Natural Phonology and Speech Sound Disorders

History of Speech Sound Disorders

• 1882-Early descriptions of 'Speech Defects'
• Early 1900s: Speech Correctionist as a title
• 1910: Organized efforts to help children with speech in schools
• 1936: Establishment of the Journal of Speech Disorders
• 1939: Publication of Van Riper's text on speech correction
• 1960s: Debate on whether language should be part of SLP scope
• 1970s-80s: Laws mandating services for 0-5-year-olds, research to support treatment, describing "normal" speech, and disorders vs differences.

Changing Terminology

• Prior to 1970s, articulation disorders were common
• 1970s-1980s: emergence of phonological disorders, terms used interchangeably with some distinctions
• Around 2005: Speech Sound Disorders (SSDs) as an umbrella term
• Articulation Disorders (SSDs): difficulties with the motoric/phonetic production of individual speech sounds
• Phonological Disorders (SSDs): rule-based errors in speech sound production.

Articulation disorders

• Clinicians take a practical approach to diagnose articulation disorders.
• The child makes speech sound errors that are not rule-based.

Phonological disorders

• Multiple speech sound error patterns persist beyond a certain age.
• Significantly impairs speech intelligibility due to underlying phonological representation or knowledge issues.
• Not due to a pure production problem (phonetic)
• Often associated with language disorders (LDs) in 45% to 66% of children.

Importance of Speech Sound Disorders (SSDs)

• Common childhood communication problem
• 90% of SLPs in schools work with children with SSDs
• 56% of a school-based SLP's caseload involves SSDs
• SSDs pose literacy skill risks (reading, writing)

Prevalence of SSDs

• An estimated 75% of children with communication disorders have an SSD
• 15% of 3-year-olds have SSDs
• 11% of 4-year-olds have SSDs
• 75% may achieve normal speech production by age 6 with or without treatment
• Prevalence drops to 3.8% by age 6.

Evidence-based practice

• Conscientious, explicit, and judicious integration of:
• Best available external evidence from scientific studies
• Best available evidence internal to clinical practice (clinical judgment)
• Preferences of the fully informed patient or parent

Communication, Speech, and Phonetics

• Communication: the act of sending and receiving information
• Speech: the organized system of sounds used to convey meaning
• Phonetics: the physical characteristics of speech sounds produced by a speaker.

Articulatory Phonetics

• Focus: how speech sounds are produced using articulators.

Acoustic Phonetics

• Study of speech sound transmission through the air as sound waves.

Two Perspectives of Speech Sounds

• Motor Production
• Units that facilitate the meaning of language

Phoneme, Allophones, Morphemes

• Family of allophones: the minimal set of sounds needed to specify meaningful units
• Allophones: variations of a phoneme that doesn't signal a change in meaning
• Morphemes: sounds or words that produce a meaningful difference

Phonetic Transcription

• IPA: represents phonemes better than traditional alphabets.
• SLPs use IPA to transcribe speech samples.

Speech Sound Inventory

• Phonemic contrasts create distinct meaning
• Each language has a sound inventory of around 100 phonemes

Anatomy of the Speech Mechanism

• Respiration, Phonation, Resonation, Articulation, Hearing- feedback
• Neural mechanism for speech

Phoneme Classification

• Two major categories: consonants and vowels
• Vowels are produced with an open vocal tract
• Consonants are consonant sounds produced in side-by-side combination

Vowels and Diphthongs

• Sounds from vibrating vocal folds
• Vowels: 14 in American English
• 6 Diphthongs in American English

Vowel Production and Traditional Phonetic Descriptions

• Categorization focuses on tongue position, lip shape, and muscle tension

Distinctive Features (Binary features)

• Describing phonemes in all languages.
• Presence or absence of closure and location.
• 24 consonant sounds in American English.
• Includes allophones (variations) of consonants

Manner, Place and Voicing

• Manner of articulation: how the airstream is modified to create sounds
• Place of articulation: location of constriction in the vocal tract
• Voicing: presence of vocal fold vibrations (voiced vs. unvoiced sounds)

Consonants, Vowels, and Syllables

• Consonants can be initial, medial, or final
• Syllables comprise vowels (carriers) and consonants (attachments)
• Onsets (beginning), nucleus (core), and coda (end) compose a syllable.

