Joanne Cleland

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of Strathclyde

Voice disorders, or dysphonia, in children impact communication, social interactions, and quality of life, emphasizing the need for effective assessment tools with accurate reference norms. Acoustic measures taken during sound prolongation are widely used to evaluate voice quality, but variability in children’s performance and limited norms from ch...

Background Ultrasound visual biofeedback (UVBF) has the potential to be useful for the treatment of compensatory errors in speakers with cleft palate ± lip (CP±L), but there is little research on its effectiveness, or on how acceptable families find the technique. This study reports on parents’ and children's perspectives on taking part in a pilot...

Voice disorders, or dysphonia, in children impact communication, social interactions, and quality of life, emphasizing the need for effective assessment tools and reference norms. Acoustic measures taken during sound prolongation are widely used to evaluate voice quality, but variability in children’s performance and limited norms from diverse back...

Voice disorders, or dysphonia, in children impact communication, social interactions, and quality of life, emphasizing the need for effective assessment tools with accurate reference norms. Acoustic measures taken during sound prolongation are widely used to evaluate voice quality, but variability in children’s performance and limited norms from ch...

Objective: Ultrasound visual biofeedback has the potential to be a useful tool in Cleft Palate ± Lip care but there is little research on its effectiveness, nor on clinicians’ views on using it in research and practice. This study reports on cleft-specialist Speech and Language Therapists’ views on the acceptability of the technique in clinical pra...

www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/speechstar/ STAR forms part of the www.seeingspeech.ac.uk suite of resources, but is designed for Speech Therapy training and study. Key resources:  Charts o Click-listen-watch IPA charts with real-time imaging videos of the vocal tract: ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI); magnetic resonance imaging (MRI_2, new higher resolu...

Gradient speech change, where speech sound production develops in a broadly step-wise fashion towards the standard adult form, is a well-recognised phenomenon in children developing typical speech, but is much less studied in speakers with developmental speech sound disorders. Instrumental techniques, such as electropalatography (EPG), may be usefu...

Objective Speech sound disorder (SSD) describes a ‘persistent difficulty with speech sound production that interferes with speech intelligibility or prevents verbal communication’. There is a need to establish which care pathways are most effective and efficient for children with SSD. Comparison of care pathways requires clearly defined, evidence-b...

Background: Ultrasound visual biofeedback has the potential to be useful for the treatment of compensatory errors in speakers with Cleft Palate +/- Lip, but there is little research on its effectiveness, nor on how acceptable families find the technique. This study reports on parents’ and children’s perspectives on taking part in a pilot randomised...

Speech sound disorder (SSD) is defined as a persistent impairment in speech sound production leading to reduced speech intelligibility and hindered verbal communication. Early recognition and intervention of children with SSD and timely referral to speech and language therapists (SLTs) for treatment are crucial. Automated detection of speech impair...

Background: The publication of phase 2 of the CATALISE project in 2017 clarified terminology for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) or delay but unintentionally muddied the water for children with unintelligible speech. A diagnostic label of DLD (phonology) indicates poor prognosis and phonological disorder that persists into midd...

Ultrasound tongue imaging is becoming popular as a tool for both phonetic research and biofeedback for treating speech sound disorders. Despite this, it has not yet been adopted into cleft palate ± cleft lip care. This paper explores why this might be the case by highlighting recent research in this area and exploring the advantages and disadvantag...

The Speech Therapy Animation and imaging Resource (STAR) is a Web-based anglophone Speech and Language Therapy resource, that hosts over 1,000 videos showing the visible and hidden movements of speech articulators, using (i) ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) with lip camera video, (ii) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and MRI-based animation. The ST...

Purpose: To investigate whether a novel electropalatography (EPG) therapy, underpinned by usage-based phonology theory, can improve the accuracy of target speech sounds for school-aged children and adults with persistent speech sound disorder (SSD) secondary to cleft palate +/- lip. Method: Six consecutively treated participants (7-27 years) wit...

Purpose This study investigates the hypothesis that younger speakers and speakers with more severe speech sound disorders are more likely to use simpler (undifferentiated) tongue gestures due to difficulties with, or immaturity of, lingual motor control. Method The hypothesis is tested using cross-sectional secondary data analysis of synchronous a...

Purpose: This study aimed to achieve a consensus on a diagnostic protocol, classification system, and subtype definitions for the differential diagnosis of speech sound disorder of unknown origin in the United Kingdom. Method: A mixed methods participatory design was used. Five services from the UK provided all paperwork, including guidelines and c...

Objective: This study aimed to determine whether increased raising of the back of the tongue is evident in children with repaired cleft palate with or without cleft lip (CP+/-CL). We hypothesized that children with CP+/-CL would show increased raising of the tongue dorsum, a compensatory pattern. Method: Secondary data analysis of mid-sagittal u...

