Background: Accurate nonword repetition (NWR) is contingent on many underlying skills, including encoding, memory and motor planning and programming. Though vowel errors are frequently associated with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), several recent studies have found that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) produce high rates of…

Purpose: In our earlier study, we found that overall accuracy on nonword repetition (NWR) lacked the specificity to differentiate among groups of children who stutter (CWS) with and without concomitant speech sound and/or language disorders and children who do not stutter (CWNS). The aim of this study was to determine whether NWR error…

Background: Speech and language are interconnected systems, and language disorder often co-occurs with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and non-CAS speech sound disorders (SSDs). Potential trade-off effects between speech and language in connected speech in children without overt language disorder have been less explored. Method: Story retell…

Purpose: Speech sound disorder (SSD) in conjunction with a language disorder has been associated with poor literacy acquisition; however, no study has evaluated whether articulation, phonological, or sequencing skills are differentially related to reading skills. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between speech error types at ages…

Purpose: Poor nonword repetition accuracy is a hallmark of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, other diagnostic categories also show impaired nonword repetition performance relative to children with typical development (TD); therefore, this task is currently a sensitive but nonspecific index of DLD. In this study, we…

Purpose: This study compared performance on the Syllable Repetition Task (SRT) by preschoolers with diverse speech and language abilities to identify underlying impairments in speech processes. Method: Three groups of 13 children ages 4 and 5 years with (a) typically developing (TD) speech and language, (b) speech sound disorder (SSD), and (c)…

Purpose: Individuals with primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS) have apraxia of speech (AOS) in which disruptions in articulation or prosody predominate the speech pattern, referred to, respectively, as phonetic or prosodic subtypes. Many develop aphasia and/or dysarthria. Past research has demonstrated that simple temporal acoustic…

Purpose: Speech-evoked neurophysiological responses are often collected to answer clinically and theoretically driven questions concerning speech and language processing. Here, we highlight the practical application of machine learning (ML)-based approaches to analyzing speech-evoked neurophysiological responses. Method: Two categories of ML-based…

Purpose: The inability to accurately recall sentences has proven to be a clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI); this task yields moderate-to-high levels of sensitivity and specificity. However, it is not yet known if these results hold for speakers of dialects whose nonmainstream grammatical productions overlap with those that are…

Purpose: The authors compared preschool children with co-occurring speech sound disorder (SSD) and language impairment (LI) to children with SSD only in their numbers and types of speech sound errors. Method: In this post hoc quasi-experimental study, independent samples t tests were used to compare the groups in the standard score from different…

Language-impaired individuals with autism perform poorly on tests such as non-word repetition that are sensitive clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI). This has fuelled the theory that language impairment in autism represents a co-morbid SLI. However, the underlying cause of these deficits may be different in each disorder. In a…

This article documents the typological occurrence and interactions of two seemingly independent error patterns, namely Velar Fronting and Labial Harmony, in a cross-sectional investigation of the sound systems of 235 children with phonological delays (ages 3;0 to 7;9). The results revealed that the occurrence of Labial Harmony depends on the…

The goal of this research programme was to evaluate the role of word lexicality in effecting phonological change in children's sound systems. Four children with functional speech sound disorders (SSDs) were enrolled in an across-subjects multiple baseline single-subject design; two were treated using high-frequency real words (RWs) and two were…

Phonological acquisition traditionally has been measured using constructs that focus on segments rather than the whole words. Findings from recent research have suggested whole-word productions be evaluated using measures such as phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU) and the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). These measures have been…

In a previous study (Dronkers, 1996), stroke patients identified as having apraxia of speech (AOS), an articulatory disorder, were found to have damage to the left superior precentral gyrus of the insula (SPGI). The present study sought (1) to characterize the performance of patients with AOS on a classic motor speech evaluation, and (2) to…