Erika S Levy

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Columbia University

Purpose Reduced speech intelligibility is often a hallmark of children with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP), but effects of speech strategies for increasing intelligibility are understudied, especially in children who speak languages other than English. This study examined the effects of (the Korean translation of) two cues, “speak with...

Purpose International cleft lip and palate surgical charities recognize that speech therapy is essential for successful care of individuals after palate repair. The challenge is how to ensure that cleft speech interventionists (i.e., speech-language pathologists and other speech therapy providers) provide quality care. This exploratory study invest...

Purpose Ten years after Miller and Lowit's (2014) groundbreaking book providing a cross-linguistic perspective on motor speech disorders, we ask where we are regarding dysarthria treatment across languages in two specific populations: adults with Parkinson's disease (PD) and children with cerebral palsy (CP). Method In this commentary, we consider...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine selected baseline acoustic features of hypokinetic dysarthria in Spanish speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and identify potential acoustic predictors of ease of understanding in Spanish. Method Seventeen Spanish-speaking individuals with mild-to-moderate hypokinetic dysarthria secondary to PD a...

Purpose This study investigated the effects of intensive voice treatment on subjective and objective measures of speech production in Mandarin speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria. Method Nine Mandarin speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease received 4 weeks of intensive voice treatment (4 × 60 min per week). The speakers w...

Background: Individuals with developmental dysarthria typically demonstrate reduced functioning of one or more of the speech subsystems, which negatively impacts speech intelligibility and communication within social contexts. A few treatment approaches are available for improving speech production and intelligibility among individuals with develo...

Learning to perceive non-native speech sounds is difficult for adults. One method to improve perception of non-native contrasts is through a distributional learning paradigm. Three groups of native-English listeners completed a perceptual assimilation task in which they mapped French vowels onto English vowel categories: Two groups (bimodal, unimod...

Purpose This study examined the effects of Speech Intelligibility Treatment (SIT) on intelligibility and naturalness of narrative speech produced by francophone children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy. Method Ten francophone children with dysarthria were randomized to one of two treatments, SIT or Hand–Arm Bimanual Intensive Therapy Includi...

Purpose Children with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy may experience reduced speech intelligibility and diminished communicative participation. However, minimal research has been conducted examining the outcomes of behavioral speech treatments in this population. This study examined the effect of Speech Intelligibility Treatment (SIT), a dua...

This study examined perception of the American English (AE) /v/-/w/ consonant contrast by Hindi speakers of English as a second language (L2). A second aim was to determine whether residence in the US modulated perception of this difficult contrast for proficient bilingual Hindi-English listeners. Two groups of Hindi-English bilinguals (the first r...

This study examined perception of the American English (AE) /v/-/w/ consonant contrast by Hindi speakers of English as a second language (L2). A second aim was to determine whether residence in the US modulated perception of this difficult contrast for proficient bilingual Hindi-English listeners. Two groups of Hindi-English bilinguals (the first r...

Background More than 6,000,000 individuals worldwide are diagnosed with Parkinson's disease (PD). Nearly 90% develop speech signs that may substantially impair their speech intelligibility, resulting in losses in their communication and quality of life. Benefits of intensive speech treatment have been documented for a range of speech signs. However...

Purpose Speech production deficits and reduced intelligibility are frequently noted in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) and are attributed to a combination of several factors. This study reports acoustic data on vowel production in young adults with DS and relates these findings to perceptual analysis of speech intelligibility. Method Participa...

Purpose Speech production deficits and reduced intelligibility are frequently noted in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) and are attributed to a combination of several factors. This study reports acoustic data on vowel production in young adults with DS and relates these findings to perceptual analysis of speech intelligibility. Method Participa...

Background: Articulatory excursion and vocal intensity are reduced in many children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP), contributing to the children's intelligibility deficits and negatively affecting their social participation. However, the effects of speech-treatment strategies for improving intelligibility in this population are underst...

Purpose This study investigated the effects of cueing for increased loudness and reduced speech rate on scaled intelligibility and acoustics of speech produced by Mandarin speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease (PD). Method Eleven speakers with PD read passages in habitual, loud, and slow speaking conditions. Fifteen liste...

