İşitme cihazı kullanıcısı bebeklerin görsel pekiştirmeli konuşmayı ayırt etme yöntemi ile değerlendirilmesi: Olgu serisi

Evaluation of babies with hearing aids using visual reinforced ınfant speech discrimination method: A case series Speech perception measurements are an important part of the audiology test battery. It is important to investigate hearing loss in the early period and to evaluate the auditory pathway in terms of speech perception for appropriate amplification. Due to the level of language development in infants, it is not possible to objectively evaluate speech perception skills with the speech test battery used in adults. It is necessary to use a test battery that gives objective results for the measurement of speech perception in infants. Visual Reinforcement Infant Speech Discrimination (VRISD) method is the most commonly used test technique to evaluate speech discrimination skills in infants. The aim of this study is to evaluate the speech discrimination skills of 3 babies aged 6-18 months, who are hearing aid users, with the VRISD test method. In the VRISD test protocol used in this study, test stimuli were created by matching /a/ with /i/ and /ba/ with /da/ speech stimuli. These stimulus pairs are arranged as one target sound and the other background sound, and they are presented at 70 dB via loudspeaker by creating a repeating sound sequence. Animated video that attracts the attention of the baby was used as visual reinforcement. Speech discrimination skills of 3 babies with bilateral hearing aids were evaluated with the VRISD test, and the results of the cases are presented. As a result of the study, speech discrimination skills of babies with hearing aids will be evaluated with the VRISD test method. These results contribute to habilitation and amplification programming. Keywords: Hearing aid, speech perception, pediatric audiology

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC GROUNDS FOR THE POPULARITY OF AMERICAN TALK SHOW WITH CHILDREN

The article aims to investigate the verbal aspect of interpersonal communication of the child-adult type in the framework of the american comedy talk-show. The findings of the study explain the phenomenon of the popularity of interview as a media genre and the immediate demand of children’s participation in media. The article outlines the peculiarities of infant speech that reflect child’s worldview, the logic and the process of thinking.

Prediction and error in early infant speech learning: a speech acquisition model

In the last two decades, statistical clustering models have emerged as a dominant model of how infants learn the sounds of their language. However, recent empirical and computational evidence suggests that purely statistical clustering methods may not be sufficient to explain speech sound acquisition. To model early development of speech perception, the present study used a two-layer network trained with Rescorla-Wagner learning equations, an implementation of discriminative, error-driven learning. The model contained no a priori linguistic units, such as phonemes or phonetic features. Instead, expectations about the upcoming acoustic speech signal were learned from the surrounding speech signal, with spectral components extracted from an audio recording of child-directed speech as both inputs and outputs of the model. To evaluate model performance, we simulated infant responses in the high-amplitude sucking paradigm using vowel and fricative pairs and continua. The simulations were able to discriminate vowel and consonant pairs and predicted the infant speech perception data. The model also showed the greatest amount of discrimination in the expected spectral frequencies. These results suggest that discriminative error-driven learning may provide a viable approach to mod- elling early infant speech sound acquisition.

Adult responses to infant prelinguistic vocalizations are associated with infant vocabulary: A home observation study

This study used LENA recording devices to capture infants’ home language environments and examine how qualitative differences in adult responding to infant vocalizations related to infant vocabulary. Infant-directed speech and infant vocalizations were coded in samples taken from daylong home audio recordings of 13-month-old infants. Infant speech-related vocalizations were identified and coded as either canonical or non-canonical. Infant-directed adult speech was identified and classified into different pragmatic types. Multiple regressions examined the relation between adult responsiveness, imitating, recasting, and expanding and infant canonical and non-canonical vocalizations with caregiver-reported infant receptive and productive vocabulary. An interaction between adult like-sound responding (i.e., the total number of imitations, recasts, and expansions) and infant canonical vocalizations indicated that infants who produced more canonical vocalizations and received more adult like-sound responses had higher productive vocabularies. When sequences were analyzed, infant canonical vocalizations that preceded and followed adult recasts and expansions were positively associated with infant productive vocabulary. These findings provide insights into how infant-adult vocal exchanges are related to early vocabulary development.