Home-Based Speech Perception Monitoring for Clinical Use With Cochlear Implant Users

Speech-perception testing is essential for monitoring outcomes with a hearing aid or cochlear implant (CI). However, clinical care is time-consuming and often challenging with an increasing number of clients. A potential approach to alleviating some clinical care and possibly making room for other outcome measures is to employ technologies that assess performance in the home environment. In this study, we investigate 3 different speech perception indices in the same 40 CI users: phoneme identification (vowels and consonants), digits in noise (DiN) and sentence recognition in noise (SiN). The first two tasks were implemented on a tablet and performed multiple times by each client in their home environment, while the sentence task was administered at the clinic. Speech perception outcomes in the same forty CI users showed that DiN assessed at home can serve as an alternative to SiN assessed at the clinic. DiN scores are in line with the SiN ones by 3–4 dB improvement and are useful to monitor performance at regular intervals and to detect changes in auditory performance. Phoneme identification in quiet also explains a significant part of speech perception in noise, and provides additional information on the detectability and discriminability of speech cues. The added benefit of the phoneme identification task, which also proved to be easy to administer at home, is the information transmission analysis in addition to the summary score. Performance changes for the different indices can be interpreted by comparing against measurement error and help to target personalized rehabilitation. Altogether, home-based speech testing is reliable and proves powerful to complement care in the clinic for CI users.

Reinforcing preschoolers’ phonemic awareness through the use of tablets

This study aimed to implement an intervention program to examine whether tablets enhance kindergarten children’s phonemic awareness. Seventy-four (74) kindergarten children (40 boys and 34 girls) aged 4 to 6 years from 4 public kindergarten classrooms participated in the study, from which 38 children formed the experimental group while 36 children formed the control one. During the intervention program, children in the experimental group were trained through tablets in initial phoneme identification, initial phoneme deletion, and phoneme segmentation, while the control group trained in the same tasks without tablets. Results showed statistically significant differences in favor of the experimental group. In conclusion, the present research found that digital media help educational practice, but it is also how teachers use digital tools to facilitate learning.

EFL learners’ phonemic awareness: A correlation between English phoneme identification skill toward word processing

This research aims to find out the correlation between English phoneme identification skills and word processing. It applies the quantitative approach with correlation design. The participants are 100 of 3rd- semester students in English Language Education Program. The correlational result reveals that it has correlation with .382 degrees in phoneme identification skill toward blending skill with the significance level .000, and .359 degrees in phoneme identification skill toward segmentation skill with the significance level .000. Then, the correlation result of English phoneme identification skill toward word processing is .462 degree with its significance .000. By the result, awareness to identify phoneme by initial, medial, and final sound correlates to the blending and segmenting skills which influence the comprehension of word. The more the students are able to identify phoneme based on its sound, the more the students will be able to blend and segment phoneme. Lastly, the ability to identify English phonemes is proven to be a skill that supports EFL learners on their productive and receptive skills. Then being able to identify its phonemes will assist on recognizing and processing English words appropriately so that English language teaching can be associated with the use of phoneme-based instruction on its teaching process. Highlights : Ability to identify English phonemes is proven to be a skill that supports EFL learners on their English productive and receptive skills. English phoneme identification skill contributes to blending and segmentation skill since phonemic awareness provides both decoding and encoding skill.

Phonetic Causes of Sound Change

The present study sheds light on the phonetic causes of sound change and the intermediate stages of the diachronic pathways by studying the palatalization and assibilation of velar stops (referred to commonly as ‘velar softening’, as exemplified by the replacement of Latin /ˈkɛntʊ/ by Tuscan Italian [ˈtʃɛnto] ‘one hundred’), and of labial stops and labiodental fricatives (also known as’ labial softening’, as in the case of the dialectal variant [ˈtʃatɾə] of /ˈpjatɾə/ ‘stone’ in Romanian dialects). To a lesser extent, it also deals with the palatalization and affrication of dentoalveolar stops. The book supports an articulation-based account of those sound-change processes, and holds that, for the most part, the corresponding affricate and fricative outcomes have been issued from intermediate (alveolo)palatal-stop realizations differing in closure fronting degree. Special attention is given to the one-to-many relationship between the input and output consonantal realizations, to the acoustic cues which contribute to the implementation of these sound changes, and to those positional and contextual conditions in which those changes are prone to operate most feasibly. Different sources of evidence are taken into consideration: descriptive data from, for example, Bantu studies and linguistic atlases of Romanian dialects in the case of labial softening; articulatory and acoustic data for velar and (alveolo)palatal stops and front lingual affricates; perceptual results from phoneme identification tests. The universal character of the claims being made derives from the fact that the dialectal material, and to some extent the experimental material as well, belong to a wide range of languages from not only Europe but also all the other continents.

Skrining Kemampuan Phonological Awareness Anak Pra Sekolah

Background. In the learning process at school, especially in pre-school education, phonological ability is the entrance for children in mastery of language. In Indonesia, research that focuses on phonological abilities in pre-school children is still very limited. Objective. This study aims to determine the profile of pre-school children's phonological awareness abilities. Method. Participants were recruited from the Surakarta ABA Thoyibah Kindergarten with a total of 27 class B children to participate in this study. Screening is given to participants. The screening results will reflect the profile of children's phonological awareness abilities. Results. There are five items that can be used to screen pre-school children's phonological awareness skills: rhyme, syllable blending, initial phoneme identification, medial phoneme identification, and final phoneme identification. The results of the internal validation analysis of phonological awareness subtest were as follows: rhyme 0.684, syllable blending 0.772, initial phoneme identification 0.880, medial phoneme identification 0.862, and final phoneme identification 0.735. Conclusion. The value of internal validity or the correlation between items in phonological awareness screening is good because all items correlated have a correlation with a low probability value.

