What is it about?
Some children’s early speech errors spontaneously resolves. Others have persistent problems affecting school achievement and social development. The research described searched for a way of identifying those children at risk for ongoing speech difficulties, examining the types of speech errors made. More than two thirds of children making speech errors at four years that were typical of younger children (e.g., 'poon' for spoon) resolved by seven years. Only a third of children whose speech errors were inconsistent (e.g., 'kart', 'sa', 'chub' for shark) or atypical of normal development (e.g., starting all words with /h/ - 'hop', 'hair', 'hoon' for pop, chair, moon) resolved by seven years. Children making few atypical errors were more likely to resolve, irrespective of total number of errors or whether they received intervention.
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Why is it important?
Speech pathology services have limited resources and need to give higher priority for intervention for children at greater risk for persistent speech difficulties, particularly since these children also often literacy difficulties. Our findings evaluated a way to identify children at greatest risk.
Perspectives
Children with unintelligible speech can have an awful time growing up. Other children often don't want to play with them, so they are isolated at school. If they are teased or bullied, and react, they get the reputation for being a behavior problem. At home, they lack the means to express their ideas, needs and explain their problems. Some go on to have language, literacy, academic achievement and behavior problems because of their early experience of being excluded from normal communication. Speech language pathologists need to better understand how to identify children at greatest risk, and how best to help them.
Barbara Dodd
University of Melbourne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Delayed and disordered development of articulation and phonology between four and seven years, Child Language Teaching and Therapy, October 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0265659017735958.
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