Dysphagia and resulting pulmonary sequelae are frequently observed in children with spastic cerebral palsy (SCP). However, physiological evidence regarding airway protective behaviors (specifically swallowing and cough function) in these children is sparse. The aim of this investigation was to quantify specific feeding, swallowing, and cough impair...

Purpose This study investigated the effects of cueing for increased loudness and reduced speech rate on scaled intelligibility and acoustics of speech produced by Mandarin speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria due to Parkinson's disease (PD). Method Eleven speakers with PD read passages in habitual, loud, and slow speaking conditions. Fifteen liste...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Adult speakers of American-English have difficulty perceiving front-back rounding contrasts in vowels, such as French /œ/-/o/. These difficulties stem in part from how learners map sounds in a second language onto native-language sound categories. We used a perceptual-assimilation task to test how perceptual training chang...

Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US and learning American-English (AE) as a second language (L2). Previous studies investigating the relationship between AE and Spanish vowels have revealed an advantage for early L2 learners for their accuracy of L2 vowel perception. Replicating and extending such previous research, this s...

Dysphagia and resulting pulmonary sequelae are frequently observed in children with spastic cerebral palsy (SCP). However, physiological evidence regarding airway protective behaviors (specifically swallowing and cough function) in these children is sparse. The aim of this investigation was to quantify specific feeding, swallowing, and cough impair...

It is well established that acquiring a second language (L2) later in life results in less accurate production and perception of speech sounds in the L2. An interesting question is to what extent phonological similarity of translation equivalents across the first language (L1) and L2 affects speech-sound processing and lexical access in an L2. The...

The Hindi phonological inventory does not include a [v-w] contrast. In a perception study, Hindi speakers identified /v/ and /w/ in American English (AE) words with approximately 50% accuracy (Grover et al., 2016). The present study compares AE /v/ and /w/ productions in bilingual Hindi-English speakers’ with those of AE speakers’ in nonsense words...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of intensive speech treatment on the conversational intelligibility of Castilian Spanish speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), as well as on the speakers' self-perceptions of disability. Method Fifteen speakers with a medical diagnosis of PD participated in this study. Speech recording...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of intensive speech treatment on the conversational intelligibility of Castilian Spanish speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), as well as on the speakers' self-perceptions of disability. Method: Fifteen speakers with a medical diagnosis of PD participated in this study. Speech recor...

Purpose: Reductions in articulatory working space and vocal intensity have been linked to intelligibility deficits in children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy. However, few studies have examined the outcomes of behavioral treatments aimed at these underlying impairments or investigated which treatment cues might best facilitate improved inte...

Purpose Reductions in articulatory working space and vocal intensity have been linked to intelligibility deficits in children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy. However, few studies have examined the outcomes of behavioral treatments aimed at these underlying impairments or investigated which treatment cues might best facilitate improved intell...

Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US (US Census Bureau, 2011) and are learning American English (AE) as a second language (L2). Accurate perception of AEvowels is important because vowels carry a large part of the speech signal (Kewley-Port, Burkle, & Lee, 2007). The present study examined the accuracy with which early and...

This study examined the ability of Hindi speakers of English to perceive and produce American English (AE) consonants /v/ and /w/, which are difficult for Hindi speakers to distinguish (e.g., in “vest” and “west”). It also examined whether the Hindi listeners’ length of residence (LOR) in the US affected their performance. Two groups of Hindi speak...

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common motor disability in childhood and can severely impact speech intelligibility. However, sparse evidence exists on which to base treatment. The current study examined the acoustic outcomes of Speech-Systems-Intelligibility-Treatment (Levy, 2014), a speech treatment aimed at enhancing intelligibility by targeting...

This study examines acoustic features of speech production in speakers of Mandarin with Parkinson's disease (PD) and relates them to intelligibility outcomes. Data from 11 participants with PD and 7 controls are compared on several acoustic measures. In speakers with PD, the strength of association between these measures and intelligibility is inve...

Articulatory precision is a critical factor that influences speaker intelligibility. In this paper, we propose a new measure we call ‘articulation entropy’ that serves as a proxy for the number of distinct phonemes a person produces when he or she speaks. The method is based on the observation that the ability of a speaker to achieve an articulator...

Children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP) present with decreased vowel space area and reduced word intelligibility. Although a robust relationship exists between vowel space and word intelligibility, little is known about the intelligibility of vowels in this population. This exploratory study investigated the intelligibility of American...

