One Size Doesn't Fit All: A Pilot Study Toward Performance-Specific Speech Intervention in Children With a Cleft (Lip and) Palate

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists usually apply a “one size fits all” approach to eliminate compensatory cleft speech characteristics (CSCs). It is necessary to investigate what intervention works best for a particular patient. This pilot study compared the effectiveness of two therapy approaches (a motor-phonetic approach and a linguistic-phonological approach) on different subtypes of compensatory CSCs in Dutch-speaking children with a cleft (lip and) palate (CP ± L). Method: Fourteen children with a CP ± L ( M age = 7.71 years) were divided into two groups using block randomization stratified by age, gender, and type of compensatory CSC. Six children received intervention to eliminate anterior oral CSCs ( n = 3 motor-phonetic intervention, n = 3 linguistic-phonological intervention). Eight children received intervention to eliminate non-oral CSCs ( n = 4 motor-phonetic intervention, n = 4 linguistic-phonological intervention). Each child received 10 hr of speech intervention divided over 2 weeks. Perceptual and psychosocial outcome measures were used to determine intervention effects. Results: Children who received linguistic-phonological intervention to eliminate anterior oral CSCs had significantly higher correctly produced consonant scores and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) scores compared to children who received motor-phonetic intervention to eliminate anterior oral CSCs. In the group of children who received intervention to eliminate non-oral CSCs, no significant differences were found in the correctly produced consonant scores nor in the HRQoL scores between the two intervention approaches. Conclusions: Linguistic-phonological intervention seems to be more appropriate to eliminate anterior oral CSCs. The beneficial effects of linguistic-phonological intervention were less pronounced in children with non-oral CSCs. Perhaps, children with non-oral CSCs benefit more from a hybrid phonetic-phonological approach. This study is a step forward in the provision of performance-specific intervention in children with a CP ± L. Replication in larger samples is needed and will aid to tailor treatment plans to the needs of our patients.

Speech characteristics of parkinson disease

Objective: Parkinson Disease (PD) is known the second most frequent neurodegenerative age-related disorder after Alzheimer’s disease. Although over the six million people worldwide suffer from PD, the main cause of the disease remains are unknown. Speech and language impairments have emerged in most patients with PD during the course of the disease. However, clinical profiles or characteristics that might differentiate individuals with PD who are predisposed to speech and language deficits are generally overlooked. Moreover, factors that expedite language disability have still been remained elusive. It is thought that the awareness of speech and language impairments in PD can significantly help to maintain language abilities as the disease progresses and also may contribute to improving communication skills with patients. For this reason, the present study aims to constitute a comprehensive frame for the speech and language characteristics of individuals with PD

Narrative as a method of studying the speech characteristics of bilingual children (On the example of Georgian bilingual and Greek monolingual juniors)

The present article: ″Narrative as a method of studying the speech characteristics of bilingual children (On the example of Georgian bilingual and Greek monolingual juniors)″ aims to study the nature of narrative and to establish narrative skills in school; also the purpose of the study is to define the importance of narrative as an effective method of research. The first part of the paper presents a brief overview of the theoretical material around the narrative. The second part of the article is based on empirical material. In particular, it is based on the analysis and results of my research which I have conducted at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece). The article presents a study of children's narratives and a comparison of narratives during bilingualism; In particular, the use of narrative-based research method in the case of Georgian bilinguals and Greek monolinguals, the use of which is quite common in the modern field of psycholinguistics.

Gender aspects of politeness strategy in speech acts

Quite important for scientists is the question of the place of gender characteristics in the choice of linguistic means, as well as the reflection in the language of stereotypes associated with gender. Each person has his own style of communication, which depends on upbringing, education, age, social status, and gender. In general, men and women speak differently, although each person has a different level of gender speech characteristics.

