Psycholinguistic Investigations of Development and Disorders of Speech Production

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目旨在为候选人提供口语发展、儿童语音障碍和声学分析领域的额外职业发展培训，使候选人能够建立一个富有成效的研究计划，以实现以下长期目标：1)根据所涉及的各个处理阶段，提高对口语产生典型发展的了解；2)更详细地了解这些处理阶段中断可能导致的儿童语音障碍，3)弥合基础科学与临床应用之间的差距。为了实现这一目标，该项目包括职业发展活动和一项研究计划，旨在深入了解正常发育儿童以及来历不明的语音障碍儿童语音产生的表征和实时过程。一些实验将时间计量范式与语音声学分析相结合，以解决语音规划单元（例如，音素）的出现及其在语音规划过程中的部署，以及一些被认为影响这些单元出现的因素（例如，词汇量大小，语音运动技能）。我们提出的研究重点是5 - 10岁的儿童，因为我们对这个年龄段的语言发展知之甚少，尽管语言产生的发展在5岁时还没有完成，并且可能会影响读写能力的发展。这个研究项目的一个主要的长期目标是增加我们对未知来源的语音障碍的理解，特别是关于不同类型的障碍（如语音障碍和儿童言语失用症）所影响的不同规划阶段。结合计时-声学方法可以进一步描述和区分语音障碍儿童，对这些儿童在诊断和治疗方面的临床服务提供具有重要意义。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of the proposed project is to provide the candidate with additional career development training in the areas of spoken language development, speech sound disorders in children, and acoustic analysis, to enable the candidate to establish a productive research program geared towards the long-term goals of 1) advancing knowledge of typical development of spoken language production in terms of the various processing stages involved, 2) gaining a more detailed understanding of speech sound disorders in children that may result from disruptions at these processing stages, and 3) bridging the gap between basic science and clinical application. To achieve this purpose, the project includes both career development activities and a research plan designed to gain insight into the representations and real time processes involved in speech sound production in typically developing children as well as in children with speech sound disorders of unknown origin. Several experiments combine chronometric paradigms with speech acoustic analyses to address the emergence of speech planning units (e.g., phonemes) and their deployment in the speech planning process, as well as a number of factors that have been postulated to influence the emergence of these units (e.g., vocabulary size, speech motor skill). The proposed studies focus on children in the age range of 5 to 10 years old, because relatively little is known about speech development in this age range, despite the fact that development of speech production is not complete at age 5 and may affect literacy development. A major long-term goal of this research program is to increase our understanding of speech sound disorders of unknown origin, in particular with respect to the different planning stages affected in different types of disorders such as phonological disorders and childhood apraxia of speech. A combined chronometric-acoustic approach may enable a further delineation and differentiation among children with speech sound disorders, with implications for clinical service delivery for these children in terms of both diagnosis and treatment. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Children with speech sound disorders of unknown origin comprise a large part of the clinical caseload for speech-language pathologists. A complete understanding of the nature of these disorders is lacking, complicating differential diagnosis and treatment. This research will enhance our understanding of typical and atypical development of speech planning and production, with implications for diagnosis and treatment.