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A Cognitive Approach to Clinical Phonology
Abstract
IntroductionUsage-Based LinguisticsClinical Applications of Cognitive PhonologyConclusion
References
... Usage-based grammar (e.g. Sosa and Bybee, 2008) hypothesizes that child phonological substitutions occur when the motor system does not have a stored (precompiled) syllable corresponding to the target syllable, and some other similar syllable is produced instead; this predicts a strong (possibly even an absolute) bias towards existing syllables. The data reported in the papers in this issue are a challenge for usage-based grammar accounts of phonological development. ...
The current issue examined acquisition of challenging segments in complex contexts: Taps/trills in word-initial clusters, plus related targets (/l/-clusters and singleton rhotics and /l/). Data were from preschool children with typical versus protracted phonological development (PPD) in Iceland, Sweden (Germanic), Portugal, Spain/Chile (Romance), Bulgaria, Slovenia (Slavic), and Hungary (Finno-Ugric). Results showed developmental group and age effects. Clusters generally had lower accuracy than singletons, although not uniformly, and were more accurate in stressed syllables. The rhotics were less advanced than alveolar /l/ except in European Portuguese, where the lateral is velarized. In early development, the rhotic is often deleted, but in later, development substitutions for rhotics were more common, primarily non-nasal coronal sonorants, which match some of the place and manner features of the rhotic. Vowel epenthesis sometimes appeared in rhotic clusters. Children with PPD showed more varied mismatch patterns, including more than one mismatch pattern within a cluster. Implications for research and clinical practice are suggested.
... Usage-based and exemplar-based models address learning as generalizations across stored forms, but do not provide explanations of early phonological phenomena. Sosa and Bybee (2008), for example, discuss the implications of usage-based phonology relative to frequency and neighbourhood effects, but do not mention the mechanisms responsible for phonological patterns such as reduplication or the realization of fricatives as stops. Bybee (2006: 15) refers to "articulatory routines that are already mastered," which possibly implies that child phonological phenomena arise in the mapping from adult-like phonological representations (which the theory addresses in detail) to pre-packaged articulatory routines as described in Levelt et al. (1999), but which are not addressed in the Bybee paper. ...
... Usage-based and exemplar-based models address learning as generalizations across stored forms, but do not provide explanations of early phonological phenomena. Sosa and Bybee (2008), for example, discuss the implications of usage-based phonology relative to frequency and neighbourhood effects, but do not mention the mechanisms responsible for phonological patterns such as reduplication or the realization of fricatives as stops. Bybee (2006: 15) refers to "articulatory routines that are already mastered," which possibly implies that child phonological phenomena arise in the mapping from adult-like phonological representations (which the theory addresses in detail) to pre-packaged articulatory routines as described in Levelt et al. (1999), but which are not addressed in the Bybee paper. ...
Although phonological intervention can be effective in the short-term (Law, Garrett Nye, 2009), long-term normalization has been reported for only 20-50% of children (e.g., Rvachew, Chang & Evans, 2007). Furthermore, even in the short-term, not all children progress as quickly as might be hoped. Thus, it is important to continue to develop alternative approaches to intervention. The current issue describes recent studies concerning speech habilitation in children and adolescents, including an adaptation of nonlinear phonological assessment to Mandarin (Bernhardt & Zhao) and intervention approaches focusing on perception (Shiller, Rvachew & Brosseau-Lapré), discourse (Baker & McCabe) and visual feedback of tongue movements with ultrasound (Bacsfalvi). The range of approaches reflects the complexity of the speech production system. This introductory article discusses models of speech production processing as a foundation for the approaches presented.
... Although it is still the subject of debate, many linguists who work on communication disorders feel that linguistic impairments (e.g. in specific language impairment and aphasia) cannot satisfactorily be accounted for in terms of a deficit in a language 'module' and that competence/performance-type explanations are an unhelpful and even misleading way of characterizing these phenomena. In contrast, the so-called usage-based accounts, such as that proposed by Joan Bybee, which places more emphasis on gradual incremental learning, have been found by a growing number of clinical linguists to offer an alternative explanation of clinical data which is both intuitively appealing and potentially more clinically tractable (Sosa and Bybee, 2008). This is part of a wider movement referred to by Evans and Levinson in one of two recent landmark articles as 'a sea-change in linguistics' in which '[r]adical changes in data, methods and theory are upon us' (Levinson and Evans, 2010). ...
Historiography is a growing area of research within the discipline of linguistics, but so far the subfield of clinical linguistics has received virtually no systematic attention. This article attempts to rectify this by tracing the development of the discipline from its pre-scientific days up to the present time. As part of this, I include the results of a survey of articles published in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics between 1987 and 2008 which shows, for example, a consistent primary focus on phonetics and phonology at the expense of grammar, semantics and pragmatics. I also trace the gradual broadening of the discipline from its roots in structural linguistics to its current reciprocal relationship with speech and language pathology and a range of other academic disciplines. Finally, I consider the scope of clinical linguistic research in 2011 and assess how the discipline seems likely develop in the future.
... More recently, Beckman, Munson & Edwards (2007 ;Munson, Edwards & Beckman, in press) have posited two levels of representations, based on a different set of parameters : an item-based level involving a ' fine-grained ' representation of the patterns associated with hearing or producing a word, and a coarser, more abstract level with information about recurring sublexical phonological patterns. Finally, in contrast to the single-or dual-entry models of lexical representation, Sosa and Bybee (2008) propose a usage-based account of phonology in which representations are not fixed entities but emerge ' by generalizing over existing forms and extracting patterns of similarity ' (p. 484). ...
Our understanding of the relationships between lexical and phonological development has been enhanced in recent years by increased interest in this area from language scientists, psychologists and phonologists. This review article provides a summary of research, highlighting similarities and differences across studies. It is suggested that the research falls into two categories with different goals and different methodological approaches: (1) child-centered studies that examine the influences active in the prelinguistic and early-word period, emphasizing individual developmental patterns and the active role played by the child; and (2) studies inspired by research on word processing in adults; these focus on the effects of the phonological and lexical characteristics of the ambient language on underlying representations and word learning in children. The article concludes with suggestions for integrating the findings from the two approaches and for future research.
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) with long-standing speech disorders associated with cleft palate enrolled in a multiple baseline (ABA) within-participant case series. The usage-based EPG therapy technique involved high-volume production of words. Speech was assessed on three baselines prior to therapy, during weekly therapy, at completion of therapy, and 3 months post-therapy. Percent correct of target phonemes in untreated words and continuously connected speech were assessed through acoustic phonetic transcription. Intra- and inter-transcriber agreement was determined.
Result:
Large to medium treatment effect sizes were shown for all participants following therapy (15-33 sessions). Percentage of targets correct for untreated words improved from near 0% pre-therapy, to near 100% for most target sounds post-therapy. Generalisation of target sounds to spontaneous connected speech occurred for all participants and ranged from 78.95-100% (M = 90.66; SD = 10.14) 3 months post-therapy.
Conclusion:
Clinically significant speech change occurred for all participants following therapy. Response to the novel therapeutic technique is encouraging and further research is indicated.
Although group studies provide necessary information about the range and frequency of phenomena in phonological development, individual profiles (case studies) can be used to describe entire phonological systems in detail. Profiles from different languages can highlight similarities and differences across languages that may be less obvious in group studies. The current issue presents profiles of children with protracted phonological development (PPD: speech sound disorders) from 16 languages (Akan, Kuwaiti Arabic, Bulgarian, Canadian English, Farsi, Canadian French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, European Portuguese, Slovenian, Granada Spanish, Swedish). Utilising a constraints-based nonlinear phonological framework, each profile describes a child’s strengths and needs in word structure, segments, features and their interactions and suggests an intervention plan. Where available, follow-up data from after clinical intervention are included. This introductory paper provides the theoretical background for the papers and reflects on the findings, drawing out particular themes and implications for phonological and developmental theories and clinical intervention.
This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while the low-frequency variant involves a front rounded vowel which is expected to be mastered relatively early. Late mastery of complex consonants was confirmed. The high-frequency labiopalatalized-consonant variant was absent at age 3 and not yet mastered even at age 5. All children produced the easier-to-produce low-frequency front-rounded-vowel variant, most at far greater frequency than in adult speech, implying that a child's output limitations can affect which variant the child targets for production. Modular theories, in which phonological plans reflect only the characteristics of adult input, fail to account for our results. Non-modular theories are implicated.
As children learn language, they spontaneously imitate the speech of those around them. This article investigates the new words that five children imitated between 1 and 2 years of age. Children were more likely to imitate new words as they aged and as their productive language developed. After controlling for age, children also were more likely to imitate new words that were shorter and with high neighborhood densities, and that contained sounds the children had previously produced accurately. Together, the findings demonstrate that both the patterns of the target words and children's productive abilities are predictors of children's imitative speech. This supports models of language development where there are influences stemming not only from phonological and lexical representations, but also from phonetic representations.
