Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of category goodness of /t/ and /k/ in typical and misarticulated children's speech.

This investigation explores perceptual and acoustic characteristics of children's successful and unsuccessful productions of /t/ and /k/, with a specific aim of exploring perceptual sensitivity to phonetic detail, and the extent to which this sensitivity is reflected in the acoustic domain. Recordings were collected from 4- to 8-year-old children with a speech sound disorder (SSD) who misarticulated one of the target plosives, and compared to productions recorded from peers with typical speech development (TD). Perceptual responses were registered with regards to a visual-analog scale, ranging from "clear [t]" to "clear [k]." Statistical models of prototypical productions were built, based on spectral moments and discrete cosine transform features, and used in the scoring of SSD productions. In the perceptual evaluation, "clear substitutions" were rated as less prototypical than correct productions. Moreover, target-appropriate productions of /t/ and /k/ produced by children with SSD were rated as less prototypical than those produced by TD peers. The acoustical modeling could to a large extent discriminate between the gross categories /t/ and /k/, and scored the SSD utterances on a continuous scale that was largely consistent with the category of production. However, none of the methods exhibited the same sensitivity to phonetic detail as the human listeners.