Speech perception in phonological impairment
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Assessing speech and non-speech auditory perception in children with phonological impairments
IRAS ID
304846
Contact name
Matthew H Davis
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Cambridge
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Children with language disorders often exhibit phonological dysfunction - problems with learning about and manipulating the sounds in spoken words. Some theories attribute this to problems with lower-level auditory or speech perception. These ‘perceptual deficit’ accounts have been supported by evidence that children with dyslexia and DLD (Developmental Language Disorder) perform poorly on categorical speech-sound discrimination tasks. However, traditional speech perception tasks rely on both perceptual and non-perceptual skills, as they typically involve massed repetition of a small number of synthetic speech sounds from a limited set of synthetic stimuli. Poor task performance could thus be due to a failure of non-linguistic cognitive skills (e.g. attention, perceptual learning or anchoring), rather than more general deficits in speech-sound perception.
We have recently developed an adaptive perceptual task using audio-morphed speech (“Listen-Up”) to measure speech perception abilities. This task avoids stimulus repetition, uses a simple ‘who said it right’ task which minimizes non-linguistic demands and engages natural listening processes. The Listen-Up task uses highly varied, child-friendly stimuli to ensure continued attention and engagement and assess perception of a broad range of speech contrasts. This test has previously been used to estimate perceptual acuity for speech sounds for typical children and adults.
We will use the Listen-Up test to evaluate whether individual differences in perceptual acuity for speech predicts performance in a developmental sample that includes phonologically impaired individuals. We will also measure spectro-temporal modulation perception, which will provide a non-linguistic measure of auditory processes relevant for speech perception. Finally, we will use standardized measures of expressive vocabulary and sentence repetition that provide commonly-used diagnostic markers of DLD. We will combine data from these perceptual tasks with existing assessments of language, attention, episodic memory and non-verbal IQ, as collected by the Centre for Attention Learning and Memory study [REC Reference 13/EE/0157].
REC name
East of England - Cambridge South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/EE/0268
Date of REC Opinion
5 Feb 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion