Dr Eleanor Lawson
Strathclyde Chancellor's Fellow
Speech and Language Therapy
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A pilot fieldwork ultrasound study of tongue shape variability in children with and without speech sound disorder Smith Amy, Dokovova Marie, Lawson Eleanor, Kuschmann Anja, Cleland Joanne Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Prague 2023 International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 3874-3877 (2023) A speech therapy animation and imaging resource (STAR) Lawson Eleanor, Cleland Joanne, Stuart-Smith Jane, Janet Beck, Aitken Brian International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 1-4 (2023) STAR : speech therapy animation and imaging resource Lawson Eleanor, Cleland Joanne Congress of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (2023) Quantifying tongue-tip to upper incisor distance in an ultrasound tongue imaging study of Swedish /i/ Lawson Eleanor, Westerberg Fabienne, Stuart-Smith Jane International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (2023) A comparison of tongue shape variability in children with and without speech sound disorder using ultrasound Smith Amy, Dokovova Marie, Lawson Eleanor, Kuschmann Anja, Cleland Joanne 19th Biennial Conference of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (2023) STAR : Speech therapy animation and imaging resource Lawson Eleanor 2022 Society of Chemical Industry, Lister Memorial Lecture. Innovation in Health poster session., pp. 1 (2022)
Publications
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International Congress of Phonetic Sciences Participant 7/8/2023 19th Biennial Conference of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association Participant 6/7/2023 Using STAR Participant 9/5/2023 British Science Week public engagement Presenter 18/3/2023 Explorathon Contributor 12/11/2022 Speech STAR - an online Ultrasound-Tongue-Imaging-based curated corpus of disordered and non-disordered speech. Recipient 22/9/2022
BletherNet: Neural Networks for Understanding Tongue Shapes in Disordered Lawson, Eleanor (Principal Investigator) Murali, Mridhula (Researcher) Kirkland, Paul (Academic) Cleland, Joanne (Academic) A project investigating the use of neural networks in the automatic classification of /r/ tongue shapes, imaged with Ultrasound Tongue Imaging 01-Jan-2023 - 31-Jan-2024 Translating Ultrasound Speech Technology into Clinical Practice Cleland, Joanne (Principal Investigator) Lawson, Eleanor (Principal Investigator) Smith, Amy (Researcher) Impact Acceleration Account project, Funded value £2,389
Speech and Language Therapy at the University of Strathclyde have been at the forefront of developing ultrasound technology for the diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders in children. Speech disorders are common in childhood, affecting social, emotional and educational prospects. Most intervention approaches involve the speech and language therapist (SLT) listening to children’s speech errors and providing verbal feedback. While this can be effective, our research at Strathclyde demonstrates that children benefit from visual feedback of their tongue movements. By placing a medical ultrasound probe under the child’s chin, we can show them their tongue movements in real-time, allowing the SLT to give them more accurate feedback to help correct speech errors.
Through two EPSRC funded projects (Ultrax and Ultrax2020) joint with the University of Edinburgh, we have improved the ultrasound technology, making it more suitable for use in the speech therapy clinic and have developed automatic ways (using artificial intelligence) to classify speech disorder types. We have also run two Chief Scientist Office (CSO) funded intervention studies (one ongoing) which show that this can be an effective treatment. In parallel to this, Eleanor Lawson (Chancellor fellow since 2022, formerly at Queen Margaret University) has developed a suite of web resources (funded by AHRC, ESRC, RSE and the Carnegie Trust) which host ultrasound, MRI and animations of speech movements for training clinicians and linguists in speech production. An ongoing ESRC project (lead by Lawson with Cleland as Co-I) is currently developing a website “Speech Therapy Animation and imaging Resource- STAR”, which will house example ultrasound videos of speech disorders for training SLT students, with a secondary aim of improving understanding of and promoting ultrasound tongue imaging in SLT. All of these research projects include ongoing collection of impact evidence gathered using questionnaires and focus groups.
It is clear that what is missing from both our research and impact are training materials for clinicians specifically in how to use ultrasound in intervention with children. This funding would allow us to develop multi-media resources specifically for this purpose, accelerating the clinical implementation of our work. We have already developed an open access manual for delivering ultrasound-based intervention https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/63372/ , and we have developed teaching materials for in-person training with ultrasound. This funding would specifically be used to develop videos of clinicians delivering ultrasound intervention- featuring real children with speech disorders (with consent- covered by our current NHS ethical approval and additional consent to use the videos for marketing purposes) at the Glasgow Children’s Hospital. We would also use the funding to record and edit ultrasound analysis videos (i.e. videos showing tongue movements, rather than videos showing the SLT and child) of real teaching moments in intervention to illustrate the key steps in helping children to improve their speech errors. Both materials will be made in collaboration with the Glasgow Children’s hospital who are currently undertaking ultrasound-based therapy as part of a CSO funded clinical trial (PI Cleland).
