Articulation Rate and Speech-Sound Normalization Failure

Abstract

Not all children with speech delay (SD) of unknown origin develop fully normal speech even with intervention. Many retain residual distortion errors into adolescence and ultimately into adulthood. The current study examined whether articulation rate distinguishes those children who retain residual errors from those who normalize. Two groups of speech-delayed children originally identified at preschool age were retested at age 9 years (the early follow-up group) and at age 12–16 years (the late follow-up group), respectively. No differences in articulation rate were observed at either test time in conversational speech between those children who continued to produce residual distortion errors (RE) compared to those children who had fully normalized speech (NSA). For the late follow-up group, children in the RE outcome group articulated speech at significantly slower rates than the children in the NSA outcome group in an embedded words task using both syllables per second and phones per second measures. Findings suggested that children with SD of unknown origin who fail to normalize may have relative speech-motor deficits and possibly deficits in language formulation skill. Alternatively, slower articulation rate in structured tasks may represent some sort of compensation for the continuing presence of speech-sound errors. Possible motivations for such compensation are discussed.

Typical consonant cluster acquisition in auditory-verbal children with early-identified severe/profound hearing loss

“…Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests for initial vs fi nal consonant cluster accuracy at chronological ages of 3-and 4-years were applied to both sampling contexts. Effect size is reported using non-parametric effect size (d-np) (Flipsen, 2003).…”

Slow speech rate effects on stuttering preschoolers with disordered phonology

“…Adults average a maximum repetition (diadochokinetic) rate of 13.6 pps and an oral reading rate of 13.1 pps (Tiffany, 1980). However, preschoolers who stutter show below normal limit articulation rates (Dailey Hall et al, 1999), as do children with speech delay of unknown origin (Flipsen, 2002(Flipsen, , 2003 when pps is the measure.…”

“…Articulation rate is operationally defined as fluent speech segment production per unit of time (Flipsen, 2002(Flipsen, , 2003Kelly & Conture, 1992;Ryan, 1992;Zebrowski et al, 1996). As time taken up by stuttering is excluded in the measurement of articulation rates, children who stutter can be compared to normally fluent peers on this measure.…”

“…Most preschoolers who stutter do not show speech rate alignment, and yet their fluency is facilitated when an adult interlocutor slows his/her rate (Zebrowski, Weiss, Savelkoul, & Hammer, 1996). When measuring preschoolers' articulation rate or fluent speech rate in phones per second, children with phonological disorders speak slower than their peers with normal phonology (Flipsen, 2002(Flipsen, , 2003, and children who stutter speak slower than their peers with normal fluency (Dailey Hall, Amir, & Yairi, 1999). We do not currently know the effect of adults' slow speech rate on the speech rate and fluency of children who stutter and show a concomitant phonological disorder, even though this is a frequently encountered subgroup of the population of children who stutter (Arndt & Healey, 2001;Louko, Edwards, & Conture, 1990;cf., Nippold, 2002).…”

Multidisciplinary Assessment and Diagnosis of Conversion Disorder in a Patient with Foreign Accent Syndrome

“…The procedure employed by Tsao and Weismer [54] to assess oral reading rate was utilized in that pause times equal to or longer than 150 ms were deducted from speaking time. Also, for those phonetic contexts within a sentence in which a word with a final stop sound was followed immediately by a word with an initial stop sound (e.g., "ancient black," "frock coat"), a pause had to be longer than 300 ms to be deducted (55). To measure articulation rate in spontaneous speech, pause times longer than 250 ms were deducted from total speaking time and time spent producing interjections (e.g., "uh," "um,") were not included in the total time.…”