Purpose Much of a child's day is spent listening to speech in the presence of background noise. Although accurate vowel perception is important for listeners' accurate speech perception and comprehension, little is known about children's vowel perception in noise. Clear speech is a speech style frequently used by talkers in the presence of noise. T...

Much of a child's day is spent listening to speech in the presence of background noise. Although accurate vowel perception is important for listeners' accurate speech perception and comprehension, little is known about children's vowel perception in noise. "Clear speech" is a speech style frequently used by talkers in the presence of noise. This st...

Whether native speakers of non-tonal languages can acquire categorical representations of lexical tones remains controversial. This study investigates the acquisition of lexical tone categories by native English speakers learning Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language by comparing the categorical perception of lexical tones between three groups of...

The paucity of evidence and detail in the literature regarding speech treatment for children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP) renders it difficult for researchers to replicate studies and make further inroads into this area in need of exploration. Furthermore, for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) wishing to follow treatments that the l...

This study investigated the perception of American-English (AE) vowels and consonants by young adults who were either (a) early Arabic-English bilinguals whose native language was Arabic or (b) native speakers of the English dialects spoken in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where both groups were studying. In a closed-set format, participants were...

Reduced speech function is a primary disability in children with cerebral palsy (CP) who have the motor speech disorder of dysarthria. Interventions for pediatric dysarthria with evidence of efficacy are greatly needed. The present exploratory study examined the effects of two intervention methods on three children with CP: (1) Lee Silverman Voice...

With the demographic shifts in the United States, it is increasingly the case that speech-language pathologists (SLPs) come from different language backgrounds from those of their clients and have nonnative accents in their languages of service. An anonymous web-based survey was completed by students and clinic directors in SLP training programs in...

Speech-language pathology (SLP) training programs are the initial gateway for nonnative speakers of English to join the SLP profession. An anonymous web-based survey in New York State examined policies and practices implemented when SLP students have foreign accents in English or in other languages. Responses were elicited from 530 students and 28...

Background: Amid robust evidence for the efficacy of language treatment in aphasia, equivocal results have been reported for the generalisation of treatment effects to items and tasks not practised during therapy. Moreover, measuring generalisation using functional language production has proven challenging, especially in the context of multilingua...

Vocal emblems, such as shh and brr, are speech sounds that have linguistic and nonlinguistic features; thus, it is unclear how they are processed in the brain. Five adult dextral individuals with left-brain damage and moderate-severe Wernicke's aphasia, five adult dextral individuals with right-brain damage, and five Controls participated in two ta...

Clear speech is an intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech that increases identification accuracy in various listening populations (e.g., Picheny, Durlach, & Braida, 1986). Children identify words more accurately in clear-speech than in conversational-speech sentences in noise (Bradlow, Kraus, & Hayes, 2003). At the segmental level, adults identif...

This study documents patterns of change in speech production in a multilingual with aphasia following a cerebrovascular accident (CVA). EC, a right-handed Hebrew-English-French trilingual man, had a left fronto-temporo-parietal CVA, after which he reported that his (native) Hebrew accent became stronger in his (second language) English. Recordings...

Clinical Education of Students in Speech-Language Pathology who speak with accents.

Second-language (L2) speech perception studies have demonstrated effects of language background and consonantal context on categorization and discrimination of vowels. The present study examined the effects of language experience and consonantal context on the production of Parisian French (PF) vowels by American English (AE) learners of French. Na...

Clear speech, an intelligibility-enhancing manner of speech production, has been shown to increase the transmission of information to various listener groups when uttered in the speaker's native language. When clear speech is used in a non-native language, it is not evident whether this mode will also improve intelligibility. The present study exam...

A quantitative "cross-language assimilation overlap" method for testing predictions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) was implemented to compare results of a discrimination experiment with the listeners' previously reported assimilation data. The experiment examined discrimination of Parisian French (PF) front rounded vowels /y/ and /oe/....

American English (AE) speakers' perceptual assimilation of 14 North German (NG) and 9 Parisian French (PF) vowels was examined in two studies using citation-form disyllables (study 1) and sentences with vowels surrounded by labial and alveolar consonants in multisyllabic nonsense words (study 2). Listeners categorized multiple tokens of each NG and...

