Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2018 Dec 10;61(12):2837-2853. doi: 10.1044/2018_JSLHR-S-17-0356.
The objectives of this study were to examine different speech profiles among children with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP) and to characterize the effect of different speech profiles on intelligibility.
Twenty 5-year-old children with dysarthria secondary to CP and 20 typically developing children were included in this study. Six acoustic and perceptual speech measures were selected to quantify a range of segmental and suprasegmental speech characteristics and were measured from children's sentence productions. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to identify naturally occurring subgroups of children who had similar profiles of speech features.
Results revealed 4 naturally occurring speech clusters among children: 1 cluster of children with typical development and 3 clusters of children with dysarthria secondary to CP. Two of the 3 dysarthria clusters had statistically equivalent intelligibility levels but significantly differed in articulation rate and degree of hypernasality.
This study provides initial evidence that different speech profiles exist among 5-year-old children with dysarthria secondary to CP, even among children with similar intelligibility levels, suggesting the potential for developing a pediatric dysarthria classification system that could be used to stratify children with dysarthria into meaningful subgroups for studying speech motor development and efficacy of interventions.
本研究旨在探讨脑瘫继发构音障碍儿童的不同语音特征，并分析这些语音特征对清晰度的影响。
本研究纳入了 20 名 5 岁脑瘫继发构音障碍儿童和 20 名正常发育儿童。我们选择了 6 项声学和感知语音测量指标，以量化一系列音段和超音段语音特征，并从儿童的句子产生中进行测量。使用层次聚类分析来识别具有相似语音特征的自然分组。
研究结果揭示了 4 种自然发生的语音聚类，其中 1 个聚类为正常发育儿童，3 个聚类为脑瘫继发构音障碍儿童。这 3 个构音障碍聚类中的 2 个在清晰度方面具有统计学等效水平，但在发音速度和过度鼻音程度上存在显著差异。
本研究首次提供了证据，表明脑瘫继发构音障碍儿童之间存在不同的语音特征，即使在清晰度相似的儿童中也是如此，这表明有可能开发一种儿科构音障碍分类系统，将构音障碍儿童分为有意义的亚组，以研究言语运动发育和干预效果。
