UW Division of Communication Disorders Researches Speech Sound Issues in Children
A grant from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation will support research through the University of Wyoming Division of Communication Disorders aimed at helping children who struggle with speech sound disorders (SSD), a condition that limits a child’s ability to learn and communicate new words and speech sounds.
Breanna Krueger, an assistant professor with the UW Division of Communication Disorders, will lead the study, titled “Interpretation of Misarticulated Words by Children with Speech Sound Disorders.”
“Children learn new words and speech sounds through hearing others in their communicative environments. This process is known as incidental learning,” Krueger says. “It is well established that children develop early representations of sounds of their first language, and use these representations to segment and understand the words they hear.”
This segmentation is stored in the child’s mental lexicon to be saved for later use. However, children with SSD may struggle with forming those early representations, which impacts their speech production as well as their learning of novel words. This difficulty may limit the ability of these children to integrate nonexemplar productions of words, such as other accents, dialects or, more frequently, developmental misarticulations by peers. The purpose of the proposed study is to explore word identification of misarticulated words by children with SSD.
At left, UW Assistant Professor Breanna Krueger works with Rue Steidley, age 7, as a computer software program plays fake words over the speaker. Steidley must select whether the word sounds like a word meant for adults or meant for kids. A screen tracker records her motions as she selects a photo of an adult or a kid. The goal of the study is to see how the acquisition of information impacts children’s interpretation of words and how fast their brains are working.
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