Tara L Whitehill’s research while affiliated with The University of Hong Kong and other places

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Publications (98)


Slope analysis of the moderating effect of PUC_MV × PRCS on CHISGR.
Slope analysis of the moderating effect of PUC_MV × SPS on CHISGR.
Development of a Psychometric Measure of the Propensity to Consciously Control and Monitor Speech Production
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

April 2020

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96 Reads

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3 Citations

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Andus Wing-Kuen Wong

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Andy Choi-Yeung Tse

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Purpose A speech-specific reinvestment scale (SSRS) is a psychometric measure of the propensity to consciously control and monitor speech production. This study develops and validates an SSRS as well as examines its relationship with speech performance with the moderating effects of trait social anxieties (i.e., social interaction anxiety, public speaking anxiety, and social phobia). Method Scale development involves the following stages: (a) initial item generation based on relevant literature, (b) item evaluation through cognitive interviews with 24 healthy respondents, (c) scale reliability and validity tests using cross-sectional survey data from 498 healthy respondents, and (d) test–retest reliability assessment using longitudinal survey data from 185 healthy respondents. Respondents' speech performance is quantified using speech examination scores. Hierarchical moderated regression analyses are conducted to examine the moderating effects of trait social anxieties. Results The validated SSRS comprises 35 items, which can be categorized into four subdimensions, namely, speech movement self-consciousness, public consciousness of speech content, speech manner, and speech movement. Results show that respondents with low trait social anxieties indicate a generally positive relationship between public consciousness of speech movement and speech performance, whereas respondents with high trait social anxieties exhibit a nonsignificant relationship. Conclusions SSRS offers a reliable and valid method for assessing the predisposition for conscious speech control and monitoring, which plays a role in speech performance and is moderated by an individual's level of trait social anxiety. SSRS is a potential assessment tool for speech-language pathologists to evaluate the impacts of conscious speech control and monitoring on individuals with speech impairment.

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Mean nasalance scores of participants in sentence reading as a function of practice block and learning condition.
Mean nasalance scores of participants in passage reading as a function of testing and learning conditions.
Effects of Error Experience on Learning to Lower Speech Nasalance Level

February 2019

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64 Reads

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5 Citations

Purpose This research aims to examine the effects of error experience when learning to speak with lowered nasalance level. Method A total of 45 typical speakers were instructed to learn to lower speech nasalance level in either an errorless (restricted possibility for committing errors) or an errorful (unrestricted possibility for committing errors) learning condition. The nasality level of the participants' speech was measured by a nasometer and quantified by nasalance scores (in percent). Errorless learners practiced producing speech with lowered nasalance level with a threshold nasalance score of 50% (the easiest target) at the beginning, which gradually decreased to a threshold of 10% (the most difficult target) at the end. The same set of threshold targets was presented to errorful learners, but in reverse order. Errors were defined by the proportion of speech, with a nasalance score exceeding the threshold. Retention and transfer tests were administered. Results Errorless learners displayed fewer errors and lower mean nasalance scores than errorful learners during the acquisition phase. Furthermore, errorless learners achieved lower mean nasalance scores than errorful learners in the retention and transfer tests. Conclusion These results suggest that errorless learning is more effective than errorful learning and that error experience has a detrimental effect on the acquisition of a novel speech motor task that requires minimization of the nasality level. Errorless learning may be a useful paradigm for the intervention and management of hypernasality in clinical settings where behavioral treatments are needed.


Spectral moment analysis of affricates produced by Mandarin-speaking pre-adolescents with repaired cleft palate

March 2016

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70 Reads

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4 Citations

International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

Objective: To explore the spectral differences in frication noise between aspirated and unaspirated affricates in typical Putonghua (standard Mandarin Chinese) pre-adolescent speakers, and to compare the spectral characteristics of affricate production between speakers with repaired cleft palate and their non-cleft peers. Participants and intervention: Spectral moment analysis, a quantitative approach to capture the contour of speech spectra, was carried out on speech samples produced by two groups of speakers: (a) speakers with repaired cleft palate (n=14, mean age=11.7 years) and (b) typical speakers (n=10, mean age=11.0 years). Results: Data from typical speakers showed that the unaspirated affricates had significantly higher first spectral moment (M1) than their aspirated counterparts. Compared with typical speakers, individuals with repaired cleft palate exhibited a lower first moment for the four affricates /ts, tʂ, tɕ(h), tɕ/. Conclusion: The results revealed important acoustical differences between aspirated and unaspirated affricates for typical speakers. The trend of spectral deviation may have contributed to the difficulty in producing unaspirated affricates found in Putonghua-speaking individuals with speech disorders related to cleft palate.