Introduction Speech sound disorder (SSD) describes a ‘persistent difficulty with speech sound production that interferes with speech intelligibility or prevents verbal communication’. There is a need to establish which care pathways are most effective and efficient for children with SSD. Comparison of care pathways requires clearly defined, evidenc...

Purpose: This study investigates the hypothesis that younger speakers and speakers with more severe speech sound disorders (SSD) are more likely to use simpler (undifferentiated) tongue gestures due to difficulties with, or immaturity of, lingual motor control. Method: The hypothesis is tested using cross-sectional secondary data analysis of synchr...

Background The publication of phase 2 of the CATALISE project in 2017 clarified terminology for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) or delay but unintentionally muddied the water for children with unintelligible speech. A diagnostic label of DLD (phonology) indicates poor prognosis and phonological disorder that persists into middle...

Background There is growing evidence to support the use of ultrasound as a tool for the assessment and treatment of speech, voice and swallowing disorders across the Speech and Language Therapy profession. Research has shown that development of training competencies, engagement with employers and the professional body are vital to progressing ultra...

Accumulating evidence suggests that ultrasound visual feedback increases the treatment efficacy for persistent speech sound errors. However, the available evidence is mostly from English. This is a feasibility study of ultrasound visual feedback for treating distortion of Finnish [r]. We developed a web-based application for auditory-perceptual jud...

Background Children with cleft lip and palate can continue to have problems producing clear speech after surgery. This can lead to social, emotional, and educational challenges. Typical treatment involves teaching children the correct tongue movements to produce speech sounds. This is known as articulation intervention. However, this intervention i...

This study aims to determine whether adding an additional modality (ultrasound tongue imaging) improves the inter-rater reliability of phonetic transcription in childhood speech sound disorders (SSDs) and whether it enables the identification of different or additional errors in children’s speech. Twenty-three English speaking children aged 5–13 ye...

Background: Children with cleft lip and palate can continue to have problems producing clear speech after surgery. This can lead to social, emotional, and educational challenges. Typical treatment involves teaching children the correct tongue movements to produce speech sounds. This is known as articulation intervention. However, this intervention...

Ultrasound Tongue Imaging is increasingly used during assessment and treatment of speech sound disorders. Recent literature has shown that ultrasound is also useful for the quantitative analysis of a wide range of speech errors. So far, the compensatory articulations of speakers with cleft palate have only been analysed qualitatively. This study pr...

This study proposes a protocol for assessing speech motor control in children using maximum performance tasks with simultaneous acoustic and ultrasound recording. The protocol was piloted on eight children with autism spectrum disorders and nine typically developing children. Diadochokinesis rate, accuracy, and consistency were elicited using an im...

Ultrasound tongue imaging is used to visualise the intra-oral articulators during speech production. It is utilised in a range of applications, including speech and language therapy and phonetics research. Ultrasound and speech audio are recorded simultaneously, and in order to correctly use this data, the two modalities should be correctly synchro...

Ultrasound tongue imaging is used to visualise the intra-oral articulators during speech production. It is utilised in a range of applications, including speech and language therapy and phonetics research. Ultrasound and speech audio are recorded simultaneously, and in order to correctly use this data, the two modalities should be correctly synchro...

Purpose This study has two key aims: first, to provide developmental articulatory norms for the alveolar–velar distinction in 30 English-speaking typically developing (TD) children; second, to illustrate the utility of the reported measures for classifying and quantifying the speech of children with a history of persistent velar fronting as they de...

Speech sound disorders are a common communication impairment in childhood. Because speech disorders can negatively affect the lives and the development of children, clinical intervention is often recommended. To help with diagnosis and treatment, clinicians use instrumented methods such as spectrograms or ultrasound tongue imaging to analyse speech...

Speech sound disorders are a common communication impairment in childhood. Because speech disorders can negatively affect the lives and the development of children, clinical intervention is often recommended. To help with diagnosis and treatment, clinicians use instrumented methods such as spectrograms or ultrasound tongue imaging to analyse speech...

Purpose: This study aims to determine whether adding an additional modality (ultrasound tongue imaging) improves the inter-rater reliability of phonetic transcription in childhood speech sound disorders (SSDs) and whether it enables the identification of different or additional errors in children’s speech.Method: Twenty-three English speaking child...

In looking at speech perception and production, it is vital we understand variation in different populations in order to understand variation in what is perceived as typical speech development; develop bio-markers; and provide effective methods for diagnosis and intervention where required. Research suggests that people with autism experience highe...

Please check, the book is open access and you can download all papers. https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/64900

We introduce UltraSuite, a curated repository of ultrasound and acoustic data, collected from recordings of child speech therapy sessions. This release includes three data collections, one from typically developing children and two from children with speech sound disorders. In addition, it includes a set of annotations, some manual and some automat...