Differences in phonological awareness performance

Children who have knowledge of two languages may show better phonological awareness than their monolingual peers (e.g. Bruck & Genesee, 1995). It remains unclear how much bilingual experience is needed for such advantages to appear, and whether differences in language or cognitive skills alter the relation between bilingualism and phonological awareness. These questions were investigated in this cross-sectional study. Participants (n = 294; 4–7 year-olds, in the first three grades of primary school) were Dutch-speaking pupils attending mainstream monolingual Dutch primary schools or early-English schools providing English lessons from grade 1, and simultaneous Dutch-English bilinguals. We investigated phonological awareness (rhyming, phoneme blending, onset phoneme identification, and phoneme deletion) and its relation to age, Dutch vocabulary, English vocabulary, working memory and short-term memory, and the balance between Dutch and English vocabulary. Small significant (α < .05) effects of bilingualism were found on onset phoneme identification and phoneme deletion, but post-hoc comparisons revealed no robust pairwise differences between the groups. Furthermore, effects of bilingualism sometimes disappeared when differences in language or memory skills were taken into account. Learning two languages simultaneously is not beneficial to – and importantly, also not detrimental to – phonological awareness.

The effect of acoustical treatment on primary school children’s performance, sound perception, and influence assessment

A previous field study showed that more than 85% of Dutch children reported they were bothered by noise in the classroom. To investigate the impact of acoustical treatment on children’s phoneme identification, 335 school children (9 to 13 years old) from the previously studied schools were invited to take part in a series of tests in the acoustical chamber of the SenseLab. All the children performed two series of listening tests and evaluations in chamber A (untreated) and chamber B (acoustically treated) respectively, while at the same time one of seven background sounds (45dB or 60dB traffic noise, 45dB or 60dB children talking, 45dB or 60dB music, or no sound) were randomly played in the chambers. T-tests were conducted to compare the results of children’s phonological process tasks, sound perceptions, and influence assessments in these two chambers. Results showed a statistically significant difference in children’s sound perceptions (p=0.01). Children reported the untreated chamber A to be noisier.

The Phoneme Identification Test for Assessment of Spectral and Temporal Discrimination Skills in Children: Development, Normative Data, and Test–Retest Reliability Studies

Previous research suggests that a proportion of children experiencing reading and listening difficulties may have an underlying primary deficit in the way that the central auditory nervous system analyses the perceptually important, rapidly varying, formant frequency components of speech.The Phoneme Identification Test (PIT) was developed to investigate the ability of children to use spectro-temporal cues to perceptually categorize speech sounds based on their rapidly changing formant frequencies. The PIT uses an adaptive two-alternative forced-choice procedure whereby the participant identifies a synthesized consonant-vowel (CV) (/ba/ or /da/) syllable. CV syllables differed only in the second formant (F2) frequency along an 11-step continuum (between 0% and 100%—representing an ideal /ba/ and /da/, respectively). The CV syllables were presented in either quiet (PIT Q) or noise at a 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio (PIT N).Development of the PIT stimuli and test protocols, and collection of normative and test–retest reliability data.Twelve adults (aged 23 yr 10 mo to 50 yr 9 mo, mean 32 yr 5 mo) and 137 typically developing, primary-school children (aged 6 yr 0 mo to 12 yr 4 mo, mean 9 yr 3 mo). There were 73 males and 76 females.Data were collected using a touchscreen computer. Psychometric functions were automatically fit to individual data by the PIT software. Performance was determined by the width of the continuum for which responses were neither clearly /ba/ nor /da/ (referred to as the uncertainty region [UR]). A shallower psychometric function slope reflected greater uncertainty. Age effects were determined based on raw scores. Z scores were calculated to account for the effect of age on performance. Outliers, and individual data for which the confidence interval of the UR exceeded a maximum allowable value, were removed. Nonparametric tests were used as the data were skewed toward negative performance.Across participants, the median value of the F2 range that resulted in uncertain responses was 33% in quiet and 40% in noise. There was a significant effect of age on the width of this UR (p < 0.00001) in both quiet and noise, with performance becoming adult like by age 9 on the PIT Q and age 10 on the PIT N. A skewed distribution toward negative performance occurred in both quiet (p = 0.01) and noise (p = 0.006). Median UR scores were significantly wider in noise than in quiet (T = 2041, p < 0.0000001). Performance (z scores) across the two tests was significantly correlated (r = 0.36, p = 0.000009). Test–retest z scores were significantly correlated in both quiet and noise (r = 0.4 and 0.37, respectively, p < 0.0001).The PIT normative data show that the ability to identify phonemes based on changes in formant transitions improves with age, and that some children in the general population have performance much worse than their age peers. In children, uncertainty increases when the stimuli are presented in noise. The test is suitable for use in planned studies in a clinical population.