel identification. Results suggest that most listeners prefer the steady state for vowel identification but are capable of using the onglide/offglide transitions for vowel identification. Results were discussed with regard to Nittrouer's developmental weighting shift hypothesis and Strange and Jenkin's dynamic specification theory.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 60 citations exist upstream.

References

2014Children with Specific Language Impairment 1990Analysis, synthesis, and perception of voice quality variations among female and male talkers 1996Language Comprehension in Language-Learning Impaired Children Improved with Acoustically Modified Speech 1973Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels 1974Developmental aphasia: Rate of auditory processing and selective impairment of consonant perception 1986A perceptual model of vowel recognition based on the auditory representation of American English vowels 1997Deficits in auditory temporal and spectral resolution in language-impaired children 1975Developmental aphasia: The perception of brief vowels and extended stop consonants

Cited by

2004Adult–child differences in acoustic cue weighting are influenced by segmental context: Children are not always perceptually biased toward transitions 2006Formant transitions in fricative identification: The role of native fricative inventory 2010Children’s recognition of American English consonants in noise 2007Abnormal frequency discrimination in children with SLI as indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN)

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.