Background: Children born with cleft palate ± lip (CP ± L) are at risk of speech sound disorder (SSD). Up to 40% continue to have SSD at age 5-6 years. These difficulties are typically described as articulatory in nature and often include cleft speech characteristics (CSC) hypothesized to result from structural differences. In non-CP ± L SSD…

Background: Approximately 50% of all young children with a developmental language disorder (DLD) also have problems with speech production. Research on speech sound development and clinical diagnostics of speech production difficulties focuses mostly on accuracy; it relates children's phonological realizations to adult models. Contrarily to these…

Background: At the beginning of the 21st century, international adoptions of children with cleft lip and/or palate increased dramatically in Sweden. Many children arrived partially or totally unoperated, despite being at an age when palatoplasty has usually been performed. To date, the speech development of internationally adopted (IA) children…

Multidimensional analysis involves moving away from one-dimensional analyses such as most articulation tests to comprehensive analyses involving levels of phonological information from the word level down to segments. This article outlines one such approach that looks at four levels from words to segments, using nine phonological measures. It also…

Many studies have pointed to impaired speech intelligibility in young people with Down's syndrome (DS). Some have attributed these problems to delayed phonological development, while others have identified disordered speech patterns, which could be related to a dyspraxic element in their speech. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to examine…

The structure of /s/-initial clusters is debated in developmental phonology. Pan and Snyder (2004) took the Government Phonology (GP) framework and proposed that production of /s/-initial clusters requires the positive setting of two binary parameters [+/-Branching rhyme (BR)] and [+/-Magic empty nucleus (MEN)] and the initial /s/ is treated as a…

A study involving 144 elementary students in three groups - controls (no articulation errors), residual error (mean of five articulation errors), and multiple errors (mean of more than 15 errors) - supported the hypothesis that Ss in the multiple error group would demonstrate measurable deviations in language compared to those in residual error or…

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to…

Children with unintelligible speech differ in severity, underlying deficit, type of surface error patterns and response to treatment. Detailed treatment case studies, evaluating specific intervention protocols for particular diagnostic groups, can identify best practice for children with speech disorder. Three treatment case studies evaluated the…

The study examined the possibility that children who omit word-final stops as a clinical entity may preserve the voicing contrast of those omitted stops by differential durations of the preceding vowel. (Author)

Eight articulation disordered kindergarten children and eight normally speaking children were taught an artificial morphophonemic rule. Results revealed essentially no differences in the way the two groups learned the stop class. In contrast, the disordered children incorporated fricatives into the rule more quickly and responded with more…

Stutterers (N=201) and their nonstuttering same sex siblings were distributed identically in early, average, and late categories of language onset. Late talkers had significantly higher frequencies of articulation problems than did stutterers who were early or average talkers and their siblings. (Author/CL)

The phonological systems of 40 functional misarticulators, ages 40-80 months, were examined in terms of the nature and variation of phonetic inventories and phonotactic constraints. Evidence suggests that these properties of disordered systems represent delays in the normal acquisition process and are not otherwise deviant. (Author/JDD)

This study examined the effect of lexical aspect and phonology on regular past-tense production. Data are presented from a group of 31 children, mean age 33 months, with typical language development. A case study of a 50-month-old child with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is also presented. Children imitated sentence pairs that included an…

The paper reviews instrumental studies of "functional" misarticulations in children and reports an experiment involving three subject groups (N=7 in each group) of normally articulating adults, normally articulating children, and children who misarticulate the /s/ sound. (Author)