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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.
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.