This research investigates the effect of production on 4.5- to 6-year-old children's recognition of newly learned words. In Experiment 1, children were taught four novel words in a produced or heard training condition during a brief training phase. In Experiment 2, children were taught eight novel words, and this time training condition was in a blocked design. Immediately after training, children were tested on their recognition of the trained novel words using a preferential looking paradigm. In both experiments, children recognized novel words that were produced and heard during training, but demonstrated better recognition for items that were heard. These findings are opposite to previous results reported in the literature with adults and children. Our results show that benefits of speech production for word learning are dependent on factors such as task complexity and the developmental stage of the learner.
The interaction between lexical and phonological development has been the focus of a growing body of research. Findings suggest that phonological ability influences word learning and that certain characteristics of words influence how words are produced by children. This article summarizes research findings regarding the effects of word frequency, phonological neighborhood density (PND), and phonotactic probability (PP) on phonological development, and describes how these factors have been manipulated to influence phonological learning in the treatment of speech sound disorder in children. Clinical applications and ideas for considering lexical factors in the selection of target words for treatment are provided.
Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) have gaps and simplifications in their speech sound systems that can make what they say difficult to understand. This chapter provides a historical backdrop to the accessible, contemporary book on child speech for a readership of clinicians, clinical educators and students in speech-language pathology/ speech and language therapy (SLP/SLT). SLP/SLT was a young profession when speech sound disorders in children were called ‘dyslalia’ or ‘functional articulation disorders’. Ingram (1989a) surveyed various attempts in the field of linguistics to construct a phonological theory that covered both normal and disordered phonological acquisition, indicating that the most likely sources of elucidation of normal acquisition might be universalist/structuralist theory, natural phonology theory, or the Stanford cognitive model. Stoel-Gammon and Dunn posited four basic interacting components necessary for the formulation of a model of phonological development: An auditory–perceptual component; cognitive component; phonological component; and neuromotor component.
AUTHOR'S NOTE TO RESEARCH GATE MEMBERS - I have now had over 100 requests for full-text copies of chapters from the book "Children's Speech Sound Disorders". Please note that the book's chapters are not available from me in electronic format. If you are interested you can buy the book in hard copy or as an e-book. Up to January 7, 2019 I answered every request individually, explaining the copyright situation, but from now on am not prepared to continue this practice.
Psycholinguistic models of spoken word production differ in how they conceptualize the relationship between lexical, phonological and output representations, making different predictions for the role of production in language acquisition and language processing. This work examines the impact of production on spoken word recognition of newly learned non-words. In Experiment 1, adults were trained on non-words with visual referents; during training, they produced half of the non-words, with the other half being heard-only. Using a visual world paradigm at test, eye tracking results indicated faster recognition of non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. In Experiment 2, non-words were correctly pronounced or mispronounced at test. Participants showed a different pattern of recognition for mispronunciation on non-words that were produced compared with heard-only during training. Together these results indicate that production affects the representations of newly learned words.
Over the course of the first 2 years of life, infants are learning a great deal about the sound system of their native language. Acquiring the sound system requires the infant to learn about sounds and their distributions, sound combinations, and prosodic information, such as syllables, rhythm, and stress. These aspects of the phonological system are being learned simultaneously as the infant experiences the language around him or her. What binds all of the phonological units is the context in which they occur, namely, words. In this review, we explore the development of phonetics and phonology by showcasing the interactive nature of the developing lexicon and sound system with a focus on perception. We first review seminal research in the foundations of phonological development. We then discuss early word recognition and learning followed by a discussion of phonological and lexical representations. We conclude by discussing the interactive nature of lexical and phonological representations and highlight some further directions for exploring the developing sound system. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:589-602. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1307 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
There are some children with speech and/or language difficulties who are significantly more difficult to understand in connected speech than in single words. The study reported here explores the between-word behaviours of three such children, aged 11;8, 12;2 and 12;10. It focuses on whether these patterns could be accounted for by lenition, as suggested by a usage-based approach to phonology. The children carried out a repetition task, with sentences containing environments that can trigger assimilation and elision. Speech elicited was examined using a combination of perceptual and electropalatographic (EPG) analysis. All of the children produced instances of word boundary behaviours reported in adult speech, as well as some which are considered to be atypical. It is argued that all of these phenomena can be viewed as lenition, and that a usage-based approach to phonology has potential for providing a valuable framework for the description of between-word processes in disordered speech.
