Raymond Kent Ph.D., University of Iowa Professor, Communicative Disorders Contact Information Waisman Center UW-Madison 1500 Highland Avenue Madison, WI 53705 608-263-7109 608-263-0529 (fax) E-mail: kent@waisman.wisc.edu

My work focuses on the communicative dimensions of speech intelligibility and speech quality as they are affected by neurogenic disorders in children and adults. Speech is an important and challenging developmental accomplishment because it is the fastest discrete motor performance in humans and is typically the preferred modality for language. A variety of neurologic lesions result in speech motor disorders (especially dysarthria or apraxia of speech). A primary objective of this research is to relate specific communicative difficulties to various types of sensory and motor impairments and their associated neural lesions. Acoustic measures defined for various speaking tasks are used for the quantitative assessment of speech intelligibility, voice quality, and prosodic features. Included in this research are studies of typically and atypically developing speech, with the objective of defining acoustic measures that have the potential of identifying infants and children at risk for communication disorders. Work to date has refined acoustic methods suitable for the study of speech disorders in individuals from infancy through adulthood. The neurogenic disorders under study include cerebral palsy, stroke, closed head injury, and progressive neurological disorders. Lesion data are being assembled to test hypotheses of brain-behavior relationships in speech motor control. The work on neurogenic disorders is done in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minnesota. A long-term goal of this collaboration is to establish an archive of speech samples that reflect various classifications of speech motor disorder. The archive is the basis for many of our published articles. The investigation of speech in children also takes into account developmental processes related to growth of the vocal tract, maturation of motor control, and acquisition of phonology. This work has contributed to the development of a neural network model that incorporates developmental changes in the anatomy of the vocal tract, associated alterations of speech motor control, and the role of auditory information in the regulation of vocal tract adjustments for speech sounds. Kent, R. D. & Kim, Y. (2003). Toward an acoustic typology of motor speech disorders. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 17, 427-445. Kent, R. D. (2004). The uniqueness of speech among motor systems. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 18, 495-505. Wang, Y.-T., Kent, R. D., Duffy, J R., & Thomas, J. E. (2005). Dysarthria in traumatic brain injury: A breath group and intonational analysis. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 57, 59-89. Kent, R. D., & Vorperian, H. K. (in press). In the mouths of babes: anatomic, motor, and sensory foundations of speech development in children. To appear in R. Paul (ed.), Language disorders from a developmental perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kent, R.D. (2005). Development of speech. In B. Hopkins (ed.), Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Rosen, K. M., Kent, R. D., & Duffy, J. R. (in press). Parametric quantitative acoustic analysis of conversation produced by dysarthric and healthy speakers. Journal of Speech, Hearing, & Language Research. Click to search National Library of Medicine and PubMed for other publications by Dr. Kent

Last updated 12/6/05 by rowley@waisman.wisc.edu