title: Acoustic phonetics in a clinical setting: a case study of /r/-distortion therapy with surgical intervention.
abstract: Acoustic measures are used to document the speech of a 6-year-old child with persistent /r/-distortion through several treatment interventions. The child originally presented a complex of speech disorders and was treated by a speech-language pathologist using phonological process techniques. The procedures successfully corrected most of his speech problems, although /r/ remained severely distorted. The primary acoustic manifestation of this distortion was a high third formant. Surgical correction of a banded lingual frenulum, along with adenoton-sillectomy indicated for sleep apnea, is shown to have had a small effect in lowering the third formant. A dramatic change was seen on reintroduction of therapy, when an extreme drop in third formant frequencies for /r/ was observed. The acoustic data are interpreted using speaker-internal controls derived from a dialect-appropriate adult model.
authors.affiliation: Linguistics Department, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 5V5, Canada.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hagiwara
authors.forename: Susan Meyers
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Fosnot
authors.forename: David M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Alessi
mesh_terms: D001184:Articulation Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000235:genetics / Q000601:surgery*; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019647:Oral Surgical Procedures; D010375:Pedigree; D010700:Phonetics; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics