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Ultrasound Images of the Tongue: A Tutorial for Assessment and Remediation of Speech Sound Errors

Diagnostic ultrasound imaging has been a common tool in medical practice for several decades. It provides a safe and effective method for imaging ...

University of Cincinnati

The goals were to (a) test the efficacy of a motor-learning-based treatment that includes ultrasound visual feedback for individuals with residual speech sound errors and (b) explore whether the addition of prosodic cueing facilitates speech sound learning.

Ultrasound visual feedback treatment and practice variability for residual speech sound errors.

Rhotics in many languages develop late and show clinically significant misarticulations. The English approximant and Spanish trill rhotics exhibit both a primary constriction along the palate and a secondary constriction in the pharynx. We speculate that the secondary constriction might be a cross-linguistic characteristic of rhotics and thus potentially a factor in delayed articulatory development/misarticulations. We describe an exploratory study analyzing rhotic tongue configurations in ultrasound videos from a small sample of native adult speakers of English, Malayalam, French, Persian and Spanish. Our findings confirm that rhotic sounds most subject to late development also involve tongue root movement towards a pharyngeal constriction, but this conclusion must remain tentative without further research. In the meantime, clinical strategies that include attention to primary and secondary constrictions should be explored for remediation of rhotic misarticulations across languages.

Ahmed Rivera-Campos

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

University of Cincinnati

Ultrasound Images of the Tongue: A Tutorial for Assessment and Remediation of Speech Sound Errors

Ahmed Rivera-Campos

.css-o250i3{font-size:18px;font-family:Open Sans,sans-serif;line-height:21.6px;}Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

University of Cincinnati

Ultrasound Images of the Tongue: A Tutorial for Assessment and Remediation of Speech Sound Errors

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders