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Abstract
We explore children’s perception of their own speech – in its online form, in its recorded form, and in synthetically modified forms. Children with phonological disorder (PD) and children with typical speech and language development (TD) performed tasks of evaluating accuracy of the different types of speech stimuli, either immediately after having produced the utterance or after a delay. In addition, they performed a task designed to assess their ability to detect synthetic modification. Both groups showed high performance in tasks involving evaluation of other children’s speech, whereas in tasks of evaluating one’s own speech, the children with PD were less accurate than their TD peers. The children with PD were less sensitive to misproductions in immediate conjunction with their production of an utterance, and more accurate after a delay. Within-category modification often passed undetected, indicating a satisfactory quality of the generated speech. Potential clinical benefits of using corrective re-synthesis are discussed.
Acknowledgements
The Promobilia foundation is gratefully acknowledged for funding this project, with support from The Swedish Graduate School of Language Technology (GSLT). We generously thank Ulrika Marklund for cross-annotation. Many thanks also to Susan Rvachew and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments. And finally, our deepest thanks to all children, their parents, SLTs and schools, and pre-schools for participating in this study.
Notes
1Here, and throughout the paper, the term “internal referent” corresponds to what Pierrehumbert (Citation2003) calls “category”, where categories are seen as bottom-up induced “labels over a phonetic map”.
2As mentioned, four of the stimuli in the selfmod tasks were original recordings. If the children with PD had misarticulated all these, and if the misarticulated production only had affected the initial consonant, the number of correct stimuli would have been stable at six for the PD group. However, since some children with PD produced /k/ accurately at some times, and since some stimuli contained inaccurately produced speech sounds apart from the initial consonant, the number of correct stimuli per child is sometimes higher and sometimes lower than 6.
3Age of acquisition (AoA) was estimated by means of a survey distributed to 12 parents of 3–6-year-old children (not included in the study). The average of the parents' estimations of their children's age when acquiring a specific word represents the estimated AoA for that particular word.
4Word frequency is reported as a number of occurrences per one million word tokens. A collection of 127 Swedish corpora with a total number of over 1.3 billion tokens was used as a corpus. This text set was available for searching at spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/korp on 2 July 2013.