General Language Deficits in Children With Articulation Problems

Abstract

Sixteen 7 year-old children with normal articulation, and sixteen 7 year-old children with defective articulation were compared as to their performance on series of language tests designed to assess the child's knowledge of form class, sentence structure, and phonological composition in English. Results showed that children in the defective articulation group gave significantly fewer paradigmatic responses in a word-association test, were less able to discriminate possible from impossible phoneme sequences in English, and were able to repeat fewer sentences correctly than children in the normal articulation group. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for present articulation therapy, which stresses the production of individual sounds and often provides little or no remedial experience in the wider aspects of language usage such as would seem required by results of the present study.

Disorders of Speech Intelligibility

“…In testing children's knowledge of phonological and syntactic rules, Whitacre, Luper and Pollio (1970) observed that children with articulatory deficits produced fewer paradigmatic responses in the word association test, were less able to discriminate possible from impossible phoneme sequences in English, and repeated fewer sentences correctly than the control children. The authors suggested that assessment of children with articulatory deficits include the individual's ability to utilize grammatical rules of language.…”

“…Further consideration was given to the relationship between severe articulatory defects and delayed syntax development in children (Shriner, Holloway & Daniloff, 1969;Whitacre, Luper & Pollio, 1970;Panagos, 1974). Researchers concluded that severe articulatory deficits constituted linguistic disorders of the phonological type (Compton, 1970;Ingram, 1976).…”

Repetition of Comprehensible Sentences by Children with Deviant Speech

“…In the case of children with deviant speech, the amount of filtering is greater than for the normal child. They seem to be particularly affected by transformational complexity and limitations on short-term memory performance (Jackson and Sommers, to appear;Menyuk, 1969 ;Whitacre et al, 1970). Omission errors predominate, although essential semantic properties are left intact (Menyuk, 1969).The purpose of this study was to examine the sentence repetitions of a group of children with normal decoding abilities, but with severe deficits in speech-motor performance as reflected in their largely unintelligible speech as perceived by clinicians and others.…”

“…In the case of children with deviant speech, the amount of filtering is greater than for the normal child. They seem to be particularly affected by transformational complexity and limitations on short-term memory performance (Jackson and Sommers, to appear;Menyuk, 1969 ;Whitacre et al, 1970). Omission errors predominate, although essential semantic properties are left intact (Menyuk, 1969).…”

“…With the acquisition of linguistic competence, speech repetition comes under the control of the linguistic system, so that the structure of imitations reflects the latter rather than the former. If the normal child is given a syntactic string within the limits of his short-term memory performance, accuracy of repetition will be determined by semantic (Fraser et al, 1963) syntactic (Menyuk, 1969) and phonological (Whitacre et al, 1970) complexity. In short, the grammatical system "filters" the input data (Menyuk, 1969).…”