Claire Timmins

Relationship between speech, oromotor, language and cognitive abilities in children with Down's syndrome

BACKGROUND Children and young people with Downs syndrome present with deficits in expressive speech and language, accompanied by strengths in vocabulary comprehension compared with non-verbal mental age. Intelligibility is particularly low, but whether speech is delayed or disordered is a controversial topic. Most studies suggest a delay, but no studies explore the relationship between cognitive or language skills and intelligibility. AIMS This study sought to determine whether severity of speech disorder correlates with language and cognitive level and to classify the types of errors, developmental or non-developmental, that occur in the speech of children and adolescents with Downs syndrome. METHODS & PROCEDURES Fifteen children and adolescents with Downs syndrome (aged 9-18 years) were recruited. Participants completed a battery of standardized speech, language and cognitive assessments. The phonology assessment was subject to phonological and phonetic analyses. Results from each test were correlated to determine relationships. OUTCOME & RESULTS Individuals with Downs syndrome present with deficits in receptive and expressive language that are not wholly accounted for by their cognitive delay. Receptive vocabulary is a strength in comparison with expressive and receptive language skills, but it was unclear from the findings whether it is more advanced compared with non-verbal cognitive skills. The majority of speech errors were developmental in nature, but all of the children with Downs syndrome showed at least one atypical or non-developmental speech error. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Children with Downs syndrome present with speech disorders characterized by atypical, and often unusual, errors alongside many developmental errors. A lack of correlation between speech and cognition or language measures suggests that the speech disorder in Downs syndrome is not simply due to cognitive delay. Better differential diagnosis of speech disorders in Downs syndrome is required, allowing interventions to target the specific disorder in each individual.

Electropalatographic therapy for children and young people with Down's syndrome

Articulation disorders in Downs syndrome (DS) are prevalent and often intractable. Individuals with DS generally prefer visual to auditory methods of learning and may therefore find it beneficial to be given a visual model during speech intervention, such as that provided by electropalatography (EPG). In this study, participants with Downs syndrome, aged 10:1 to 18:9, received 24 individualized therapy sessions using EPG. Simultaneous acoustic and EPG recordings were made pre- and post-intervention during 10 repetitions of a word list containing lingua-palatal consonants. Participants also completed the DEAP phonology sub-test at both time points. Post-treatment, all participants showed qualitative and quantifiable differences in EPG patterns and improvements in DEAP percentage consonants correct. EPG assessment and therapy appears a positive approach for identifying and improving articulatory patterns in children with DS.

The use of electropalatography (EPG) in the assessment and treatment of motor speech disorders in children with Down's syndrome: Evidence from two case studies

Background: Many children experience significant difficulties in developing key aspects of speech. For some, these communication difficulties are compounded by co-occurring intellectual disabilities. Method: This paper presents two case studies from a larger on-going longitudinal study of the effectiveness of using electropalatography (EPG) to address the intelligibility problems experienced by many children and young people with Downs syndrome (DS). EPG, an innovative computer-based tool for assessing and treating speech motor difficulties, enables the speaker to ‘see’ the placement of his or her tongue during speech and to attempt to correct any lingual palatal errors. Results: This visual supplementation of auditory feedback offers potential therapeutic benefits for children with intellectual disabilities, many of whom show relative strengths in visual vs. auditory and simultaneous vs. sequential processing. EPG also provides therapists with an objective measure of articulatory ability. Conclusions: Findings from these two case studies demonstrate the potential utility of EPG in both the assessment and treatment of speech motor disorders in DS.

An EPG analysis of /t/ in young people with Down's syndrome

Many studies have pointed to impaired speech intelligibility in young people with Down’s syndrome (DS). Some have attributed these problems to delayed phonological development, while others have identified disordered speech patterns, which could be related to a dyspraxic element in their speech. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to examine the speech of 25 young people with DS, focusing on their production of the obstruent /t/. For the EPG analysis, participants produced the target obstruent in the word ‘toe’, repeated 10 times. An investigative analysis was carried out. A new descriptive taxonomy of EPG error patterns was developed and these errors were related to perceptually based transcriptions. The measures are discussed in relation to current knowledge of the anatomical and physiological characteristics of DS.

A perceptual and electropalatographic study of /∫/ in young people with Down's syndrome

Speech production in young people with Downs syndrome has been found to be variable and inconsistent. Errors tend to be more in the production of sounds that typically develop later, for example, fricatives and affricates, rather than stops and nasals. It has been suggested that inconsistency in production is a result of a motor speech deficit. Late acquired fricatives such as /s/ and /∫/ are complex articulations, which may require more precise motor programming and may therefore show highly inconsistent productions. Other factors potentially affecting speech production in this population are abnormal palatal structure, hearing loss, and hypotonia. A group of 20 young people with Downs syndrome were recorded using Electropalatography (EPG), reading a wordlist containing the phrase ‘a sheep’. The wordlist contained seven other phrases and was repeated 10 times. Eight typically developing, cognitively matched children and eight adults were also recorded producing the same data set. Articulatory (EPG pattern analysis) and perceptual analyses of the 10 productions of /∫/ were carried out. /∫/ production was found to be inconsistent in the young people with Downs syndrome, with more errors both in the auditory analysis and articulatory analysis than in the typical sample, which may be due to a motor programming or motor control problem. There were a greater number of errors in the EPG analysis than in the perceptual analysis. This suggests that some young people with DS were able to produce perceptually acceptable /∫/ with atypical EPG patterns. The use of typical, adult-modelled /∫/ EPG patterns in therapy may be inappropriate for some children with DS who present with atypical palatal structures.

Language and the Influence of the Media: A Scottish Perspective

This chapter summarises the findings from over a decade of research on the possible influence of the broadcast media on speech which has been carried out in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow. Our focus on the media, and particularly television, as a factor (or bundle of factors) in language change, arose coincidentally from an initial variationist study into phonological variation and change in Glaswegian for the Urban Voices volume (Foulkes and Docherty 1999). The format of the Urban Voices survey required us to analyse the same ’London’ English consonant variables known to be spreading rapidly across England (e.g. Trudgill 1988) in this ‘traditional’ Scottish dialect (e.g. Wells 1982). Glaswegian vernacular continues a variety of West Central Broad Scots, with dialect mixing and levelling towards (Scottish) Standard English (Macafee 1983). It is substantially different from English English accents, phonologically and phonetically (Wells 1982; Stuart-Smith 2004). It also has well-established local non-standard variation deriving from Broad Scots. Our analysis contained some surprising discoveries, concentrated in the speech of working-class adolescents: TH-fronting, e.g. [f]ink as well as local [h]ink, DH-fronting, bro[v]er beside bro[r]er, and L-vocalisation to high back (un)rounded vowels in e.g. fill, despite the pharyngealised quality of Glasgow /l/, as more than sporadic in the speech of working-class adolescents (Stuart-Smith 1999; cf. Macafee 1983).