Elaine Hitchcock
Montclair State University, NJ·Medicine & Clinical Research
Most children who mispronounce sounds outgrow it by about age 8 or 9. However, roughly 2–5% have residual speech sound disorder (RSSD), errors that persist into adolescence or adulthood despite years of therapy.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
Neuroscience
- Topics
speech sound disorder
speech therapy
speech-language pathology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether a period of perceptual training, in which children learn to classify correct and incorrect "r" sounds, improves their response to visual-acoustic biofeedback treatment delivered via telepractice.
- Test, using a single-case experimental design, whether online visual-acoustic biofeedback with a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) spectrum display produces meaningful improvement for children with residual "s" errors.
- Examine how auditory perception of error sounds relates to speech production in children with residual speech sound disorder, as part of evaluating perceptual and biofeedback tasks in the online modality.
More about the research
These errors usually affect late-learned sounds such as the American English "r" sound and "s". They can make speech harder to understand and get in the way of school and social life. Earlier work, including this team's, indicates that children with RSSD often have trouble hearing the difference between correct and incorrect versions of the sounds they get wrong. This suggests that therapies that sharpen a child's sense of the target sound may work better.
Why it matters
Children and teens whose speech errors persist despite years of therapy face obstacles in school and social life. Showing that perceptual training and visual-acoustic biofeedback work over telepractice could let more families reach these specialized treatments without traveling to a clinic. Extending biofeedback to "s" errors could also give speech-language pathologists an evidence-based option for another commonly misarticulated sound.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ratree Wayland
University of Florida, FL·Psychology
Test whether listening training with immediate feedback plus speaking practice improves articulatory coordination of novel consonant clusters more than speaking practice alone, in a two-group training study.
Chung Yin Joseph Lau
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether the balance between top-down expectation signals and local speech representations is disrupted in autism, using EEG to measure context-dependent processing of speech sounds.
Ayoub Daliri
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Neuroscience
Evaluate how exposure to auditory errors alters predictive sensorimotor processes in children and adults who stutter, using behavioral and neurophysiological recordings to test whether stuttering involves inaccurate speech predictions across the lifespan.
The school
Montclair State University: 2 labs on PI Pages, $44M a year on research, 39 research doctorates a year.
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