Examining the cognitive demands of analogy instructions compared to explicit instructions

January 2016

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46 Reads

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12 Citations

Purpose: In many learning domains, instructions are presented explicitly despite high cognitive demands associated with their processing. This study examined cognitive demands imposed on working memory by different types of instruction to speak with maximum pitch variation: visual analogy, verbal analogy and explicit verbal instruction. Method: Forty participants were asked to memorise a set of 16 visual and verbal stimuli while reading aloud a Cantonese paragraph with maximum pitch variation. Instructions about how to achieve maximum pitch variation were presented via visual analogy, verbal analogy, explicit rules or no instruction. Pitch variation was assessed off-line, using standard deviation of fundamental frequency. Immediately after reading, participants recalled as many stimuli as possible. Result: Analogy instructions resulted in significantly increased pitch variation compared to explicit instructions or no instructions. Explicit instructions resulted in poorest recall of stimuli. Visual analogy instructions resulted in significantly poorer recall of visual stimuli than verbal stimuli. Conclusion: The findings suggest that non-propositional instructions presented via analogy may be less cognitively demanding than instructions that are presented explicitly. Processing analogy instructions that are presented as a visual representation is likely to load primarily visuospatial components of working memory rather than phonological components. The findings are discussed with reference to speech therapy and human cognition.


Consonant Accuracy in Mandarin-speaking Children with Repaired Cleft Palate

November 2015

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163 Reads

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7 Citations

International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

Objective: To compare the consonant production of Chinese-speaking cleft palate children with perceived hypernasal resonance (PHR) after palatoplasty and those with perceived normal resonance (PNR), and to assess the possible influence of language on articulation. Setting: Two hospital cleft lip and palate centers in mainland China. Participants: Thirty-one speakers were allocated into two groups based on perceptual judgment results of their resonance provided by three speech therapists: one group with PNR (n=20, average age=9.3 years), and another group with PHR (n=11, average age=8.3 years). All participants had no known hearing or cognitive deficits. Intervention: Articulation was evaluated using two Mandarin Chinese assessment tools, the Putonghua Segmental Phonology Test and the Deep Test for Cleft Palate Speakers in Putonghua. Speaker consonant accuracy was evaluated by two experienced speech therapists. Results: Compared to individuals with PNR, the PHR group exhibited more difficulties on production of unaspirated consonants, including/b/,/t/,/k/,/ts/,/tʂ/ and/tɕ/, than for aspirated consonants. Conclusion: The distinctive feature of aspiration in Mandarin phonology brought a language specific pattern to consonant production among those speakers with PHR after primary palatal closure.





Validity and Reliability of Visual Analog Scaling for Assessment of Hypernasality and Audible Nasal Emission in Children With Repaired Cleft Palate

October 2014

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127 Reads

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68 Citations

The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal

Objective: To investigate the validity and reliability of multiple listener judgments of hypernasality and audible nasal emission, in children with repaired cleft palate, using visual analog scaling (VAS) and equal-appearing interval (EAI) scaling. Design: Prospective comparative study of multiple listener ratings of hypernasality and audible nasal emission. Setting: Multisite institutional. Participants: Five trained and experienced speech-language pathologist listeners from the Americleft Speech Project. Measures: Average VAS and EAI ratings of hypernasality and audible nasal emission/turbulence for 12 video-recorded speech samples from the Americleft Speech Project. Intrarater and interrater reliability was computed, as well as linear and polynomial models of best fit. Results: Intrarater and interrater reliability was acceptable for both rating methods; however, reliability was higher for VAS as compared to EAI ratings. When VAS ratings were plotted against EAI ratings, results revealed a stronger curvilinear relationship. Conclusions: The results of this study provide additional evidence that alternate rating methods such as VAS may offer improved validity and reliability over EAI ratings of speech. VAS should be considered a viable method for rating hypernasality and nasal emission in speech in children with repaired cleft palate.


Citations (86)


... As Cantonese has no consistent pattern of stress or emphasis on specific syllables to create a rhythmic pattern (ba-NA-na /bə′nɑːnə/), and the tone of each syllable exerts a significant impact on the meaning of a phrase or a sentence, the overall rhythm of Cantonese is difficult to predict and identify. Furthermore, Cantonese is a wh-in-situ language, meaning wh words (e.g.,/sɵy21/ who and /sɐm22 mɔ23/ what) are not relocated to the beginning of a question, but remain in their original position (Gu et al., 2006;Huang, 1982;Ma et al., 2006). In addition, Cantonese wh questions typically end with the final particle /nε:55/, which is marked by a rising contour (Yang et al., 2020). ...

Reference:

The roles of prosody in Chinese-English reading comprehension
Quantitative analysis of intonation patterns in statements and questions in Cantonese
  • Citing Conference Paper
  • May 2006

... Although PBL originated in medical education, its growing popularity in therapy education has been well documented. It has been implemented in physiotherapy (Titchen & Cole, 1991;van Langenberghe, 1988;Kaufman, Portney & Jette, 1997;Eksteen & Slabbert, 2001), occupational therapy (Busuttil, 1988;Royen, 1995;McCarron, 2002), speech-language therapy (Mok, 2009), dietetic (Terry, 2008, Lohse, Nitzke, & Ney, 2003, and podiatric (Finch, 1999) professional entry-level education. As therapists are required to problem solve in their day-to-day clinical practice, acquiring knowledge in the context of solving problems would appear to be an appropriate approach for educating entrylevel students (Bransford et al., 1989). ...

