Clinical Neuropsychology Research Group, Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.
Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2024 May;33(3):1236-1253. doi: 10.1044/2023_AJSLP-23-00246. Epub 2024 Feb 28.
The purposes of this study were (a) to investigate adult listeners' perceptions of age and gender in typically developing children and children with dysarthria and (b) to identify predictors of their estimates among auditory-perceptual parameters and an acoustic measure of vocal pitch (0). We aimed to evaluate the influence of dysarthria on the listeners' impressions of age and gender against the background of typical developmental processes.
In a listening experiment, adult listeners completed age and gender estimates of 144 typically developing children (3-9 years of age) and 25 children with dysarthria (5-9 years of age). The Bogenhausen Dysarthria Scales for Childhood Dysarthria (BoDyS-KiD) were applied to record speech samples and to complete auditory-perceptual judgments covering all speech subsystems. Furthermore, each child's mean 0 was determined from samples of four BoDyS-KiD sentences.
Age estimates for the typically developing children showed a regression to the mean, whereas children with dysarthria were systematically underestimated in their age. The estimates of all children were predicted by developmental speech features; for the children with dysarthria, specific dysarthria symptoms had an additional effect. We found a significantly higher accuracy of gender attribution in the typically developing children than in the children with dysarthria. The prediction accuracy of the listeners' gender attribution in the preadolescent children by the included speech characteristics was limited.
Children with dysarthria are more difficult to estimate for their age and gender than their typically developing peers. Dysarthria thus alters the auditory-perceptual impression of indexical speech features in children, which must be considered another facet of the communication disorder associated with childhood dysarthria.
本研究的目的是（a）调查成年听众对正常发育儿童和构音障碍儿童的年龄和性别感知，（b）确定听觉感知参数和嗓音音高声学测量值（0）预测他们估计的指标。我们旨在评估构音障碍对听众对年龄和性别的印象的影响，背景是典型的发育过程。
在听力实验中，成年听众对 144 名正常发育儿童（3-9 岁）和 25 名构音障碍儿童（5-9 岁）完成了年龄和性别估计。应用博根豪森儿童构音障碍量表（BoDyS-KiD）记录语音样本并完成涵盖所有语音子系统的听觉感知判断。此外，从四个 BoDyS-KiD 句子的样本中确定每个孩子的平均 0。
正常发育儿童的年龄估计呈回归均值，而构音障碍儿童的年龄则被系统低估。所有儿童的估计均由发育性语音特征预测；对于构音障碍儿童，特定的构音障碍症状有额外的影响。我们发现正常发育儿童的性别归因准确性明显高于构音障碍儿童。包括语音特征在内的听众在青春期前儿童中性别归因的预测准确性有限。
与正常发育的同龄人相比，构音障碍儿童更难估计他们的年龄和性别。因此，构音障碍改变了儿童索引性语音特征的听觉感知印象，这必须被视为与儿童构音障碍相关的沟通障碍的另一个方面。
