The present study measured the accuracy of automated grammatical tagging software as compared to manual tagging in Spanish-speaking children's personal and fictional event narrative language samples. Studies have identified articles, clitic (contracted with a verb) pronouns, and verbs as clinical markers for language impairment in Spanish-speaking children. Automated grammatical tagging software may aid in the rapid identification of these grammatical markers. Grammatical morphemes of 30 first and fourth grade children's personal and fictional event narrative samples were tagged and compared with their respective manually tagged samples. The accuracy of word-level coding averaged 91%, and similar accuracy was found for clinically significant tags. Automated grammatical analysis has the potential to accurately identify clinically relevant grammatical forms in samples from children who speak Spanish.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the use of a robot (Troy) in a low-dose treatment protocol for two children with Autism Spectrum disorder. The efficacy of intervention was measured by comparing social engagement in two contexts: interactions with two adults and interaction with an unfamiliar adult. During the treatment, a robot was included in pseudo-triadic interactions with the clinician and the child. The robot was programmed to perform simple actions that imitated the actions of the clinician in an effort to engage the child. These pseudo-triadic interactions were incorporated into intervention over the course of a 16-session intervention program. Each child's social engagement was assessed pre-intervention as well as post-intervention in the context of symbolic play in a triad and interaction with an unfamiliar adult. These pre-and post-intervention levels of social engagement were compared in order to detect significant gains after the intervention program with the robot. An increase in both participants' engaged behaviors during post-assessment measures was observed. One participant demonstrated significantly more engaged behaviors than the other.

Prosody plays an important role in speech communication. Many individuals with motor speech disorders have decreased prosodic control and thus lower overall intelligibility. Few studies have examined the effect of a flattened prosodic contour on the intelligibility of dysarthric speech, and little is known about the role that listener gender plays in understanding disordered speech. The purpose of this study was to quantify the impact of artificial prosodic manipulation on the intelligibility of dysarthric speech as a function of the extent of fundamental frequency (F0) contour flattening. A further goal was to examine the influence of listener gender on intelligibility. Speech recordings from two speakers (one with mild dysarthria and one with severe dysarthria) were synthetically altered by reducing F0 variability by 50%, 75%, and 100%. Fifty listeners transcribed the sentences and rated the perceived difficulty of the task. Results of the study indicated that a flattened F0 contour led to decreases in the intelligibility of both speakers with dysarthria, both in terms of transcription accuracy and ratings of listener confidence. All altered conditions resulted in poorer intelligibility than the unaltered utterances. For the mild speaker, scores and ratings decreased predictably in proportion to the extent of F0 flattening, whereas for the severe speaker, there was not a steady decrease in intelligibility as the F0 was progressively flattened. The utterances were more intelligible to female than male listeners.

This study examined the use of a humanoid robot to engage two children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on responding language behaviors including language, affect, imitation, and eye contact. The robot was integrated into each child's regular intervention in low-doses (10 min of a 50 min session). The goal was to increase responding language behaviors in the children with their conversational partners. The two children participated in pre and post assessment sessions as well as 16 intervention sessions. The data from these sessions were coded into two main categories including how the children interacted (Initiating Engagement, Responding to Engagement, and Non-Engagement) and who the children interacted with (Robot Only and Both). Both children improved in response to the intervention indicating a relation between improved behavior and intervention with the robot.

This study focused on intervention using a humanoid robot to facilitate social engagement and joint attention in four children with autism. Intervention was conducted over a three month period, with each child receiving pre-testing, intervention, and post-testing. Intervention was based on the SCERTS model (Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, & Laurent, 2003). Pre- and post-testing involved interactions with a parent, a familiar adult interaction, a less-familiar adult interaction, and a triadic interaction. This study focuses on the baseline and follow-up testing from the interaction with the familiar adult. Following a period of traditional intervention, sessions involving a humanoid robot (named Troy) were conducted. The robot was integrated into the therapy in a low dose model, meaning that during a 50-minute therapy session, approximately 10 minutes were designated to interactions using the robot to facilitate the interaction. Pre- and post-intervention assessments were recorded, analyzed, and coded for social engagement behaviors. Results comparing baseline to follow-up assessments of the interactions with the familiar adult indicated that the most notable changes were observed in reciprocal action and eye contact. Little change was noted in initiation of social engagement, symbolic play, and language. The implications of these results are discussed and recommendations for future research are provided.

