Who is Right? A Word-Identification-in-Noise Test for Young Children Using Minimal Pair Distracters

Purpose: Many children have difficulties understanding speech. At present, there are few assessments that test for subtle impairments in speech perception with normative data from U.K. children. We present a new test that evaluates children's ability to identify target words in background noise by choosing between minimal pair alternatives that differ by a single articulatory phonetic feature. This task (a) is tailored to testing young children, but also readily applicable to adults; (b) has minimal memory demands; (c) adapts to the child's ability; and (d) does not require reading or verbal output. Method: We tested 155 children and young adults aged from 5 to 25 years on this new test of single word perception. Results: Speech-in-noise abilities in this particular task develop rapidly through childhood until they reach maturity at around 9 years of age. Conclusions: We make this test freely available and provide associated normative data. We hope that it will be useful to researchers and clinicians in the assessment of speech perception abilities in children who are hard of hearing or have developmental language disorder, dyslexia, or auditory processing disorder. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.17155934

Revisiting the status of labialised consonants in contemporary Amharic

Though a lot of studies have been conducted on Amharic, studies on its phonology are very few and even those studies do not agree on the number and inventory of Amharic consonant phonemes. This study argues that there are 19 labialised Amharic phonemes. The study argues that overgeneralization of labialisation and loss of /w/ cannot account for all the occurrences of labialised consonants in Amharic. Minimal pair test and derivation of agentive and adjutative forms are presented as evidences to show the phonemic status of labialised consonants in Amharic.

Cross-Situational Word Learning in Two Foreign Languages: Effects of Native Language and Perceptual Difficulty

Cross-situational word learning (CSWL) paradigms have gained traction in recent years as a way to examine word learning in ambiguous scenarios in infancy, childhood, and adulthood. However, no study thus far has examined how CSWL paradigms may provide viable learning pathways for second language (L2) word learning. Here, we used a CSWL paradigm to examine how native Australian English (AusE) speakers learned novel Dutch (Experiment 1) and Brazilian Portuguese (Experiment 2) word-object pairings. During each learning phase trial, two words and objects were presented without indication as to which auditory word belonged to which visual referent. The two auditory words formed a non-minimal or vowel minimal pair. Minimal pairs were classified as “perceptually easy” or “perceptually difficult” based on the acoustic-phonetic relationship between AusE and each L2. At test, participants again saw two visual referents but heard one auditory label and were asked to select the corresponding referent. We predicted that accuracy would be highest for non-minimal pair trials (in which the auditory words associated with the target and distractor object formed a non-minimal pair), followed by perceptually easy minimal pairs, with lowest accuracy for perceptually difficult minimal pair trials. Our results support these hypotheses: While accuracy was above chance for all pair types, in both experiments accuracy was highest for non-minimal pair trials, followed by perceptually easy and then perceptually difficult minimal pair trials. These results are the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of CSWL in adult L2 word learning. Furthermore, the difference between perceptually easy and perceptually difficult minimal pairs in both language groups suggests that the acoustic-phonetic relationship between the L1-L2 is an important factor in novel L2 word learning in ambiguous learning scenarios. We discuss the implications of our findings for L2 acquisition, cross-situational learning and encoding of phonetic detail in a foreign language.

On measure phrase alternation and smuggling

This chapter examines the phenomenon of M(easure) P(hrase) alternation from a cross-categorial perspective. An illustration of this phenomenon is given by the minimal pair (i) John is two inches too tall; (ii) John is too tall by two inches. The former features a bare MP, the latter by+MP. Interestingly, clauses permit only one order: *Mary two years outlived her husband; (ii) Mary outlived her husband by two years. It is proposed that the pattern featuring the bare MP is the base order. The pattern featuring by+MP is the derived order. This derived order results from leftward movement of a phrasal constituent past MP. In clauses, this phrasal constituent is a VP which smuggles the subject across MP. The ill-formedness of the clause featuring a bare MP is due to a locality violation: a subject moves across an intervening MP. In non-clausal configurations, this violation does not occur since the (small clause) subject is located higher than MP.

Who is Right?: A word identification in noise test for young children using minimal pair distracters

Many children have difficulties understanding speech. Reliable tools are needed to identify them in order to provide appropriate interventions. At present, there are relatively few assessments that test for subtle impairments in speech perception that have normative data from UK children. Here we present a new test, which evaluates children’s ability to identify target words in background noise by choosing between minimal pair alternatives that differ by a single articulatory phonetic feature. This new test of single word perception is (1) tailored to testing young children, (2) has minimal memory demands, (3) adapts to the child’s ability and (4) does not require reading or verbal output. Although designed for young children, it is also readily applicable in adults. Here, we show that speech in noise abilities in this particular task develop rapidly through childhood until they reach maturity at around ten years of age. We make this test freely available, with normative data for listeners aged 4-25 years old, and hope that it will be useful to researchers and clinicians in the assessment of speech perceptual abilities in children with hearing impairments, Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), Dyslexia and Auditory Processing Disorder (APD).

BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English

We introduce The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs (BLiMP), 1 a challenge set for evaluating the linguistic knowledge of language models (LMs) on major grammatical phenomena in English. BLiMP consists of 67 individual datasets, each containing 1,000 minimal pairs—that is, pairs of minimally different sentences that contrast in grammatical acceptability and isolate specific phenomenon in syntax, morphology, or semantics. We generate the data according to linguist-crafted grammar templates, and human aggregate agreement with the labels is 96.4%. We evaluate n-gram, LSTM, and Transformer (GPT-2 and Transformer-XL) LMs by observing whether they assign a higher probability to the acceptable sentence in each minimal pair. We find that state-of-the-art models identify morphological contrasts related to agreement reliably, but they struggle with some subtle semantic and syntactic phenomena, such as negative polarity items and extraction islands.

Performance of normal hearing school age children on Hindi minimal pair test

Speech perception is the process of transforming a continuously changing acoustic signal into discrete linguistic units and is a developmental process having several aspects i.e. Pattern perception, Perception of phonemic contrasts, Vowel & Sentence perception. There is no standardized minimal pair test material available for testing Hindi school aged children and no normative data for this test is available in Indian scenario. Such normative data will act as a reference for using of Hindi Minimal Pair Test (HMPT) test with children with hearing impairment in clinical situation. Hence, this study is warranted. The aim of study is to obtain normative data for school aged children on HMPT of speech perception. A total of 200 participants were included in the study. Each subject underwent Otoscopic examination, Oto Acoustic Emission, Pure tone audiometry, Immittance audiometry and Screening for CAPD. This study indicates perception of minimal pair contrast significantly improves as the age increases. P value obtained for comparison between males and females is 0.62 which is greater than 0.05 suggesting no significant difference between mean scores of male and female participants. For age comparison obtained p value is 0.00, suggesting a significant difference between the two age groups. P value of 0.051 for interaction suggests no significant interaction between age and sex statistically.