Oral language skills of children with defective articulation

A longitudinal investigation of morpho-syntax in children with Speech Sound Disorders

PURPOSE

The intent of this study was to examine the longitudinal morpho-syntactic progression of children with Speech Sound Disorders (SSD) grouped according to Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) scores.

METHODS

Thirty-seven children separated into four clusters were assessed in their pre-kindergarten and Grade 1 years. Cluster 1 were children with typical development; the other clusters were children with SSD. Cluster 2 had good pre-kindergarten MLU; Clusters 3 and 4 had low MLU scores in pre-kindergarten, and (respectively) good and poor MLU outcomes.

RESULTS

Children with SSD in pre-kindergarten had lower Developmental Sentence Scores (DSS) and made fewer attempts at finite embedded clauses than children with typical development. All children with SSD, especially Cluster 4, had difficulty with finite verb morphology.

CONCLUSIONS

Children with SSD and typical MLU may be weak in some areas of syntax. Children with SSD who have low MLU scores and poor finite verb morphology skills in pre-kindergarten may be at risk for poor expressive language outcomes. However, these results need to be replicated with larger groups.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The reader should (1) have a general understanding of findings from studies on morpho-syntax and SSD conducted over the last half century (2) be aware of some potential areas of morpho-syntactic weakness in young children with SSD who nonetheless have typical MLU, and (3) be aware of some potential longitudinal predictors of continued language difficulty in young children with SSD and poor MLU.

Hesitation phenomena in the spontaneous speech of normal and articulatory-defective children

The utterances of 40 children aged five to six and equally distributed as to age, sex, and group — normal or articulatory-defective - were recorded unobtrusively. Samples of each recording were analyzed for eight categories of hesitation phenomena. Retest recordings were made and analyzed for 16 of the subjects to assess temporal reliability of the hesitation phenomena. The results showed that, like adults, the children used ah phenomena and repetitions/stutters significantly more often than other hesitation phenomena. Articulatory-defectives, by contrast, used more non- ah phenomena. Articulatory-defective males exhibited significantly more hesitation phenomena generally than the other groups. Hesitation phenomena decreased with age for the males in the study but increased for females.

Spontaneous remission of misarticulations

Spontaneous remission of misarticulation remains a central professional concern to those responsible for much nonorganically based misarticulation in children. The present review attempts to consolidate research pertinent to the process of outgrowing errors of articulation. Relatively recent longitudinal studies of misarticulating school children supplement earlier investigations of prognostic indicators and developmental norms to contribute to a more complete understanding of spontaneous remission. The clinical implications of the reviewed research are presented and discussed.

General language deficits in children with articulation problems

Sixteen 7 year-old children with normal articulation, and sixteen 7 year-old children with defective articulation were compared as to their performance on series of language tests designed to assess the child's knowledge of form class, sentence structure, and phonological composition in English. Results showed that children in the defective articulation group gave significantly fewer paradigmatic responses in a word-association test, were less able to discriminate possible from impossible phoneme sequences in English, and were able to repeat fewer sentences correctly than children in the normal articulation group. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for present articulation therapy, which stresses the production of individual sounds and often provides little or no remedial experience in the wider aspects of language usage such as would seem required by results of the present study.