Suprasegmentals or Prosodic Features

• Degree of emphasis or importance given to part of an utterance (stress)
• Melody of speech-changes in vocal pitch (intonation)
• Sound intensity (loudness), average pitch (pitch level)
• Vocal punctuations (junction), and words per second (speaking rate)

Coarticulation and Anticipatory/Retentive influences

• Sound production affected by preceding and following sounds.
• Anticipatory: sound influenced by the anticipated next sound.
• Retentive: sound influenced by the preceding sound.

Acoustic Characteristics

• Frequency, amplitude, and duration of sound waves

Chapter 3 - Speech Sound Acquisition

• Typical sound acquisition, referral, assessment, and diagnosis
• Traditional, complexity, and intervention approaches

Speech Acquisition Theories

• Behaviorist (B.F. Skinner)
• Lingustic/psycholingustic models (Noam Chomsky): Generative phonology, phonological rules
• Natural Phonology (phonological processes) (e.g., frameworks to analyze the developmental errors children make.

2 Main Tiers for Speech

• Prosodic tier (word, foot, syllable, onset-rime, skeletal segmental tiers).
• Segmental tier (speech sounds, and their features).

Optimality Theory (constraints)

• Constraints, Universal, Markedness, Faithfulness.

5 Stages of Speech Development

• Children's use of adult-like forms and decrease use of constraints with increasing experience.

Visual Speech Perception

• Visual perception plays a critical role in infants language learning

Phase 1: Foundations and Vocal Development

• Typology 1 (Stark): Reflexive (0-2 mo), Control of Phonation, Expansion (3-8 mo), Basic Canonical Syllables (5-10 mo), Advanced forms (9-18 mo)
• Typology 2 (Oller): Non-speech-like vocalizations, vegetative and fixed vocal signal; speech-like vocalizations (protophones), Quasi-vowel, Primitive articulation stage (2-3 mo), Expansion stage (3-6 mo), Basic canonical syllable (5-10 mo), Advanced forms (9-18 mo), and Canonical Babbling (6+ months).

Phase 1: Babbling and Speech

• Babbling patterns, differences between typically-developing children (TD) and children with hearing loss.
• Late onset of canonical babbling as a possible predictor of later speech disorders

Phase 2: First 50 words

• Consonant inventory in first words
• Systematic and stable word-oriented learning with consistent pronunciation

Phase 2: First Words - Phonology & Vocabulary Relationship

• Phonological knowledge reflected in the acquisition of vocabulary.
• Inventory constraints: sounds produced by the child.
• Positional constraints: sounds in different syllable positions.
• Sequence constraints: restrictions on sound co-occurrences

Phase 3: Growth of Inventory

• Speech acquisition through data collection: (Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies)
• Intelligibility comparison: child's speech compared to adult speech.
• Phonetic inventory, syllable structures, and abilities.

Phase 4: Mastery of Speech & Literacy

• Phonological awareness (manipulating sounds within a language for reading development).
• Components: phonemic, onset-rime, syllable, assessment by detection, deletion, segmenting, and blending.

Phonological awareness acquisition Stages (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Carroll et al., 2003)

• Awareness of syllables, words, onsets and rimes, phonemes.

Factors Influencing Typical Acquisition of Speech

• Includes gender, SES.

Conclusion

• Theories guide understanding of speech acquisition, data collection methods (cross-sectional and longitudinal studies), speech development, vocabulary development, and links to phonological awareness. Also, human interaction vs screens for infant learning.

This quiz explores key concepts in natural phonology, including markedness constraints in Optimality Theory, phonological processes, and the role of diary studies in speech and language development. Additionally, it touches on historical milestones and practices in the field of speech sound disorders. Test your knowledge on the intersection of phonology and speech therapy.