This study investigated the perception of American English (AE) vowels and consonants by proficient adult Arabic-English bilinguals studying in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The native language of all participants was Arabic, and their average age of English acquisition was 6 years. In a closed set format, 29 participants were asked to identify 1...

The present study examined the extent to which perceptual performance by American English (AE) individuals predicted their accuracy in producing second-language (L2) Parisian French (PF) vowels. Three groups of AE participants (no, moderate, and extensive French-language experience) participated in two perceptual tasks (categorial discrimination an...

Recent research has called for an examination of perceptual assimilation patterns in second-language speech learning. This study examined the effects of language learning and consonantal context on perceptual assimilation of Parisian French (PF) front rounded vowels /y/ and /oe/ by American English (AE) learners of French. AE listeners differing in...

This study examined the effects of language experience and consonantal context on the production of Parisian French (PF) vowels by American English (AE) learners of French. A repetition task was performed, involving French vowels y-oe-i-a-u uttered by a native speaker of Parisian French (PF) in bilabial bVp and alveolar dVt contexts embedded in the...

This study investigated the effects of language experience and consonantal context on American English (AE) listeners’ discrimination of contrasts involving Parisian French vowels /y, œ, u, i/. Vowels were produced in /rabVp/ and /rabVt/ nonsense disyllables in carrier phrases by 3 speakers and presented in a categorial AXB discrimination task. Two...

BACKGROUND: Recent investigations of language gains following treatment in bilingual individuals with chronic aphasia appear to confirm early reports that not only the treated language but also the non-treated language(s) benefit from treatment. The evidence, however, is still suggestive, and the variables that may mitigate generalisation across la...

This chapter explores relevant work in the fields of the bilingual lexicon and cross-linguistic compound variation, which should contribute to research investigating questions that surface at the interface of the two fields-that is, when bilinguals process compounds. It begins with an overview of what is known about the bilingual lexicon from psych...

Cross-language perception studies report influences of speech style and consonantal context on perceived similarity and discrimination of non-native vowels by inexperienced and experienced listeners. Detailed acoustic comparisons of distributions of vowels produced by native speakers of North German (NG), Parisian French (PF) and New York English (...

Despite anecdotal data on lexical interference among the languages of multilingual speakers, little research evidence about the lexical connections among multilinguals' languages exists to date. In the present paper, two experiments with a multilingual speaker who had suffered aphasia are reported. The first experiment provides data about inter-lan...

According to Best’s [Best, C. T. (1994). ‘‘The emergence of native‐language phonological influence in infants: A perceptual assimilation model,’’ in The Development of Speech Perception: The Transition from Speech Sounds to Spoken Words, edited by J. Goodman & H. C. Nusbaum (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA); Best, C. T. (1995) ‘‘A direct realist view of c...

Previous research in our laboratory has demonstrated that the perceived similarity of vowels across languages is not always predictable from the closeness of their target formant values in F1/F2/F3 space. In this study, perceptual similarity was established using a task in which 11 American English (AE) monolinguals were presented multiple tokens o...

To study the brain regions and networks that underlie knowledge of more than one language, neurolinguists have traditionally compared what is impaired with what is spared in the language disturbance of aphasia. The sizable literature on polyglot aphasia suggests left-hemisphere dominance for all the languages of most polyglots. Supporting evidence...

This project investigates the acoustic variability of vowels produced in multisyllabic nonsense words /cvC1VC2(v)/ in carrier sentences by speakers of American English (AE), Parisian French (PF), and North German (NG). Variables under examination are (1) immediate phonetic context (C1=b,d; C2=b,d,p,t), (2) sentence prominence (narrow focus versus p...

This study extended Gottfried's [J. Phonetics 12, 91-114 (1984)] investigation of the effects of learning French on AE listeners categorial discrimination of the contrasts involving Parisian French vowels /y/, /ø/, /u/, and /i/. Vowels were presented in /rabVp/ and /radVt/ bisyllables embedded in carrier phrases by three different speakers in an AX...

Perspectives neurolinguistiques sur la langue maternelle. Dans une perspective neurolinguistique, nous nous demandons comment la langue maternelle s’organise par comparaison avec d’autres langues ? Nous considérons trois domaines expérimentaux : l’aphasie, la stimulation du cortex et la résonance magnétique. On peut conclure que la langue la plus u...