Speech and Hearing Science Commons^™

Infants’ Discrimination Of Consonant Contrasts In The Presence And Absence Of Talker Variability, Carolyn Quam, Lauren Clough, Sara Knight, Louann Gerken

Speech and Hearing Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

To learn speech‐sound categories, infants must identify the acoustic dimensions that differentiate categories and selectively attend to them as opposed to irrelevant dimensions. Variability on irrelevant acoustic dimensions can aid formation of robust categories in infants through adults in tasks such as word learning (e.g., Rost and McMurray, 2009) or speech‐sound learning (e.g., Lively et al., 1993). At the same time, variability sometimes overwhelms learners, interfering with learning and processing. Two prior studies (Kuhl & Miller, 1982; Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullennix, 1992) found that irrelevant variability sometimes impaired early sound discrimination. We asked whether variability would impair or facilitate discrimination …

Sound Discrimination And Explicit Mapping Of Sounds To Meanings In Preschoolers With And Without Developmental Language Disorder, Carolyn Quam, Holly Cardinal, Celeste Gallegos, Todd Bodner

Speech and Hearing Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose: To investigate links between sound discrimination and explicit sound-meaning mapping by preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder (DLD).

Method: We tested 26 children with DLD and 26 age- and gender-matched peers with typical language development (TLD). Inclusion was determined via results of standardised assessments of language and cognitive skills and a hearing screening. Children completed two computerised tasks designed to assess pitch and duration discrimination and explicit mapping of pitch- and duration-contrasting sounds to objects.

Result: Children with TLD more successfully mapped pitch categories to meanings than children with DLD. Children with TLD also showed significantly better overall …