Word Position and Grammatical Function in Relation to Preschoolers' Speech Disfluency

1974 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen-Marie Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Phase I ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Word Position ◽  
Interview Situation ◽  
School Classroom ◽  
Speech Disfluency ◽  
Children's Speech

Spontaneous speech samples were tape-recorded from 10 4-yr.-old nonstutterers in their nursery school classroom and in an interview situation. The samples were analyzed to determine whether the children tended to be disfluent on initial words of utterances and on pronouns and conjunctions. The tendency for beginning stutterers to stutter on such words is considered part of the symptomatology of Phase I, or beginning, stuttering. The children in this study demonstrated a statistically significant tendency in both situations to be disfluent on these words. Thus, the tendency to produce speech interruptions at the beginning of utterances and on pronouns and conjunctions appears to be a characteristic of young children's speech production rather than an aspect of the symptomatology of beginning stuttering.

Effect of Selected Word Attributes on Preschoolers' Speech Disfluency: Initial Phoneme and Length

1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen-Marie Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Word Length ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Initial Phoneme ◽  
Interview Situation ◽  
School Classroom ◽  
Monosyllabic Words ◽  
Word Attributes ◽  
Speech Disfluency

This study was designed to determine whether preschool nonstutterers tend to be disfluent on words that begin with consonants or on words that begin with vowels and whether they tend to be disfluent on long or on short words. Analyses of the spontaneous speech of 10 four-year-old boys sampled both in their nursery school classroom and in an interview situation indicated that initial phoneme exerted no influence on the distribution of their speech disfluencies. Word length, however, exerted an influence in the interview situation where the children tended to be disfluent on monosyllabic words. These data raise questions with respect to the applicability of Bloodstein’s (1974) model of the development of stuttering to the disfluency behavior of nonstutterers.

Syntactic Complexity of Preschoolers' Egocentric and Socialized Speech

1972 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen-Marie Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Nursery School ◽  
Private Speech ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Interval Scale ◽  
Interview Situation ◽  
School Classroom

The purpose of this study was to determine whether young children's socialized speech (their speech addressed to an auditor) is more syntactically complex than their egocentric (private) speech. 150 utterances produced by 10 4-yr.-old boys in their nursery school classroom and in an interview situation were randomly selected for analysis. 52 judges rated each utterance on a 7-point equal-appearing-interval scale of “intricacy of language usage.” No difference in intricacy was observed between the children's egocentric and socialized utterances.

Requests and responses in children's speech

1975 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Garvey
Keyword(s):  
School Children ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Indirect Requests ◽  
Children's Speech ◽  
Conversational Sequences

ABSTRACTAn investigation of children's ability to convey and respond to requests for action was based on the spontaneous speech of 36 dyads of nursery school children (3; 6–5; 7). Direct request forms (e.g. Give me the hammer) were frequent and the majority were acknowledged verbally. Examination of the contexts of direct requests indicated that speaker and addressee shared an understanding of the interpersonal meaning factors relevant to requesting. These meaning factors were invoked in justifying, refusing and in repeating or paraphrasing a request, and they also provided a basis for the communication of indirect requests. Examples of inferred requests are discussed, and a relationship between the structure of the speech act and conversational sequences is proposed.

The Influence of Preschoolers' Speech Usage on Their Disfluency Frequency

1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen-Marie Silverman
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Structured Interview ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
School Classroom

A relationship between the function of speech usage and disfluency as it interacts with the speaking situation was hypothesized to explain a previously observed situational difference in preschoolers' frequency of disfluency. To test this hypothesis, speech samples collected from 10 preschoolers in their nursery school classroom and in a structured interview were subjected to a functional analysis. The results revealed that the function of the children’s language usage influenced the frequency of their disfluency.

