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Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
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Vowel perception by adults and children with normal language and specific language impairment: based on steady states

J E Sussman1

  • 1Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo, New York 14214, USA. jsussman@acsu.buffalo.edu

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|April 17, 2001
PubMed
Summary

Children with specific language impairment struggle with vowel identification, particularly using transitional cues. Adults and typically developing children effectively use both steady-state and transitional formant frequencies for accurate vowel perception.

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Area of Science:

  • Speech and Language Pathology
  • Acoustic Phonetics
  • Developmental Psychology

Background:

  • Vowel identification relies on acoustic cues like steady-state formant frequencies and transitional formant frequencies.
  • Children's ability to utilize these cues may differ based on language development status.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how adults, typically developing children, and children with specific language impairment identify vowels using steady-state and transitional formant frequencies.
  • To compare cue utilization strategies across different age and language development groups.

Main Methods:

  • Synthetic speech tokens were created with varying acoustic properties (steady-state, transitional, congruent, conflicting).
  • Participants included adults, typically developing children (4-5 years), and children with specific language impairment (5-6 years).
  • Vowel identification accuracy was measured for each stimulus type and participant group.

Main Results:

  • Children with specific language impairment showed poorer identification of the [i] vowel, especially with voweless and congruent tokens.
  • All children identified vowels most accurately using steady-state centers and congruent stimuli (94-96% accuracy).
  • Typically developing children and those with language impairment used transitional cues for voweless tokens with 89% and 83.5% accuracy, respectively.

Conclusions:

  • Listeners generally prefer steady-state cues for vowel identification but can utilize transitional cues.
  • Children with specific language impairment may have difficulties integrating transitional acoustic information for vowel perception.
  • Findings align with theories on developmental weighting shifts and dynamic specification in speech perception.