The system of factors to define word change paradigms of militi-pseudonyms in the modern Ukrainian language

The article is concerned with consideration of specific characteristics of militi- pseudonyms as of made-up personal names of the military, the focus is made on the fact that the problem of normative reproduction of such proprieties in orthography is not set up. It is also emphasized that militi-pseudonyms of Ukrainian heroes of different times, in particular of liberation struggle in 1917–1922, 1938–1950, of today’s Russian-Ukrainian war, are to be written with capital letters and without inverted commas. It is recommended that such information and examples be added to the corresponding paragraph in «Ukrainian Orthography» and determined as a grammar standard. The publication involves a detailed analysis of relevant factors system necessary to define elementary paradigmatic classes of militi- pseudonyms. On the whole, there have been defined 23 out of 33 possible nouns in the modern Ukrainian literary language, which can be changed, 6 being considered as potential. Noun declension of proprieties, functioning as the military’s names, is influenced by part of speech characteristics (lexico-grammatical class of nouns, in particular substantivized verbs, numerals, adjectives, participles, adverbs, interjections, etc), by declension type (those of a noun, adjective or referred to differently declined), by lexical meaning, by belonging to a definite class or subclass of onyms, to the person category, definite gender, declension, declension group, short paradigm (only singular word forms), by different word formants, definite stem finals, identity of all word forms or inflexional rows integrity (with or without variant or analytical forms, priority of some of them) within declension paradigm, accentual, contextual, orthographic, morphological, dialect factors, possible deviation from expected forms and changes in the paradigm caused by extra lingual factors (political, military, social, cultural, religious, etc.).

StressDat – Database of speech under stress in Slovak

The paper describes methodology for creating a Slovak database of speech under stress and pilot observations. While the relationship between stress and speech characteristics can be utilized in a wide domain of speech technology applications, its research suffers from the lack of suitable databases, particularly in conversational speech. We propose a novel procedure to record acted speech in the home of actors and using their own smartphones. We describe both the collection of speech material under three levels of stress and the subsequent annotation of stress levels in this material. First observations suggest a reasonable inter-annotator agreement, as well as interesting avenues for the relationship between the intended stress levels and those perceived in speech.

Visualizing the Knowledge Domain of Motor Speech Disorders: A Scientific Review (2000-2019)

This review visualizes the knowledge domain of motor speech disorders (MSDs) in linguistics between 2000 and 2019 by means of scientometric methods. With topic searches, the study collected 869 bibliographic records and 20, 411 references from Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) of Thomson Reuter. The clustered and visualized document co-citation network of the MSDs knowledge domain in CiteSpace identifies 15 research foci in different periods, including apraxia of speech, acoustics, children, technology, aphemia, childhood apraxia of speech, primary progressive aphasia, speech motor delay, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, rhythm, foreign accent syndrome, phonation, phonological awareness, dose and speech perception. Revolving around linguistics, these foci could be divided into studies on speech characteristics of MSDs in terms of phonology and phonetics, remedies for MSDs in terms of neurolinguistics and acoustic phonetics, dysarthria secondary to neurological diseases based on pathological linguistics, subtypes of apraxia of speech, methods of MSDs based on auditory phonetics and a newly recognized subtype of MSDs. Meanwhile, the emerging trends of MSDs in linguistics are detected by the analysis of reference citation bursts, suggesting growing research in remedies for MSDs with the focus on assessments and effectiveness of treatments, speech characteristics and indexes of dysarthria secondary to neurological diseases and assistance to diagnose apraxia of speech. To sum up, the review has indicated that the acoustic measures to assess MSDs and acoustic remedies for dysarthria may not only be the past foci but also be future trends.

TYPES OF LINGUISTIC CONFLICT TRIGGERS AND THEIR ROLE IN SPEECH AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFLICTS

Problem statement. Conflicts that arise in communication are created by the system and speech characteristics of the language means used. The study of the phenomenon of linguistic conflict trig-ger will allow us to distinguish between different types of conflicts, as well as to describe the types of language units and the features of their actualization that can provoke conflict interaction. Taking into account potentially conflict-triggering language phenomena will make it possible to implement a preventive speech strategy aimed at harmonizing communication. The purpose of this article is to identify and characterize the types of language units in speech that trigger conflicts (conflict triggers), to distinguish them from similar, but not identical units (inten-sifiers); to reveal the mechanisms of conflict interaction that arise when interpreting specific linguistic means and to identify the role of the verbal component in conflicts of different types. Methodology (materials and methods).The research material is a card catalogue of conflict in-teraction examples from literary texts and the media, jokes, Internet memes, and recordings of spoken speech. The main methods of analysis are the descriptive method, the method of semantic analysis, and the method of conceptual analysis. Research results. The analyzed examples show that only a linguistic means that has special sys-tem characteristics or contextual content that create a space of communicative tension and generates various types of conflict interaction (speech and psychological conflicts) can be classified as a linguis-tic conflict trigger. The typology of linguistic conflict triggers, based on the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the linguistic sign, includes three types: systemic, usual, and contextual conflict triggers.