Speech-language pathology students' approaches to learning in a problem-based learning curriculum
  • Citing Article
  • December 2009

... Furthermore, compensatory errors can significantly impede speech intelligibility (McWilliams, 1954;Whitehill, 2002). Reductions in intelligibility are the result of alterations in the place of articulation, typically via backing of oral consonant targets, either outside the oral cavity (nonoral errors) toward points of articulation within the pharyngeal or glottal regions, or within the posterior oral cavity (posterior errors) toward palatal, velar, or uvular points of constriction. ...

Assessing Intelligibility in Speakers with Cleft Palate: A Critical Review of the Literature
  • Citing Article
  • January 2002

The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal

... When participants have audible nasal emission, nasal obstruction, palatal fistula, or compensatory articulation errors, the data should be interpreted with caution. Additionally, caution should be practiced in using hard cut-off points for patient diagnosis due to variability of scores between individuals (16,47). ...

Nasalance Measures in Cantonese-Speaking Women
  • Citing Article
  • March 2001

The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal

... Research related to language formulation J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f processes further indicates that WM and attentional control contribute significantly to speech production, particularly at earlier stages involving conceptualization (generating thoughts) and formulation (retrieving words and grammatical structures) (Jongman, 2017(Jongman, , 2021Levelt, 2001;Roelofs, 2011). Although articulatory processes are largely automatic for healthy, proficient adult speakers (Levelt, 1983;Lo et al., 2020;Segalowitz, 2003), speakers engage in complex coordination of processing and storage demands as they simultaneously plan what to stay and store these plans until they are ready to be executed as words and sentences. Speakers must also formulate new plans while concurrently delivering plans that were just prepared (Daneman, 1991). ...

Development of a Psychometric Measure of the Propensity to Consciously Control and Monitor Speech Production

... Zheng (2023) reviewed studies on implicit motor learning in children with ASD. In three studies, external attention instruction was used (as an implicit learning method) (Li et al., 2017;Tse, 2019;Asadi, Aiken, Heidari, Goudini, & Saeedpour-Parizi, 2022) and in two studies, analogy learning (Lo et al., 2019;Kok, Kal, van Doodewaard, Savelsbergh, & van der Kamp, 2021) was used. In all three studies that used external attention, the exteranl attention groups performed better than the internal attention groups. ...

Effects of Error Experience on Learning to Lower Speech Nasalance Level

... Some of the earliest studies employed EPG, whereby the speaker is fitted with an acrylic dental appliance that covers the hard palate with an array of contact-sensitive electrodes to provide real-time visual feedback of tonguepalate contact patterns during speech production. Numerous studies have examined the application of EPG in the remediation of speech sound disorders in children and adults, including those associated with cleft-lip and palate (Gibbon and Hardcastle, 1989;Lee et al., 2009;Michi et al., 1986;Whitehill et al., 1996), functional phonological and articulation disorders (Carter and Edwards, 2004;Dagenais et al., 1994;Gibbon and Hardcastle, 1987;Hitchcock et al., 2017;McAuliffe and Cornwell, 2008), neurological disorders Hardcastle et al., 1987), and hearing impairment . While the majority of these studies involved a small number of participants, they nonetheless demonstrate across a wide range of clinical populations that real-time visual feedback of the tongue can be of potential benefit in speech production training. ...

Electropalatography Treatment in an Adult with Late Repair of Cleft Palate
  • Citing Article
  • March 1996

The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal

... Motor speech disorders in Cantonese-speaking adults have been explored. Whitehill (2010) and Whitehill and Ma (2014) reviewed the early investigations of dysarthria in Cantonese speakers and suggested that these speakers with dysarthria showed clinical features consistent with those of English speakers with the same disorder. Whitehill (2010) also found that Cantonese speakers with dysarthria demonstrated some clinical features that had never been reported from English speakers, such as lexical tone errors. ...

10. Motor Speech Disorders in Chinese: A Cross-Language Perspective
  • Citing Chapter
  • December 2014

... At risk are cleft patients with borderline VPF preoperatively. A critical review of the literature found conflicting results about the impact of surgery on velopharyngeal status (Chanchareonsook et al., 2006). According to this review, the 39 studies that were included had used different methods to analyze speech pre-and postoperatively. ...

The Effect Of Cranio-maxillofacial Osteotomies And Distraction Osteogenesis On Speech And Velopharyngeal Status: A Critical Review
  • Citing Article
  • January 2005

The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal

... SMA is a quantitative method for statistically measuring and describing speech for voiceless stop consonants and sibilant fricatives through four spectral moments (Forrest et al., 1988). The four moments include mean frequency (M1, centroid or center of gravity), energy spread or variance (M2), skewness (M3), and kurtosis (M4) of the sound energy (Jiang et al., 2016). This method has been recently used to quantitatively describe speech characteristics in children with repaired cleft lip/palate and conductive hearing loss and in adolescents and adults with DFD (Lathrop-Marshall et al., 2021). ...

Spectral moment analysis of affricates produced by Mandarin-speaking pre-adolescents with repaired cleft palate
  • Citing Article
  • March 2016

International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology