Analysis of Errors in Sentence Repetition by Subgroups of Children with Speech Sound Disorders

Abstract

Objectives: Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) are clinically useful tasks for examining working memory ability and discriminating residual language delay. This study aims to examine sentence repetition skills by groups of children with SSDs and analyze error types and morphosyntactic strengths and weaknesses in SRTs. Methods: Thirty-four children aged 5-7 years with SSDs were classified into groups with articulation disorders, phonological delays, and phonological disorders. SRTs were conducted, and errors in SRTs were analyzed in terms of lexical and grammatical morphemes and children’s sentence repetition (SR) skills were examined by two scoring systems including or excluding articulation errors. Results: In SRTs, children with phonological disorders showed more omission errors; in particular, omission of grammatical morphemes, and sentence paraphrase errors were more frequent. Children with phonological disorders showed more lexical grammatical morpheme errors than the other subgroups. Even in the scoring system that reflects both language and articulation errors, children with phonological disorders showed a lower performance than children with articulation disorders. Conclusion: Children with phonological disorders exhibited morphosyntactic weakness by showing greater difficulties in repeating grammatical morphemes accurately in SRTs. This finding suggests that systematic grammar intervention should be addressed for children with phonological disorders.