Levels of complexity in phonological disorders: evidence from Cantonese

Longitudinal data from ten phonologically disordered Cantonese-speaking boys were analysed for distinctive features (manner and place). The children labelled 95 pictures, attempting each initial Cantonese segment at least five times. The applicability of Dinnsen et al.'s implicational hierarchy to this data was examined. Categorization of each child's system according to an implicational hierarchy was successful for nine of the ten children when phonetic inventories were considered. In addition, a phonemic inventory based on Dinnsen et al.'s phonetic inventory captured the system of phonological contrasts used by eight of the ten children. The patterns of the children who did not match the hierarchy were considered deviant rather than delayed. The ability of the hierarchy to predict the route of development in this group of children was also examined. The hierarchies (both phonetic and phonemic) successfully predicted the route of change in these cases. Implications for the use of an implicational hierarchy in phonological assessment and treatment are discussed. Further research on feature-based phonological development, in both typically-developing and disordered phonological systems is required.     

Feature development in Cantonese

The phonetic inventories of 122 typically developing Cantonese-speaking children, aged from 0;10 to 4;7, were examined in terms of feature distinctions. The applicability of Dinnsen. Chin, Elbert and Powell's implicational feature hierarchy to these data was investigated. Results show that modifications to the hierarchy are necessary for the Cantonese phonetic system. A revised hierarchy for Cantonese is proposed. Differences between this proposal and the original work are discussed. The implicational nature of the proposed hierarchy was also tested on longitudinal data from ten children (aged from 0;10 to 3;5 at the beginning of the study) over a 1 year period. The proposed hierarchy successfully predicted the route of sound change of these inventories. Implications for further research on feature development are discussed.     

The interface between phonetic and lexical abilities in early Cantonese language development

Data from the Cantonese Communicative Development Inventory (CCDI) is used to review the phonological preferences of younger (16–22 months) and older (23–30 month) groups of children in the lexical items they are reported to be able to say. Analogous results to those found for English emerge from the Cantonese data: the younger group display selectivity in the initial consonants of words they say, and their preferences accord with developmental tendencies in Cantonese phonology. From children whose scores fell below the tenth percentile of the CCDI, a subset were followed up 1 year later and their linguistic progress evaluated. Only a proportion of these children were below still below the tenth percentile for vocabulary at follow‐up. Their lexical immaturities were accompanied by limited phonetic abilities. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Lexical tone and stuttering in Cantonese

Cantonese is a tone language, in which the variation of the fundamental frequency contour of a syllable can change meaning. There are six different lexical tones in Cantonese. While research with Western languages has shown an association between stuttering and syllabic stress, nothing is known about whether stuttering in Cantonese speakers is associated with one or more of the six lexical tones. Such an association has been reported in conversational speech in Mandarin, which is also a tone language, but which varies markedly from Cantonese. Twenty-four native Cantonese-speaking adults who stutter participated in this study, ranging in age from 18–33 years. There were 18 men and 6 women. Participants read aloud 13 Cantonese syllables, each of which was produced with six contrastive lexical tones. All 78 syllables were embedded in the same carrier sentence, to reduce the influence of suprasegmental or linguistic stress, and were presented in random order. No significant differences were found for stuttering moments across the six lexical tones. It is suggested that this is because lexical tones, at least in Cantonese, do not place the task demands on the speech motor system that typify varying syllabic stress in Western languages: variations not only in fundamental frequency, but also in duration and intensity. The findings of this study suggest that treatments for adults who stutter in Western languages, such as speech restructuring, can be used with Cantonese speakers without undue attention to lexical tone.     

Speech errors in Cantonese speaking adults with cerebral palsy

The aim of this study was to characterize the speech errors made by Cantonese-speaking adults with dysarthria associated with cerebral palsy, using a perceptual-phonetic analysis. The subjects were 22 adult Cantonese speakers with cerebral palsy. Fifteen subjects had spastic-type cerebral palsy, five had athetoid-type and two mixed-type. Single words were transcribed phonetically and analysed by speech part for accuracy and error patterns. There were no significant differences in accuracy for type of cerebral palsy, gender or age. Speakers with athetosis had a significantly higher relative occurrence of diphthong reduction. The majority of error patterns could be explained by the neurological damage of cerebral palsy. However, several patterns were attributed to unique features of the Cantonese phonological system. Physiological explanations and language-specific contributions to speech disorder in this group of speakers were discussed.     

Perceptual characteristics of Cantonese hypokinetic dysarthria

The aims of this study were to provide a perceptual speech ‘profile’ for Cantonese speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria, to examine the reliability of non‐expert listeners in perceptual judgements of dysarthric speech, and to investigate cross‐language differences in profiles of hypokinetic dysarthria. Participants included 19 speakers with Parkinson's disease and 10 speech‐language pathologists who served as listeners. Listeners rated 21 speech dimensions, using seven‐point interval scales. Mean intralistener agreement was 94.52% and mean interlistener reliability was 0.88 (Cronbach's alpha). Mean scale values (MSV) for each dimension ranged from 3.37 to 1.36. The perceptual profile of Cantonese hypokinetic dysarthria was largely similar to profiles for English and Japanese speakers; notable differences are discussed. Possible reasons for the relatively high reliability obtained are presented.     

The impact of extrinsic demographic factors on Cantonese speech acquisition

This study modeled the associations between extrinsic demographic factors and children's speech acquisition in Hong Kong Cantonese. The speech of 937 Cantonese-speaking children aged 2;4 to 6;7 in Hong Kong was assessed using a standardized speech test. Demographic information regarding household income, paternal education, maternal education, presence of siblings and having a domestic helper as the main caregiver was collected via parent questionnaires. After controlling for age and sex, higher maternal education and higher household income were significantly associated with better speech skills; however, these variables explained a negligible amount of variance. Paternal education, number of siblings and having a foreign domestic helper did not associate with a child's speech acquisition. Extrinsic factors only exerted minimal influence on children's speech acquisition. A large amount of unexplained variance in speech ability still warrants further research.     

Use of co-verbal gestures during word-finding difficulty among Cantonese speakers with fluent aphasia and unimpaired controls

Background: Co-verbal gestures refer to hand or arm movements made during speaking. Spoken language and gestures have been shown to be tightly integrated in human communication.

Aims: The present study investigated whether co-verbal gesture use was associated with lexical retrieval in connected speech in unimpaired speakers and persons with aphasia (PWA).

Methods & Procedures: Narrative samples of 58 fluent PWA and 58 control speakers were extracted from Cantonese AphasiaBank. Based on the indicators of word-finding difficulty (WFD) in connected speech adapted from previous research and a gesture annotation system with independent coding of gesture forms and functions, all WFD instances were identified. The presence and type of gestures accompanying each incident of WFD were then annotated. Finally, whether the use of gesture was accompanied by resolution of WFD (i.e., the corresponding target word could be retrieved) was examined.

Outcomes & Results: Employment of co-verbal gesture did not seem to be related to the success of word retrieval. PWA’s naming ability at single-word level and their overall language ability (as reflected by the aphasia quotient of the Cantonese version of the Western Aphasia Battery) were found to be the two strongest predictors of success rate of resolving WFD.

Conclusions: The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis highlighting the facilitative functions of iconic and metaphoric gestures in lexical retrieval was not supported. Challenges in conducting research related to WFD, and the clinical implications in gesture-based language intervention for PWA were discussed.     

Vowel and diphthong development in Cantonese-speaking children

Spontaneous speech samples were collected from 40 Cantonese-speaking children aged between 10 and 27 months. Over 7, 000 vowels and diphthongs were transcribed and analysed to determine the accuracy of production of Cantonese vowels and diphthongs. A model of feature complexity was derived from the distinctive features of vowels to predict the route of development of vowels and diphthongs. Two factors were found to affect development: a linguistic factor (frequency of occurrence in the ambient language) and an articulatory factor (feature complexity). Early dependence on the feature complexity of segments at 15-18 months is superseded by ambient language influences by 24 months of age.     