Background As cost and access barriers to ultrasound technology have decreased, interest in using ultrasound visual biofeedback (U‐VBF) as a tool for remediating speech sound disorders (SSD) has increased. A growing body of research has investigated U‐VBF in intervention for developmental SSD; however, diversity in study design, participant charact...

Objective: This study investigated whether adding an additional modality, namely ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI), to perception-based phonetic transcription impacted on the identification of compensatory articulations and on interrater reliability. Patients and methods: Thirty-nine English-speaking children aged 3-12 years with cleft lip and pal...

Purpose This study evaluated ultrasound visual biofeedback treatment for teaching new articulations to children with a wide variety of speech sound disorders. It was hypothesized that motor-based intervention incorporating ultrasound would lead to rapid acquisition of a range of target lingual gestures with generalization to untreated words. Metho...

Background Electropalatography (EPG) records details of the location and timing of tongue contacts with the hard palate during speech. It has been effective in treating articulation disorders that have failed to respond to conventional therapy approaches but, until now, its use with children and adolescents with intellectual/learning disabilities a...

Abstract: Previous research by Gibbon (2004) shows that at least 8 distinct error types can be identified in the speech of people with cleft lip and palate (CLP) using electropalatography (EPG), a technique which measures tongue-palate contact. However, EPG is expensive and logistically difficult. In contrast, ultrasound is cheaper and arguably bet...

We present a comparative quantification of the primary dorsal gesture in velar stops, comparing the tongue dorsum for /k/ against the tongue shape and location in /t/ - based on midsagittal ultrasound tongue images which have been stabilised using a headset. For a given vowel environment, /t/ provides the baseline against which the active, primary...

Scobbie, J.M., Wrench, A., Timmins, C., Roxburgh, Z., Zharkova, N., Lawson, E., Schaeffler, S., Cleland, J. & Richmond, K. (2013). Ultrafest VI: Programme and Abstract booklet. 6th-8th November 2013. The booklet has been published at Ultrafest VI address: http://www.qmu.ac.uk/casl/conf/ultrafest_2013/docs/Ultrafest%20abstract%20booklet.pdf

Here are the proceedings of the winter school.

In einer Interventionsstudie mit 20 Kindern wird die Effektivität von visuellem Ultraschall-Biofeedback in der Therapie verschiedener Sprechstörungen untersucht. Die Studie umfasst mehrere standardisierten Tests (multiple Baselines), um die Sprach-, und Sprechfähigkeiten der Kinder vor, während und nach der sprachtherapeutischen Intervention zu erh...

Acoustic and articulatory studies demonstrate covert contrast in perceptually neutralised phonemic contrasts in both typical children and children with speech disorders. These covert contrasts are thought to be relatively common and symptomatic of phonetic speech disorders. However, clinicians in the speech therapy clinic have had no easy way of id...

Cleft Palate (CP) assessments based on phonetic transcription are the “gold standard” therapy outcome measure, despite reliability difficulties. Here we propose a novel perceptual evaluation, applied to ultrasound-visual biofeedback (U-VBF) therapy and therapy using visual articulatory models (VAMs) for two children with repaired submucous CP. Thre...

Visual biofeedback tools, such as Electropalatography (EPG), are recommended for assessing and treating speech sound disorders (SSDs) associated with Cleft Palate (CP). However, EPG is not suitable for all clients, due to dependencies on stable dentition and timing of palatal repair. Ultrasound is becoming increasingly popular for its use in treati...

We describe an asymmetric categorical pattern of onset-coda allophony for English /r/, the post-alveolar rhotic approximant, drawing on published and unpublished information on over 100 child, teenage and adult speakers from prior studies. Around two thirds of the speakers exhibited allophonic variation that was subtle: onset and coda /r/ were typi...

Abstract Growing evidence suggests that speech intervention using visual biofeedback may benefit people for whom visual skills are stronger than auditory skills (for example, the hearing-impaired population), especially when the target articulation is hard to describe or see. Diagnostic ultrasound can be used to image the tongue and has recently be...

Speakers possess a natural capacity for lip reading; analogous to this, there may be an intuitive ability to "tongue-read." Although the ability of untrained participants to perceive aspects of the speech signal has been explored for some visual representations of the vocal tract (e.g. talking heads), it is not yet known to what extent there is a n...

The present study reports on a new vocal emotion recognition task and assesses whether people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) perform differently from typically developed individuals on tests of emotional identification from both the face and the voice. The new test of vocal emotion contained trials in which the vocal emotion of the sentence...

The present study reports on a new vocal emotion recognition task and assesses whether people with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) perform differently from typically developed individuals on tests of emotional identification from both the face and the voice. The new test of vocal emotion contained trials in which the vocal emotion of the sentence...

