Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1982. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 291-299).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1982 / Vita. Bibliography: leaves 291-299.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 29, 1996." Also available in print.

This study investigated the effectiveness of utilizing acoustic measures as an objective tool in monitoring speech errors and providing visual feedback to enhance speech training and aural rehabilitation of children with hearing impairment. The first part of the study included a comprehensive description of the acoustic characteristics related to the speech deficits of a hearing impaired child. Results of a series of t-tests performed on the experimental measures showed that vowel length and the loci of formant frequencies were most relevant in differentiating between correctly and incorrectly produced vowels, while voice onset time along with measures of Moment 1 (mean) and Moment 3 (skewness) obtained from speech moment analysis, were related to consonant accuracy. These findings, especially the finding of an abnormal sound frequency distribution shown in the hearing impaired child's consonant production, suggest a link between perceptual deficits and speech production errors and provide clues to the type of compensatory feedback needed for aural rehabilitation. The second part of the study involved a multiple baseline design across behaviours with replication across three hearing impaired children to assess the efficacy of treatment with acoustic signals as visual feedback. Participants' speech articulations following traditional speech training and training using spectrographic and RMS displays as visual feedback (referred to as 'visual treatment') were compared, with traditional non-visual treatment followed by visual treatment on one or two targets in a time-staggered fashion. Although no statistically significant difference on the experimental measures was found between the two training approaches based on perceptual assessment, some objective acoustic measures revealed more subtle changes toward normal speech patterns with visual treatment as compared to a traditional approach. Further acoustic-perceptual studies with a larger sample size and longer experimental period are needed to better understand the general and long-term effectiveness of visual treatment.

This study investigated the effectiveness of utilizing acoustic measures as an objective tool in monitoring speech errors and providing visual feedback to enhance speech training and aural rehabilitation of children with hearing impairment. The first part of the study included a comprehensive description of the acoustic characteristics related to the speech deficits of a hearing impaired child. Results of a series of t-tests performed on the experimental measures showed that vowel length and the loci of formant frequencies were most relevant in differentiating between correctly and incorrectly produced vowels, while voice onset time along with measures of Moment 1 (mean) and Moment 3 (skewness) obtained from speech moment analysis, were related to consonant accuracy. These findings, especially the finding of an abnormal sound frequency distribution shown in the hearing impaired child's consonant production, suggest a link between perceptual deficits and speech production errors and provide clues to the type of compensatory feedback needed for aural rehabilitation. The second part of the study involved a multiple baseline design across behaviours with replication across three hearing impaired children to assess the efficacy of treatment with acoustic signals as visual feedback. Participants' speech articulations following traditional speech training and training using spectrographic and RMS displays as visual feedback (referred to as 'visual treatment') were compared, with traditional non-visual treatment followed by visual treatment on one or two targets in a time-staggered fashion. Although no statistically significant difference on the experimental measures was found between the two training approaches based on perceptual assessment, some objective acoustic measures revealed more subtle changes toward normal speech patterns with visual treatment as compared to a traditional approach. Further acoustic-perceptual studies with a larger sample size and longer experimental period are needed to better understand the general and long-term effectiveness of visual treatment.

Thesis (M.S.)--Duquesne University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-127).

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, May 4, 2001." Also available in print.

Speech errors in normal speech provide important information about the processing mechanisms of speaking, one of the most complex cognitive, linguistic, and motor skills that human beings use for communication. Studies of speech errors form a major part of psycholinguistic research on speech production, but until recently such research has been largely based on the evidence from only a few European languages. In contrast to most speech error analyses in English, this dissertation focuses on the discussion of speech errors in Chinese, illustrating that speech errors featuring Chinese language-specific characteristics imply some processing steps that are not observed in previous speech production models. Similarities between speech errors in Chinese and English in terms of their patterns and classification suggest universality in speech production disorders in normal speech, but language-specific characteristics of the two languages suggest that English and Chinese speakers experience different processing steps in speech production, and err at different rates in different domains. For example, tonal errors in Chinese indicate that Chinese speakers undergo a special phonological process sub-step for tonal specification, this sub-step involves tone sandhi rule application, a processing task that does not concern non-tonal language speakers. A second example arises when, in the course of articulating a retrieved lexical item, the logophonographic features of the Chinese writing system provide phonological information about the lexical item through a processing step of "mental visualization". Partial visualization or incorrect phonological processing of the mentally visualized items can lead to errors of the logo-phonographic type which are not found in alphabetic languages such as English. Third, bilingual errors show that mixing of syntactic and phonological features of two different languages can occur when speech is being planned by bilingual speakers. Lastly, socio-cultural values in Chinese, such as those that involve address patterns and kinship term systems, can lead to errors that are rarely experienced by English speakers. Such different types of speech errors found in Chinese provide evidence that speech in Chinese is mediated by certain steps that have not been described in the many speech production models based on evidence derived from English errors. In general agreement with the functional-positional speech production model of Garrett (1975. 1988) and the overall language production schema of Levelt (1989. 1992), this dissertation argues for a unified speech production model that describes each of the ordered steps in the speech production process, including conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. Such a model does not overemphasize either the linguistic or psychological factors that cause speech errors. In order to precisely account for speech errors of all types in all natural languages, this model involves a set of ordered cognitive activities with psychological, linguistic, socio-cultural and contextual factors under full consideration. / Graduate

This dissertation presents experimental research on speech errors in Tunisian Arabic (TA). The central empirical questions revolve around properties of `exchange errors'. These errors can mis-order lexical, morphological, or sound elements in a variety of patterns. TA's nonconcatenative morphology shows interesting interactions of phrasal and lexical constraints with morphological structure during language production and affords different and revealing error potentials linking the production system with linguistic knowledge.The dissertation studies expand and test generalizations based on Abd-El-Jawad and Abu-Salim's (1987) study of spontaneous speech errors in Jordanian Arabic by experimentally examining apparent regularities in data from real-time language processing perspective. The studies address alternative accounts of error phenomena that have figured prominently in accounts of production processing. Three experiments were designed and conducted based on an error elicitation paradigm used by Ferreira and Humphreys (2001). Experiment 1 tested within-phrase exchange errors focused on root versus non-root exchanges and lexical versus non-lexical outcomes for root and non-root errors. Experiments 2 and 3 addressed between-phrase exchange errors focused on violations of the Grammatical Category Constraint (GCC).The study of exchange potentials for the within-phrase items (experiment 1) contrasted lexical and non-lexical outcomes. The expectation was that these would include a significant number of root exchanges and that the lexical status of the resulting forms would not preclude error. Results show that root and vocalic pattern exchanges were very rare and that word forms rather than root forms were the dominant influence in the experimental performance. On the other hand, the study of exchange errors across phrasal boundaries of items that do or do not correspond in grammatical category (experiments 2 and 3) pursued two principal questions, one concerning the error rate and the second concerning the error elements. The expectation was that the errors predominantly come from grammatical category matches. That outcome would reinforce the interpretation that processing operations reflect the assignment of syntactically labeled elements to their location in phrasal structures. Results corroborated with the expectation. However, exchange errors involving words of different grammatical categories were also frequent. This has implications for speech monitoring models and the automaticity of the GCC.

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