01-Jan-2023 - 01-Jan-2023 Edinburgh MRI modelled speech corpus (EMMSC) Lawson, Eleanor (Principal Investigator) 01-Jan-2022 - 01-Jan-2023 Dynamic Dialects: integrating articulatory video to reveal the complexity of speech Lawson, Eleanor (Principal Investigator) Stuart-Smith, Jane (Principal Investigator) Scobbie, James M (Co-investigator) Dynamic Dialects contains an articulatory video-based corpus of speech samples from world-wide accents of English. Videos in this corpus contain synchronised audio, ultrasound-tongue-imaging video and video of the moving lips. The website contains three main resources: A clickable Accent Map: clicking on points of the map will open up links to ultrasound tongue videos showing a comparable set of words and a spontaneous speech excerpt for speakers of world-wide Englishes; a clickable Accent Chart: this provides ultrasound tongue and lip video for a comparable set of words and a spontaneous speech excerpt for speakers of world-wide Englishes. You can filter by accent, gender, and agerange; an introduction to UTI and lip video recording techniques. The online resource is a product of the collaboration between researchers at six Scottish Universities: the University of Glasgow, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, the University of Strathclyde, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Aberdeen. 01-Jan-2014 - 31-Jan-2015 Seeing the Links in the Speaker-Hearer Chain: An investigation of the transmission of articulatory variation using ultrasound tongue imaging Lawson, Eleanor (Principal Investigator) Previous research has asserted that retroflex/bunched variation exemplifies the phenomenon of "articulatory tradeoffs", where very different articulatory strategies result in the same acoustic output. However, in the Central Scottish English speech community, ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) analysis has shown that underlying bunched/retroflex tongue shape for coda /r/ is highly socially stratified, which suggests that speaker-hearers are able to perceive the underlying variation in tongue shape. I asked the questions:
(1) how do middle-class Scottish speakers acquire a bunched rather than a retroflex approximant for coda /r/, if bunched and retroflex /r/ are auditorily and acoustically equivalent as claimed by Delattre and Freeman (1968), Guenther et al (1999) and Twist, Baker, Mielke and Archangeli (2007)?
(2) are speaker-listeners able to adapt their /r/ tongue shapes articulations to a bunched or retroflex shape when asked to mimic an audio-only stimulus with an underlying bunched or retroflex /r/. 01-Jan-2011 - 01-Jan-2014
Professional Activities
Projects
Speech and Language Therapy at the University of Strathclyde have been at the forefront of developing ultrasound technology for the diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders in children. Speech disorders are common in childhood, affecting social, emotional and educational prospects. Most intervention approaches involve the speech and language therapist (SLT) listening to children’s speech errors and providing verbal feedback. While this can be effective, our research at Strathclyde demonstrates that children benefit from visual feedback of their tongue movements. By placing a medical ultrasound probe under the child’s chin, we can show them their tongue movements in real-time, allowing the SLT to give them more accurate feedback to help correct speech errors.
Through two EPSRC funded projects (Ultrax and Ultrax2020) joint with the University of Edinburgh, we have improved the ultrasound technology, making it more suitable for use in the speech therapy clinic and have developed automatic ways (using artificial intelligence) to classify speech disorder types. We have also run two Chief Scientist Office (CSO) funded intervention studies (one ongoing) which show that this can be an effective treatment. In parallel to this, Eleanor Lawson (Chancellor fellow since 2022, formerly at Queen Margaret University) has developed a suite of web resources (funded by AHRC, ESRC, RSE and the Carnegie Trust) which host ultrasound, MRI and animations of speech movements for training clinicians and linguists in speech production. An ongoing ESRC project (lead by Lawson with Cleland as Co-I) is currently developing a website “Speech Therapy Animation and imaging Resource- STAR”, which will house example ultrasound videos of speech disorders for training SLT students, with a secondary aim of improving understanding of and promoting ultrasound tongue imaging in SLT. All of these research projects include ongoing collection of impact evidence gathered using questionnaires and focus groups.
It is clear that what is missing from both our research and impact are training materials for clinicians specifically in how to use ultrasound in intervention with children. This funding would allow us to develop multi-media resources specifically for this purpose, accelerating the clinical implementation of our work. We have already developed an open access manual for delivering ultrasound-based intervention https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/63372/ , and we have developed teaching materials for in-person training with ultrasound. This funding would specifically be used to develop videos of clinicians delivering ultrasound intervention- featuring real children with speech disorders (with consent- covered by our current NHS ethical approval and additional consent to use the videos for marketing purposes) at the Glasgow Children’s Hospital. We would also use the funding to record and edit ultrasound analysis videos (i.e. videos showing tongue movements, rather than videos showing the SLT and child) of real teaching moments in intervention to illustrate the key steps in helping children to improve their speech errors. Both materials will be made in collaboration with the Glasgow Children’s hospital who are currently undertaking ultrasound-based therapy as part of a CSO funded clinical trial (PI Cleland).
(1) how do middle-class Scottish speakers acquire a bunched rather than a retroflex approximant for coda /r/, if bunched and retroflex /r/ are auditorily and acoustically equivalent as claimed by Delattre and Freeman (1968), Guenther et al (1999) and Twist, Baker, Mielke and Archangeli (2007)?
(2) are speaker-listeners able to adapt their /r/ tongue shapes articulations to a bunched or retroflex shape when asked to mimic an audio-only stimulus with an underlying bunched or retroflex /r/.
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Contact
Dr
Eleanor
Lawson
Strathclyde Chancellor's Fellow
Speech and Language Therapy
Email: eleanor.lawson@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 548 3164