Many studies have pointed to impaired speech intelligibility in young people with Down's syndrome (DS). Some have attributed these problems to delayed phonological development, while others have identified disordered speech patterns, which could be related to a dyspraxic element in their speech. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to examine...

A study is described that employs ultrasound to measure the effects of gravity on production of vowels. The materials are designed to encourage consistent production over repetitions. A recording and analysis protocol is described which allows for correction for probe movement or rejection of data where correction is not possible. Results indicate...

The expressive prosodic abilities of two groups of school-age children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), Asperger’s syndrome (AS) and high-functioning autism (HFA), were compared with those of typically-developing controls. The HFA group showed impairment relative to age-matched controls on all the prosody tasks assessed (affect, sentence-type...

We report the development of a database that will contain paired ultrasound and MRI of tongue movements and shapes from 12 adults, illustrated with pilot data from one speaker. The primary purpose of the database will be to evaluate the informational content of ultrasound tongue images on the basis of the richer articulatory structures visible with...

This study involved a qualitative analysis of speech errors in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Participants were 69 children aged 5-13 years; 30 had high functioning autism and 39 had Asperger syndrome. On a standardized test of articulation, the minority (12%) of participants presented with standard scores below the normal range, i...

Speech production in young people with Down's syndrome has been found to be variable and inconsistent. Errors tend to be more in the production of sounds that typically develop later, for example, fricatives and affricates, rather than stops and nasals. It has been suggested that inconsistency in production is a result of a motor speech deficit. La...

Articulation disorders in Down's syndrome (DS) are prevalent and often intractable. Individuals with DS generally prefer visual to auditory methods of learning and may therefore find it beneficial to be given a visual model during speech intervention, such as that provided by electropalatography (EPG). In this study, participants with Down's syndro...

Children and young people with Down's syndrome present with deficits in expressive speech and language, accompanied by strengths in vocabulary comprehension compared with non-verbal mental age. Intelligibility is particularly low, but whether speech is delayed or disordered is a controversial topic. Most studies suggest a delay, but no studies expl...

Disordered expressive prosody is a widely reported characteristic of individuals with autism. Despite this, it has received little attention in the literature and the few studies that have addressed it have not described its relationship to other aspects of communication. To determine the nature and relationship of expressive and receptive language...

Many children experience significant difficulties in developing key aspects of speech. For some, these communication difficulties are compounded by co-occurring intellectual disabilities. This paper presents two case studies from a larger on-going longitudinal study of the effectiveness of using electropalatography (EPG) to address the intelligibil...

Background: Prosody, the intonation and inflection of spoken language, serves to change or enhance the meaning of what is being said, through elements such as pitch, loudness, speech rate and rhythm. “Contrastive stress” is an area of particular difficulty for those with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD; Paul et al., 2005; Pepp et al., 2007). O...

Speech production patterns of young people with Down's syndrome have been found to be variable and inconsistent, with preliminary studies finding higher than normal levels of variability and inconsistency in the articulation of stops and fricatives. Previous studies on this population have identified similar characteristics to that found in Childho...

Purpose This study aimed to identify the nature and extent of receptive and expressive prosodic deficits in children with high-functioning autism (HFA). Method Thirty-one children with HFA, 72 typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age, and 33 adults with normal speech completed the prosody assessment procedure, Profiling Elements...

Speech production in Down's syndrome is highly variable, with particular problems arising from complex articulations such as fricatives. In this paper, EPG analysis is used to study the variation in the production of the fricatives /s/ and // in 6 young people with Down's syndrome. The variability of these productions is compared with information f...

Children with high-functioning autism are widely reported to show deficits in both prosodic and pragmatic ability. New procedures for assessing both of these are now available and have been used in a study of 31 children with high-functioning autism and 72 controls. Some of the findings from a review of the literature on prosodic skills in individu...

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders present with unusual or odd-sounding prosody. Despite this widely noted observation, prosodic ability in autism spectrum disorders is often perceived as an under-researched area. This review seeks to establish whether there is a prosodic disorder in autism, what generalizations can be made about its v...

A procedure for assessing prosody and intonation in children (PEPS-C: Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems--Children), suitable for use by clinicians with both children and adults, is described. The procedure includes testing of four communication areas in which intonation/prosody has a crucial role: interaction, affect, boundary (chunking) and f...

Recent research has suggested that eliciting diadochokinetic (DDK) rate and accuracy in young children is difficult [1], with analysis being time-consuming. This paper details a new protocol for assessing DDK in young children or children with intellectual impairment (Down's syndrome) and a method for calculating accuracy scores automatically. Accu...

People with autism are perceived to have 'odd' prosody, but is it malfunctioning? A new prosody test assesses the functionality of prosody in four aspects of speech (phrasing, affect, turn-end and focus) by tasks that elicit utterances in which prosody alone conveys the meaning. The test was used with 100 typically-developing children (TD), 39 with...