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Speech production in DLD (Parvez et al., 2024)

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posted on 2024-10-11, 18:13 authored by Lyla Parvez, Mahmoud Keshavarzi, Susan Richards, Giovanni M. Di Liberto, Usha Goswami

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a multifaceted disorder. Recently, interest has grown in prosodic aspects of DLD, but most investigations of possible prosodic causes focus on speech perception tasks. Here, we focus on speech production from a speech amplitude envelope (AE) perspective. Perceptual studies have indicated a role for difficulties in AE processing in DLD related to sensory/neural processing of prosody. We explore possible matching AE difficulties in production.

Method: Fifty-seven children with and without DLD completed a computerized imitation task, copying aloud 30 familiar targets such as “alligator.” Children with DLD (n = 20) were compared with typically developing children (age-matched controls [AMC], n = 21) and younger language controls (YLC, n = 16). Similarity of the child’s productions to the target in terms of the continuous AE and pitch contour was computed using two similarity metrics, correlation, and mutual information. Both the speech AE and the pitch contour contain important information about stress patterning and intonational information over time.

Results: Children with DLD showed significantly reduced imitation for both the AE and pitch contour metrics compared to AMC children. The opportunity to repeat the targets had no impact on performance for any group. Word length effects were similar across groups.

Conclusions: The spoken production of multisyllabic words by children with DLD is atypical regarding both the AE and the pitch contour. This is consistent with a theoretical explanation of DLD based on impaired sensory/neural processing of low-frequency (slow) amplitude and frequency modulations, as predicted by the temporal sampling theory.

Supplemental Material S1. Performance for the AMC, YLC, and DLD groups in pitch contour matching by word length (2 syllables, 3 syllables, 4 syllables) using Spearman’s rank correlation.

Parvez, L., Keshavarzi, M., Richards, S., Di Liberto, G. M., & Goswami, U. (2024). Imitation of multisyllabic items by children with developmental language disorder: Evidence for word-level atypical speech envelope and pitch contours. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(11), 4288–4303. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00031

Funding

This research was funded in part by a donation to U.G. from the Yidan Prize Foundation and represents part of the PhD of the first author. The sponsors played no role in the study design, data interpretation, nor writing of the report. G.M.D.L. was supported by Science Foundation Ireland under the Career Development Award 15/CDA/3316 (EL) and under Grant Agreement No. 13/RC/2106_P2 at the ADAPT SFI Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin. ADAPT, the SFI Research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology, is funded by Science Foundation Ireland through the SFI Research Centres Programme.

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