2009 — 2011 |
Smith, Nicholas A |
R03Activity Code Description: To provide research support specifically limited in time and amount for studies in categorical program areas. Small grants provide flexibility for initiating studies which are generally for preliminary short-term projects and are non-renewable. |
Hearing Status and Prosody in Mother-Child Speech @ Father Flanagan's Boys'Home
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The aim of this project is to examine how developmental changes in the pragmatic functions and prosody of speech directed to, and produced by, children is affected by children's hearing loss. Prosody is an important cue to the pragmatic function of speech, such as marking questions, statements, requests. Exaggerated prosody is a hallmark of mothers'speech to children. It has higher overall pitch, expanded pitch range, and uses distinctive pitch contours. These features are used to express emotion, guide infants'attention, and facilitate speech perception and language acquisition. Using an NIH-funded database of recordings of mother-child interactions between 4 and 60 months of age (R01DC006681;R01DC004300;P30DC004662), the prevalence of various pragmatic categories of utterances will be assessed to the determine the degree to which mothers speech consists of questions, statements, and other kinds of utterances. These utterances will then be analyzed acoustically to examine how mothers use prosody to express pragmatic function, and how mothers adapt their prosody to their child's age and hearing ability. A parallel acoustical analysis, will examine the pragmatic function of children's speech to their mothers, how children's use of prosody develops and how it is affected by hearing loss. Children's pragmatic and prosodic speech development depends on their early auditory and language experience, which may be limited or affected by hearing loss and their mothers'pragmatic language use. Finally, mother-child interactions will also be analyzed to assess the development of rhythmic coordination in the timing of vocalizations. Coordinated mother-child interaction is important for many developmental outcomes. Understanding how vocal interactions are affected by hearing loss may lead to improved methods of remediation. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project aims to identify how hearing loss affects the development of the pragmatic and prosodic aspects of vocal interaction between mothers and their children. Using a database of recordings from a longitudinal (4 to 60 months of age) NIH-funded study (R01DC006681;R01DC004300;P30DC04662) of mothers interacting with their normal hearing and hearing impaired children, the pragmatic function of utterances will be coded, and their use of prosody to mark pragmatic functions will be analyzed acoustically. Given previous research demonstrating the importance of quality mother-child interactions on various developmental outcomes in normal hearing children, a greater understanding of the ways in which hearing loss influences these interactions may lead to improved methods of remediation, and speech and language outcomes.
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0.912 |
2014 — 2018 |
Smith, Nicholas A |
P20Activity Code Description: To support planning for new programs, expansion or modification of existing resources, and feasibility studies to explore various approaches to the development of interdisciplinary programs that offer potential solutions to problems of special significance to the mission of the NIH. These exploratory studies may lead to specialized or comprehensive centers. |
Perception and Production of Audiovisual Speech in Children With Hearing Loss @ Father Flanagan's Boys' Home
In noisy situations, talkers adapt the way they speak to be more intelligible. Similarly, listeners adapt their processing strategies by increasing their reliance on visual information on the talker's face to compensate for the degraded auditory information. The goal of this research program is to understand the process of reciprocal adaptation in speech production and perception between mothers and their preschool children. In Aim 1, we will examine how mothers adapt the visual and acoustical properties of their speech when talking to children with hearing loss and children with normal hearing under conditions of background noise. By simultaneously tracking mothers' speech related head movements while analyzing their speech acoustics, we can assess the ways in which mothers might exaggerate their speech to make it more intelligible to their children. In Aim 2, we will directly test whether speech directed to children with hearing loss, or produced in the presence of high levels of background noise, is more intelligible to children in a speech-recognition task. These measurements will be made in an auditory-only mode, without visual information. In Aim 3, we will use eye tracking to examine children's visual processing of videos of their mothers' speech to test the degree to which visual information enhances speech recognition, how background noise affects children's attention to talker facial regions, and whether visual fixation on the mother's mouth increases speech intelligibility. One important way of implementing successful interventions for children with hearing loss involves coaching parents to provide language input that facilitates speech and language development. By understanding the reciprocal adaptations that occur in the production and perception of mother-child speech, and how they are impacted by hearing loss, this project will provide an empirical basis for the identification and implementation of clinical intervention practices for audiovisual speech perception problems in children, and improve the developmental outcomes for children with hearing loss.
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0.912 |