Speech perception in school-aged children with specific language impairment
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Cheng, An-An
Abstract
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are characterized by difficulty with language learning but without severe cognitive and physical development deficits. Some studies on English-learning SLI children propose that these children are restricted by “rapid temporal processing deficit”, so that they can’t efficiently process speech sounds, and result in language learning difficulties. The study aimed to investigate the “rapid processing deficit” hypothesis in Mandarin-learning SLI children, and also examined the consonant and lexical tone perception in this group of children. A series of three experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 explored the “temporal effect” on Mandarin-speaking adults discriminating stop consonants with different place of articulation, and found that the duration of formant transition affected the consonant discrimination performance. Experiment 2 investigated the “consonant” and “lexical tone” perception in 6-year-old typically-developed children, and failed to found the “temporal effect” on consonant and “tone sweep” discrimination. However, the regression analysis showed that “lexical tone” contributed more in accounting for the overall phonetic discrimination variance. Experiment 3 compared the Mandarin-learning 9-year-old SLI children (n = 14) with age and nonverbal IQ matched control group (n = 17) on three speech discrimination tasks -- “lexical tone”, “consonant, the place of articulation (stop-vowel syllables)”, and “tone sweep”. The results showed that SLI children performed significantly less accurate in “lexical tone” and ”consonant” discrimination than controls, but they performed similar “tone sweep” sensitivity with controls. It seemed the perceptual processing deficit of SLI was “speech-specific” rather than “auditory” in detecting spectral cues of lexical tones and temporal cues of stop-vowel syllables. On the other hand, the speech processing deficit might not be “rapid processing limit”. Results showed that lengthening the formant transition didn’t improve the consonant discrimination performance. The performance of SLI children was still poorer than controls on discriminating consonants with prolonged formant transitions. Thus, Mandarin-learning SLI children might have processing difficulties in integrating essential acoustic-phonetic cues to detect phonetic differences. Besides, exaggerated F0 range of lexical tones improved both groups’ performance. Results of regression analysis showed that lexical tone sensitivity contributed most in accounting for the overall speech discrimination variance, and also significantly related to language production performance. Results suggest that lexical tone processing is critical to Mandarin-speaking SLI children to learn language and also demonstrate the “language-specific processing deficit” in SLI children.
Subjects
speech perception
specific language impairment
school-aged children
lexical tone
place of articulation
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