Acoustic and Perceptual Categorization of Sibilants for Mandarin Children With Ankyloglossia

Purpose: To deepen our understanding of the effects of ankyloglossia on articulation, the purpose of this study is to examine consonant production and the perceived accuracy of Mandarin-speaking children with ankyloglossia. Method: Ten tongue-tie (TT) and 10 typically developing (TD) children produced nine Mandarin sibilants that contrast in three places of articulation. Their speech productions were analyzed from six acoustic measurements. To further examine the perceptual consequences, an auditory transcription task ( N = 21) was conducted. Results: The acoustic analyses discovered that the TT children failed to distinguish the three-way place contrast and produced significant acoustic deviations compared with the TD peers. The perceptual transcription results found that TT children's production was significantly misidentified, suggesting severely affected intelligibility. Conclusions: The preliminary findings provide strong support for a correlation between ankyloglossia and distorted speech signals and suggest important interactions between sound errors and linguistic experience. We also propose that ankyloglossia should not be a purely appearance-based diagnosis and that speech production is a crucial index of tongue function in clinical decision making and monitoring.