Semester of Graduation

Spring 2021

Degree

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

The phoneme /l/ is one of the highly misarticulated sounds for young children. Referrals for articulation are often based on a listener’s perception of the problem. The aim of the current study was to examine three listener groups’ perception of word-initial /l/ produced by young children to understand if level of experience with child speech impacts listeners’ perception on /l/. The three groups were separated based on their years of experience: speech-language pathologists with at least 10 years of experience (SLP group), graduate students in speech-language pathology (GS group), and naive listeners with no clinical phonetics experience (NL group). Specifically, the differences in perception were examined in relation to the productions’ acoustic correlates. Listeners judged productions of children’s word-initial /l/ using a Visual Analog Scale (VAS). The results showed that the mean ratings and standard deviation did not differ based on listener group, and that F2 was the perceptual cue that SLP and graduate student groups, but not NL group, used to determine the ratings.

Committee Chair

Hyunju Chung

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.5267

Download

Share

COinS