Children's recognition of their own recorded voice: influence of age and phonological impairment

Abstract

Children with phonological impairment (PI) often have difficulties perceiving insufficiencies in their own speech. The use of recordings has been suggested as a way of directing the child's attention toward his/her own speech, despite a lack of evidence that children actually recognize their recorded voice as their own. We present two studies of children's self-voice identification, one exploring developmental aspects, and one exploring potential effects of having a PI. The results indicate that children from 4 to 8 years recognize their recorded voice well (around 80% accuracy), regardless of whether they have a PI or not. A subtle change in this ability from 4 to 8 years is observed that could be linked to a development in short-term memory. Clinically, one can indeed expect an advantage of using recordings in therapy; this could constitute an intermediate step toward the more challenging task of online self-monitoring.

Keywords:

• child phonological disorders
• speech perception
• short-term memory

Acknowledgements

The Promobilia foundation is gratefully acknowledged for funding this project, with support from The Swedish Graduate School of Language Technology (GSLT). Many thanks to Ulrika Marklund for cross-annotation, and to my advisors David House and Åsa Wengelin for their support during the work of this study, and for proof-reading and suggesting improvements. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. And finally, my deepest thanks to all children, their parents, SLTs and schools and pre-schools for participating in this study.

Declaration of Interest: The author reports no conflict of interest.