Imitation of intonation contours by children with normal and disordered language development

This study investigated the relation between intonation and segmental phonology in children with developmental language impairment (LI). Eleven 4-year-olds with LI and 11 age-matched children with normal language development imitated sentences that were modelled with different nuclear tones. Instrumental analysis indicated that the children imitated falling tones more accurately than rising tones, but there were no group differences. Although the children with LI had age-appropriate intonation skills, they all demonstrated mild to moderate impairments in segmental phonology. This dissociation pattern was confirmed by correlation analyses, which indicated that the severity of a child's articulation disorder predicted how well he or she produced segmental contrastsA but not prosodic contrasts. The findings are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that prosody pertains to a different 'tier' of the grammar than other phonological systems, and that the speech of children with LI may reflect asymmetrical degrees of impairment across prosodic and non-prosodic tiers.     

The interface between phonetic and lexical abilities in early Cantonese language development

Data from the Cantonese Communicative Development Inventory (CCDI) is used to review the phonological preferences of younger (16-22 months) and older (23-30 month) groups of children in the lexical items they are reported to be able to say. Analogous results to those found for English emerge from the Cantonese data: the younger group display selectivity in the initial consonants of words they say, and their preferences accord with developmental tendencies in Cantonese phonology. From children whose scores fell below the tenth percentile of the CCDI, a subset were followed up 1 year later and their linguistic progress evaluated. Only a proportion of these children were below still below the tenth percentile for vocabulary at follow-up. Their lexical immaturities were accompanied by limited phonetic abilities. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Understanding the role of the prefrontal cortex in phonological processing

Lesion studies have demonstrated impairments of specific types of phonological processes. However, results from neuropsychological studies of speech sound processing have been inconclusive as to the role of specific brain regions because of a lack of a one‐to‐one correspondence between behavioural patterns and lesion location. Functional neuroimaging studies have contributed more detailed information about the involvement of specific brain regions in a wide range of phonological tasks. A framework developed by Hickok and Poeppel to account for these neuropsychological and neuroimaging results is evaluated in light of a series of phonological studies in which cognitive load is manipulated by changing the acoustic properties and lexical status of stimuli, as well as the type of phonological judgement. Overall, the findings for speech stimuli are consistent with the view that tasks that require increased articulatory recoding result in increased activation of the posterior aspect of the inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44). However, similar activation patterns for tone sequences as compared to speech may challenge whether the recoding is speech‐specific. Implications of these investigations for future neuroimaging studies of individuals with aphasia are discussed.     

Threat-detection in child development: An evolutionary perspective

Evidence for developmental aspects of fear-targets and anxiety suggests a complex but stable pattern whereby specific kinds of fears emerge at different periods of development. This developmental schedule seems appropriate to dangers encountered repeatedly during human evolution. Also consistent with evolutionary perspective, the threat-detection systems are domain-specific, comprising different kinds of cues to do with predation, intraspecific violence, contamination-contagion and status loss. Proper evolutionary models may also be relevant to outstanding issues in the domain, notably the connections between typical development and pathology.     

List intonation in pre-schoolers with normal and disordered language development

The principal aim of this study was to evaluate pre-schoolers’ expressive intonation in light of current debates about the underlying nature of language impairment (LI). Children with LI typically have deficits in grammar, a component of language that is phonologically represented on the segmental level. The hypothesis is that children with LI do not have deficits of this type when grammar is conveyed by intonation, a pitch-based component of language that is phonologically represented on the suprasegmental level. This study focused on the richly diversified suprasegmental patterns of sentences in which the speaker produces a series of items in a list. To address the hypothesis, list intonation in the speech of 4-year-olds with and without LI was acoustically analysed. Lists produced by children with LI were comparable to those produced by children with normal language development (NL). The results do not support the claim that LI stems from a poor understanding of grammatical principles. Rather, LI reflects an underlying impairment of segmental information processing. The discussion focuses on two characteristics of pitch contours which may account for the resilience of intonation in children with LI. Namely, steady state versus transient signals and universal symbol meanings versus arbitrary relationships between form and function.     

Nutritional and immunological factors in breast milk: A role in the intergenerational transmission from maternal psychopathology to child development

Perinatal psychopathologies affect more than 25% of women during and after their gestational period. These psychiatric disorders can potentially determine important biological variations in their organisms, affecting many different physiological and metabolic pathways. Of relevance, any of these changes occurring in the mother can alter the normal composition of breast milk, particularly the concentration of nutritional and inflammatory components, which play a role in child brain functioning and development. Indeed, there is evidence showing that changes in milk composition can contribute to cognitive impairments and alterations in mental abilities in children. This review aims to shed light on the unique intergenerational role played by breast milk composition, from maternal psychopathologies to child development.     

What Complexity Differences Reveal About Domains in Language*

An important distinction between phonology and syntax has been overlooked. All phonological patterns belong to the regular region of the Chomsky Hierarchy, but not all syntactic patterns do. We argue that the hypothesis that humans employ distinct learning mechanisms for phonology and syntax currently offers the best explanation for this difference.     

Lesion-site affects grammatical gender assignment in German: perception and production data

Two experiments investigated phonological, derivational-morphological and semantic aspects of grammatical gender assignment in a perception and a production task in German aphasic patients and age-matched controls. The agreement of a gender indicating adjective (feminine, masculine or neuter) and a noun was evaluated during perception in Experiment 1 (grammaticality judgment). In Experiment 2 the same participants had to produce the matching definite article to a noun. In the perception task patients with left frontal lesions (LF) made more errors during phonological gender assignment as compared to derivational-morphological and semantic gender assignment, while patients with lesions of the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) made more errors in derivational-morphological gender assignment as compared to phonological and semantic gender assignment. In the production task no differences between patient groups were found. These data support previous evidence that left frontal brain areas are critically involved in phonological processing. The pSTG on the other hand may be critically engaged in the integration of phonological and lexical information essential for phonological and derivational-morphological gender assignment.     

Do children still pick and choose? The relationship between phonological knowledge and lexical acquisition beyond 50 words

Previous studies document an influence of phonological knowledge on word learning that differs across development. Specifically, children with expressive lexicons of fewer than 50 words learn words composed of IN sounds more rapidly than those composed of OUT sounds. In contrast, preschool children with larger expressive lexicons show the reverse effect. The goal of the current study was to provide a re‐analysis of existing data to determine if this discrepancy across studies may be related to how phonological knowledge has been defined. This study defines knowledge on a continuum from most to more to less. Results showed a continuous inverse relationship between phonological knowledge and word learning by preschool children. Specifically, most phonological knowledge was associated with poorest word learning, more knowledge with intermediate word learning, and less knowledge with best word learning. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Learning to read new words in individuals with Down syndrome: Testing the role of phonological knowledge

This study examined the effect of word level phonological knowledge on learning to read new words in Down syndrome compared to typical development. Children were taught to read 12 nonwords, 6 of which were pre-trained on their phonology. The 16 individuals with Down syndrome aged 8–17 years were compared first to a group of 30 typically developing children aged 5–7 years matched for word reading and then to a subgroup of these children matched for decoding. There was a marginally significant effect for individuals with Down syndrome to benefit more from phonological pre-training than typically developing children matched for word reading but when compared to the decoding-matched subgroup, the two groups benefitted equally. We explain these findings in terms of partial decoding attempts being resolved by word level phonological knowledge and conclude that being familiar with the spoken form of a new word may help children when they attempt to read it. This may be particularly important for children with Down syndrome and other groups of children with weak decoding skills.