This textbook describes the approaches to phonology that are most relevant to communication disorders. It examines schools of thought in theoretical phonology, and their relevance to description, explanation and remediation in the clinical context.
The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between sound change and lexical structure in two children with functional phonological disorders. Specifically, the question of how sound change infuses through the developing lexicon was addressed. A chronology of phonemic acquisition for the children who participated has previously been documented. These archival data were now extended to evaluate lexical change relative to sounds acquired. Lexical change was examined through the parameters of neighbourhood density and word frequency. Results of this study revealed two converging patterns across children: (a) for each child there was one parameter (neighbourhood density or word frequency) of lexical change which held across all sounds acquired, and (b) for each child the alternative parameter patterned differentially by sound. This variability in lexical change was hypothesized to be associated with the relative degree of feature specification of the sounds acquired. This has theoretical implications for the overlay of phonological and lexical structure, and clinical potential for remediation of phonological disorders.
This study examined frequency-of-occurrence effects on the articulatory productions of /s/ in words by 76 normal and 18 /s/-defective second graders. The stimuli, monosyllabic CCVC and CVCC words, consisted of high- and low-frequency words, with each word containing either a high- or low-frequency /s/ cluster. The stimuli were arranged in four permutations of cluster/word frequency combinations and were presented to the subjects in an imitation task. Significant differences were observed between the articulatory performances on high- versus low-frequency clusters, as well as on high- versus low-frequency words.
The interaction between lexical acquisition and acquisition of initial voiceless stops was studied in two normally developing children, aged 1;9 and 1;10, by acoustically examining the token-by-token accuracy of initial voiceless stop targets in different lexical items. Production accuracy was also examined as it related to the frequency of usage of different words, as well as the time when they entered the children's lexicons. Fewer than half of the words in the children's lexicons had tokens representing the emergence of accurate voiceless stop production prior to the session at which the voicing contrast was achieved. These words were primarily 'old' words that had been in the children's lexicons from the beginning of data collection, as opposed to 'new' words, first produced in later recording sessions. Findings are discussed in reference to the 'lexical diffusion' model of sound change and within the framework of nonlinear underspecification theory.
Lexical diffusion, as characterized by interword variation in production, was examined in phonological acquisition. The lexical variables of word frequency and neighbourhood density were hypothesized to facilitate sound change to varying degrees. Twelve children with functional phonological delays, aged 3;0 to 7;4, participated in an alternating treatments experiment to promote sound change. Independent variables were crossed to yield all logically possible combinations of high/low frequency and high/low density in treatment; the dependent measure was generalization accuracy in production. Results indicated word frequency was most facilitative in sound change, whereas, dense neighbourhood structure was least facilitative. The salience of frequency and avoidance of high density are discussed relative to the type of phonological change being induced in children's grammars, either phonetic or phonemic, and to the nature of children's representations. Results are further interpreted with reference to interactive models of language processing and optimality theoretic accounts of linguistic structure.
This paper examines the contributions of markedness and a child's grammar to the process of lexical diffusion in phonological acquisition. Archival data from 19 preschoolers with functional phonological delays were submitted to descriptive analyses of productive sound change in fricatives. Children's presenting fricative inventory, the fricatives newly learned, and their position of occurrence were varied, with word frequency and neighbourhood density measured. Results indicated that lexical diffusion of fricatives occurred differentially by word position. Positional, featural and structural markedness further converged such that change in unmarked structure of any type was implemented in low frequency words. A child's presenting fricative inventory was not directly affiliated with systematic patterns of diffusion. These results have clinical applications for the evaluation of productive sound change and theoretical implications for deterministic models of lexical diffusion and processing models of word recognition.
It is noted that much previous work in phonology has attempted to provide economical theories of sound systems without explicitly attempting to provide theories that have psycholinguistic validity. The work of Bybee on a cognitive approach to phonology is described, and its possible application to disordered speech is considered. It is discussed that cognitive phonology, coupled with gestural phonology, provides descriptive as well as explanatory accounts of disordered speech, and has specific implications for approaches to therapy. The article concludes with a case study of child with severely unintelligible speech, where it seems that the insights of cognitive phonology provide both an explanation for and a description of her speech behaviors.