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The purpose of this study was to measure the speech perception of children with speech sound disorders and compare it to that of adults and typically developing children. A secondary purpose was to determine if an adaptive-tracking tool, the Wide Range Acoustic Accuracy Scale (WRAAS) equalized task demands across participants independent of perceptual ability. The participants included 31 adults, 15 typically developing children, and 15 children with speech sound disorders. Children with speech sound disorders all had difficulty producing /r/ correctly. Each participant completed perceptual testing discriminating differences in three syllable contrast pairs: /bɑ/-/wɑ/, /dɑ/-/gɑ/, and /rɑ/-/wɑ/. Results indicated that children with speech sound disorders had significantly poorer perception than the adults for /bɑ/-/wɑ/ and /dɑ/-/gɑ/ and significantly poorer perception than their typically developing peers for the /rɑ/-/wɑ/ contrast. Adults and typically developing children did not differ in their perception of any contrast. Results also indicated that WRAAS equalized the number of trials across all participants irrespective of perceptual ability. We discuss clinical implications of these results and how WRAAS may be used in future research and in clinical work to efficiently and effectively determine perceptual abilities of children with speech sound disorders.

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Impairment caused by non-fluent aphasia often results in the omission and substitution of inflectional markers. Cross-linguistic work has revealed differential patterns of aphasic impairment across languages. This study aims to determine how non-fluent aphasia is manifested in English-based Caribbean creole languages, namely Jamaican Creole English (JCE) and Guyanese Creole (GC). The use of inflectional morphology is variable in English-based Caribbean creole languages. Therefore, in aphasic creole speech, it is difficult to ascertain the status of a grammatical omission as a valid creole feature or as a sign of impairment. I argue that Seymour’s et al. (1998) contrastive-noncontrastive schema can be useful for differentiating between normal and disordered creole features. The data in this study was obtained from a creole speaker with aphasic impairments. The data was later transcribed and analyzed. The results of this study appear to suggest that grammatical markers may form a hierarchy of susceptibility to aphasic impairment. Tense, agreement and aspectual markers along with auxiliaries and copulas appear to be more susceptible to impairment in disordered creole speech than plural markers, personal and demonstrative pronouns and articles. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Non-fluent aphasia is a language disorder caused by stroke and other types of severe brain trauma. This disorder can affect an individual's ability to produce grammatical words and suffixes in different ways depending on the language that they speak. This study seeks to determine how non-fluent aphasia affects English-based Caribbean creole languages, namely Jamaican Creole English (JCE) and Guyanese Creole (GC). Grammatical suffixes are optional in English-based Caribbean creole languages; therefore, it is difficult to determine whether or not an omitted grammatical suffix is a valid creole feature or a sign of impairment. I argue that Seymour’s et al. (1998) contrastive-noncontrastive schema can be useful for differentiating between normal and disordered creole features. The data in this study was obtained from a creole speaker with aphasic impairments. The data was later transcribed and analyzed. The results of this study appear to suggest that certain grammatical markers are more prone error than others in aphasic creole speech. Markers that carry tense, agreement and aspectual information along with auxiliaries and copulas appear to be more susceptible to impairment than plural markers, personal and demonstrative pronouns and articles.

The thesis is an account of a lecture series to help parents alleviate and prevent speech problems through a mental hygiene approach to normal speech development.