Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

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Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityHöraTal – a test and training program for children whohave difficulties in perceiving and producing speechAnne-Marie ÖsterSpeech, Music and Hearing, CSC, KTH, StockholmAbstractA computer-aided analytical speech perceptiontest and a helpful training program have beendeveloped. The test is analytical and seeks toevaluate the ability to perceive a range ofsound contrasts used in the Swedish language.The test is tailored for measurements with children,who have not yet learnt to read, by usingeasy speech stimuli, words selected on the basisof familiarity, and pictures that represent thetest items unambiguously. The test is intendedto be used with small children, from 4 years ofage, with difficulties to perceive and producespoken language.Especially prelingually hearing-impairedchildren show very different abilities to learnspoken language. The potential to develop intelligiblespeech is unrelated to their pure toneaudiograms. The development of this test is aneffort to find a screening tool that can predictthe ability to develop intelligible speech. Theinformation gained from this test will providesupplementary information about speech perceptionskills, auditory awareness, and the potentialfor intelligible speech and specify importantrecommendations for individualizedspeech-training programs.The intention is that this test should benormalized to various groups of children so theresult of one child could be compared to groupdata. Some preliminary results and referencedata from normal-hearing children, aged 4 to 7years, with normal speech development are reported.IntroductionThere exist several speech perception tests thatare used with prelingually and profoundly hearingimpaired children and children with specificlanguage impairment to assess theirspeech processing capabilities; the GASP test(Erber, 1982), the Merklein Test (Merklein,1981), Nelli (Holmberg and Sahlén, 2000) andthe Maltby Speech Perception Test (Maltby,2000). Results from these tests provide informationconcerning education and habilitationthat supplements the audiogram and the articulationindex, because it indicates a person’sability to perceive and to discriminate betweenspeech sounds. However, no computerized testshave so far been developed in Swedish for usewith young children who have difficulties inperceiving and producing spoken language.The development of the computer-aidedanalytical speech perception test, described inthis paper, is an effort to address the big needfor early diagnoses. It should supply informationabout speech perception skills and auditoryawareness.More important, a goal of this test is tomeasure the potential for children to produceintelligible speech given their difficulties toperceive and produce spoken language. Theexpectation is that the result of this test willgive important recommendations for individualtreatment with speech-training programs(Öster, 2006).Decisive factors for speech tests withsmall childrenThe aim of an analytical speech perception testis to investigate how sensitive a child is to thedifferences in speech patterns that are used todefine word meanings and sentence structures(Boothroyd, 1995). Consequently, it is importantto use stimuli that represent those speechfeatures that are phonologically important.Since the speech reception skills in profoundlyhearing-impaired children are quite limited, andsince small children in general have a restrictedvocabulary and reading proficiency, the selectionof the speech material was crucial. Thewords selected had to be familiar and meaningfulto the child, be represented in pictorial formand contain the phonological contrasts of interest.Thus, presenting sound contrasts as nonsensesyllables, so that the perception is not dependenton the child’s vocabulary, was not asolution. It has been shown that nonsense syllablestend to be difficult for children to respondto and that they often substitute the nearestword they know (Maltby, 2000). Other importantfactors to pay attention to were:96
Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm University• what order of difficulty of stimulus presentationis appropriate• what are familiar words for children atdifferent ages and with different hearinglosses• what is the most unambiguous way toillustrate the chosen test wordsMoreover, the task had to be meaningful, naturaland well understood by the child; otherwisehe/she will not cooperate. Finally, the test mustrapidly give a reliable result, as small childrendo not have particularly good attention and motivation.The child answers by pointing with the mouseor with his/her finger to one of the boxes on thescreen. The results are presented in percent correctresponses on each subtest showing a profileof a child’s functional hearing, see figure 2(Öster, 2008)Table 1. The eighteen subtests included in the test.Description of HöraTal-TestIn the development of this analytical speechperception test the above mentioned factorswere taken into consideration (Öster et al,2002).The words contain important phonologicalSwedish contrasts and each contrast is tested inone of eighteen different subtests by 6 wordpairs presented twice. In Table 1 a summary ofthe test shows the phonological contrasts evaluatedin each subtest, an explanation of the discriminationtask and one example from eachsubtest. The words used were recorded by onefemale speaker. An illustrated word (the target)is presented to the child on a computer screentogether with the female voice reading theword. The task of the child is to discriminatebetween two following sounds without illustrationsand to decide which one is the same as thetarget word, see figure 1.Figure 1. An example of the presentation of teststimuli on the computer screen. In this case thephonological contrast of vowels differing at lowfrequencies tested through the words båt-bot[bo:tbu׃t] (boat-remedy).Figure 2. Example of a result profile for a child.Percent correct responses are shown for each subtest.97
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Department of LinguisticsPhonetics
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