Speech disorders

Question 1

How does prelingual deafness affect speech?

Answer 1

Substitutions between voiced and voiceless plosives.

Question 2

How does postlingual deafness affect speech?

Answer 2

Level of contrast reduced by shortening voiceless VOT values. Contrast can be enhanced when hearing is restored with cochlear implants.

Question 3

How does hearing impairment affect speech?

Answer 3

Vowel space is reduced/ more centralised so reduced intelligibility (Horga and Liker, 2006).
Compromised F0 patterns - low levels of dynamic pitch contours.

Question 4

How does a hearing impairment affect voice quality?

Answer 4

• High degrees of nasality (poor velopharyngeal function)
• Reduced vowel space (overlap in formant frequencies due to limited articulatory range).
• Higher fundamental frequency (laryngeal tension)
• Reduced loudness
• Absolute durations longer than controls but no difference in relative timing.

Question 5

How does stuttering affect speech acoustics?

Answer 5

Affects F2 transitions.

• Important for identification of place of articulation
• Gives information on coarticulation patterns ( stuttering children have slower coarticulation)
• Coarticulation tracks how the tongue moves during speech

Question 6

What do children with Developmental Dyspraxia of speech (DAS) show?

Answer 6

• Higher levels of formant variability

- Higher levels of coarticulation (Nijland, 2003).

Question 7

How does Down Syndrome affect speech?

Answer 7

REDUCED speech intelligibility.

BUNTON and LEDDY (2011) :

• reduced vowel space
• reduced articulatory space and speed for tongue - DS have large tongues

Question 8

Describe speech in Acquired Apraxia of Speech (AOS)

Answer 8

• Effortful and groping
• Initiation difficulties
• reduced intelligibility due to articulatory errors
• less speech automaticity and fluency

Question 9

Acoustics analysis of AOS?

Answer 9

• prolongations
• reduced gestural overlap
• inconsistency
• Prosodic abnormality (helps differentiate from aphasic phonemic impairment)

Question 10

Coarticulation in AOS?

Answer 10

REDUCED coarticulation

• delay in onset of articulatory gestures
• reduced gestural overlap between syllables (Whiteside et al. 2010)
• disruptions in interlocutor phasing

Question 11

VOT in AOS?

Answer 11

Voicing errors (Whiteside et al., 2012)
Inconsistent VOT patterns

Question 12

Voice quality in dysarthria? Laryngeal features

Answer 12

• higher levels of noise = HARSH voice quality
• phonatory instability affects prosody
• tremors - feature of Parkinsons

Question 13

Supralaryngeal features in dysarthria

Answer 13

REDUCED INTELLIGIBILITY

• centralisation of vowel formant frequenices = reduced articulatory range
• vocal tremor affects waveforms

Question 14

Temporal features of dysarthria

Answer 14

• longer repetition of syllables
• staccato rhythm
• slower speaking rate
• changes in tempo
  INCREASED VOT variability

Question 15

What is FAS?

Answer 15

Foreign Accent Syndrome

• minor aphasic difficulties e.g hesitations, syntactic and morphological features contribute to foreigness
• intelligibility is HIGH

Question 16

Factors that contribute to FAS

Answer 16

• variability in pitch affects prosody
• increased supralaryngeal tension
• staccato speech

Question 17

What does vocal abuse lead to?

Answer 17

• reduced range
• reduced loudness
• increases in jitter
• increases in shimmer
• pitch breaks
• increases in aperiodicity/breathiness