He who Hesitates: Hesitation Phenomena as Quality Control in Speech Production, Obstacles in Non-Native Speech Perception

2000 ◽  
Vol 182 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marnie Reed
Keyword(s):  
Quality Control ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Classification Framework ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Control Devices ◽  
Content Processing ◽  
Hesitation Phenomena

This study was designed to determine the nature and occurrence of hesitation phenomena in spontaneous speech of native and non-native speakers, and to determine whether and to what extent the hesitation phenomena normal in spontaneous speech pose perception problems for non-native speakers. A quantitative analysis reveals that hesitation phenomena are ubiquitous in both native and non-native speech production. A qualitative analysis based on a content-processing classification framework reveals the function of hesitations. Hesitations act as overt traces of prospective and retrospective speech-processing tasks which function to forestall errors, and to permit detection and repair of errors once they are committed. Hesitations are quality control devices; native and non-native speakers are highly successful utilizing them to forestall errors. However, hesitation phenomena clearly pose perception problems for non-native speakers who show little evidence of recognizing them as such. Like native speakers, non-native speakers produce hesitation phenomena. Unlike native speakers, who edit and filter out the hesitations they hear, non-native speakers attempt to assign meaning to speakers' faulty output or to parenthetical remarks. Hesitations are unpredictable in their frequency or occurrence; failure to provide training in these oral discourse features of connected speech may result in non-native speakers whose speech production vastly outstrips their perception.

scholarly journals Current Aspects of Speech Disfluency Research: Scientific Review of the International Workshop DiSS 19 (Budapest) Issues

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-74
Author(s):  
Tatiana Sineokova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Information Transfer ◽  
International Workshop ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Speech Technology ◽  
Scientific Review ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Speech Disfluency ◽  
Working Out

Disfluency in spontaneous speech is currently a subject of study of specialists working in different fields of knowledge. Different external manifestations of disfluency (hesitation pauses, sound prolongations, pause fillers, articulatory perseverations and lexico-grammatical repetitions, self-corrections, breaks, nonverbal means of information transfer, etc.) are being investigated. They turn out to be a convenient tool for revealing and monitoring the peculiarities of cognitive processes with the help of explicit clearly registered signals occurring in speech under the influence of a number of extralinguistic factors such as the communicative situation, the type of speech (monologic or dialogic), the language of communication (L1 or L2), the emotional state of the speaker, the age, the social status, the diseases impairing speech and mental activity, and others. Further investigation of disfluency makes it possible to solve both a number of fundamental problems connected with modeling of cognitive coding and decoding speech processes and applied tasks connected with adoption of research findings in such fields as developmental pedagogy, psychology, medicine, foreign language training, translation, automatic recognition of speech signal, etc. Up to now, a sufficient number of empirical investigations have been carried out providing a basis for working out particular models which will make it possible, in the long run, to create the overall model of disfluency in spontaneous speech. Conferences and workshops undoubtedly play an important role in uniting the efforts of specialists in this sphere. One of them is the international workshop “Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS)” that was first held in 1999. The current problems that were discussed by the participants of the workshop (production and perception speech models, age and clinical factors of disfluency, special difficulties in foreign speech production, including translation, speech technology) may be a useful reference point for researchers working on the issue.

The Speech and Language Characteristics of Children with Prader-Willi Syndrome

1990 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sallie A. Kleppe ◽  
Kerri Misaki Katayama ◽  
Kenneth G. Shipley ◽  
David R. Foushee
Keyword(s):  
Expressive Language ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Prader Willi Syndrome ◽  
Limited Information ◽  
Speech And Language ◽  
Language Abilities ◽  
Speech Articulation ◽  
Communicative Development ◽  
Language Characteristics ◽  
Children's Speech

Prader-Willi syndrome was initially identified in 1956. Since then, a majority of the literature pertaining to Prader-Willi has focused on the medical and genetic aspects of the syndrome. There has been limited information available regarding the speech and language abilities of children with Prader-Willi. This study investigated the communicative development of 18 children with the syndrome, ranging in age from 8:8 to 17:1. A number of evaluative procedures were used to evaluate the subjects' spontaneous speech, articulation, and receptive and expressive language abilities, as well as their voice, fluency, oral mechanisms, hearing, and their developmental histories. A variety of communicative deficiencies were found in the children's speech, language, voice, and fluency.

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