This study examined a sentence-initial one-second sound prolongation as a possible fluency-inducing condition in people who stutter. The effects of this prolongation technique on the single sentence utterances of five people who stutter (PWS) and five age- and gender-matched controls were investigated. Variables tested included stuttering percentages, speaking rate, duration of phonated intervals, and correlation between upper lip and lower lip/jaw. Results showed a non-significant trend for less stuttering to occur when participants used the prolongation technique. Significant findings included longer durations of phonated intervals and more negatively correlated upper- and lower-lip movements during the prolongation condition. Rate of speech was not affected. These findings suggest that the prolongation technique caused measurable changes in speech motor control, possibly leading to greater fluency for PWS.

This study evaluated the possible influence of linguistic demands on speech motor control by measuring articulatory movement stability during conditions of increasing grammatical complexity. There were 60 participants in three age groups: 20-30 years, 40-50 years, and 60-70 years, with equal numbers of men and women in each group. These speakers produced 10 repetitions of five different sentence or phrase conditions. These five conditions included two baseline measurements and three sentences of varying complexity. Each complexity condition had an MLU count of 23, word length of 17, syllable length of 25, and contained the phrase open boxes of pompoms. Complexity was measured by node-count and grammatical structure. Lower lip movements during production of the target phrase were used to compute the spatiotemporal index (STI), a measure of lip movement stability over 10 repetitions. It was predicted that STI would be lower (indicating greater stability) in the baseline and low complexity conditions. Comparison of complexity conditions against the baseline-counting condition demonstrated significant differences in the upper lip's STI, displacement, and velocity, as well as in vocal intensity. Speech motor differences between the grammatical complexity levels were minimal and could be attributed to several factors, such as speaking rate or semantic differences. An unexpected finding of this study was the influence of age on speech production. Participants from the 60 year-old group had significantly longer utterance duration, while those from the 20 year-old group had the highest lower lip and jaw STI values. These findings suggest that speech motor control matures even beyond young adulthood and that linguistic complexity does not appear to have a consistent effect on speech movement variables.

Relative clauses are grammatical constructions that are of relevance in both typical and impaired language development. Thus, the accurate identification of these structures in child language samples is clinically important. In recent years, computer software has been used to assist in the automated analysis of clinical language samples. However, this software has had only limited success when attempting to identify relative clauses. The present study explores the development and clinical importance of relative clauses and investigates the accuracy of the software used for automated identification of these structures. Two separate collections of language samples were used. The first collection included 10 children with language impairment, ranging in age from 7;6 to 11;1 (years;months), 10 age-matched peers, and 10 language-matched peers. A second collection contained 30 children considered to have typical speech and language skills and who ranged in age from 2;6 to 7;11. Language samples were manually coded for the presence of relative clauses (including those containing a relative pronoun, those without a relative pronoun and reduced relative clauses). These samples were then tagged using computer software and finally tabulated and compared for accuracy. ANACOVA revealed a significant difference in the frequency of relative clauses containing a relative pronoun but not for those without a relative pronoun nor for reduce relative clauses. None of the structures were significantly correlated with age; however, frequencies of both relative clauses with and without relative pronouns were correlated with mean length of utterance. Kappa levels revealed that agreement between manual and automated coding was relatively high for each relative clause type and highest for relative clauses containing relative pronouns.

This study examined the effects of low dose exposure to a humanoid robot on the social engagement skills of four children with autism during select activities with a familiar adult. Participants included two males and two females who ranged in age from four to nine at the commencement of the study. The current study was part of a larger investigation focused on the effect of exposure to a robot on social engagement with a variety of social partners and situations. Children participated in variable multiple baseline sessions followed by a varied number of sessions of traditional treatment. After traditional treatment, the children participated in 40 minutes of traditional intervention paired with 10 minutes of exposure to a robot designed to elicit social communication skills. The final sessions consisted of follow up assessments. Pre- and posttreatment data were compared and analyzed. Results showed variable performance for each of the participants. Findings and areas of future research are discussed.

Advances in instrumentation and computer technology such as electropalatography (EPG) have offered additional types of feedback to more traditional therapy for individuals with speech disorders, specifically those with hearing impairment. The purpose of this study was to document whether therapeutic integration of EPG visual feedback in combination with traditional articulation therapy for a school-aged child with an articulation disorder secondary to hearing impairment was more effective than traditional therapy alone. One participant received five sessions of each therapy approach. Six adult listeners rated the quality of the participant's production of /r/ in words recorded during the therapy sessions. The EPG plus a traditional approach to therapy was more effective in treating the misarticulation of /r/ than traditional therapy alone. The integration of EPG therapy into traditional methods was an effective way of treating an articulation disorder for an individual with hearing impairment.