Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Hong Kong, 5th Floor, Prince Philip Dental Hospital, 34 Hospital Road, Sai Yin Pun, Hong Kong, China.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2009 Dec;52(6):1493-509. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2009/08-0170).
This study examined the perception of fundamental frequency (f0) patterns by Cantonese children with and without specific language impairment (SLI).
Participants were 14 five-year-old children with SLI, and 14 age-matched (AM) and 13 four-year-old vocabulary-matched (VM) controls. The children identified a word from familiar word pairs that illustrated the 8 minimally contrastive pairs of the 6 lexical tones. They discriminated the f0 patterns within contrastive tonal pairs in speech and nonspeech stimuli.
In tone identification, the SLI group performed worse than the AM group but not the VM group. In tone discrimination, the SLI group did worse than the AM group on 2 contrasts and showed a nonsignificant trend of poorer performance on all contrasts combined. The VM group generally did worse than the AM group. There were no group differences in discrimination performance between speech and nonspeech stimuli. No correlation was found between identification and discrimination performance. Only the normal controls showed a moderate correlation between vocabulary scores and performance in the 2 perception tasks.
The SLI group's poor tone identification cannot be accounted for by vocabulary knowledge alone. The group's tone discrimination performance suggests that some children with SLI have a deficit in f0 processing.
本研究旨在探讨广东儿童，包括有特定语言障碍（SLI）和无特定语言障碍的儿童对基频（f0）模式的感知。
参与者包括 14 名 5 岁的 SLI 儿童，14 名年龄匹配（AM）和 13 名词汇匹配（VM）的对照组儿童。这些儿童从熟悉的单词对中识别出一个单词，这些单词展示了 6 个声调中的 8 个最小对比对。他们在语音和非语音刺激中辨别对比声调对中的 f0 模式。
在声调识别中，SLI 组的表现不如 AM 组，但优于 VM 组。在声调辨别中，SLI 组在 2 个对比上的表现不如 AM 组，在所有对比上的表现均呈非显著趋势。VM 组的表现普遍不如 AM 组。在语音和非语音刺激之间，两组在辨别性能上没有差异。识别和辨别性能之间没有相关性。只有正常对照组在这两个感知任务中的表现与词汇得分之间存在中度相关性。
SLI 组在声调识别方面的表现不佳不能仅用词汇知识来解释。该组在声调辨别方面的表现表明，一些 SLI 儿童在 f0 处理方面存在缺陷。
