Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
Speech therapy;
Abstract
Modification of deviant speech patterns begins with identification of the factors responsible for the deviancy. Agreement between speech clinicians (trained listeners) and parents and teachers (untrained listeners) on the nature of errors may be important in a successful clinical services program. Previous studies investigated differences between trained and untrained listeners in the number of "correct-incorrect" decisions they made about speech sounds. This study dealt with the ability of listeners to rate defective /r/ sounds along a r--w continuum. Two groups of listeners were used; a trained group made up of twelve graduate speech clinicians enrolled in a summer session at the University of Northern Iowa. The untrained group was composed of twelve summer school students, none of whom had any experience with the evaluation of speech deviations. These listeners were asked to rate the initial consonant of twenty utterances of the five words rabbit, red, watch, ring, and wing. The continuum used for the ratings represented a perceptual dimension ranging from the phoneme /r/ to the phoneme /w/. Comparisons were made between the mean ratings of both groups and between the mean ratings of each group over two listening sessions, one week apart. The following conclusions were reached: (1) Groups of listeners, both trained listeners representing qualified speech clinicians, and untrained or naive listeners representing parents, teachers and others, hear both /r/ distortions and /w/ substitutions for /r/ in speech samples of children arbitrarily judged to have /r/ errors. (2) Trained and untrained listeners do not differ in the kinds of "errors" they perceive. (3) Trained and untrained listeners are equally consistent in their judgments about the nature of the error sound. Further exploration of the rating performances involved consideration of such aspects as individual speaker, phonetic context and individual judge. Comparing the results of this study with earlier ones requiring "correct-incorrect" decisions leads to the hypothesis that the difference between trained and untrained listeners is not in the way they perceive the error sound but in the position of a boundary for "normalcy" along a perceptual continuum. The findings of this study suggest that one might make a comparison of the correct-incorrect cut-off points on the rating continuum for both trained and untrained listeners and explore the consistency in the articulation patterns of speakers making repeated utterances of the same sound.
Year of Submission
1967
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of Speech
First Advisor
Roy Eblen
Second Advisor
Ralph Schwartz
Date Original
1967
Object Description
1 PDF file (47 leaves)
Copyright
©1967 Mary Ann Dostal
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Dostal, Mary Ann, "The Performance of Trained and Untrained Listeners in Rating Defective /r/ Along a Continuum" (1967). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 2505.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/2505
Comments
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