Meaningful Words and Non-Words Repetitive Articulatory Rate (Oral Diadochokinesis) in Persian Speaking Children

Abstract

Repetitive articulatory rate or Oral Diadochokinesis (oral-DDK) shows a guideline for appraisal and diagnosis of subjects with oral-motor disorder. Traditionally, meaningless words repetition has been utilized in this task and preschool children have challenges with them. Therefore, we aimed to determine some meaningful words in order to test oral-DDK in Persian speaking preschool children. Participants were 142 normally developing children, (age range 4–6 years), who were asked to produce /motæka, golabi/ as two meaningful Persian words and /pa-ta-ka/ as non-word in conventional oral-DDK task. We compared the time taken for 10-times fast repetitions of two meaningful Persian words and the tri-syllabic nonsense word /pa-ta-ka/. Praat software was used to calculate the average time that subjects took to produce the target items. In 4–5 year old children, of time taken for 10-times repetitions of /pa-ta-ka, motæka, golabi/ were , and seconds respectively, and in 5–6 year old children were , and seconds respectively. Findings showed that the main effect of type of words on oral diadochokinesis was significant (). Children repeated meaningful words /motæka, golabi/ faster than the non-word /pa-ta-ka/. Sex and age factors had no effect on time taken for repetition of oral-DDK test. It is suggested that Speech Therapists can use meaningful words to facilitate oral-DDK test for children.

Evidence-Based Clinical Recommendations for the Administration of the Sequential Motion Rates Task

“…Most of SMR studies that used real word stimuli (e.g., in English, “buttercup”, “patty-cake”) evaluated preschool children (3–6 years old, Canning & Rose, 1974; Robbins & Klee, 1987; Yaruss & Logan, 2002). Similarly, Zamani et al (2016) reported an advantage of about 17% for real word repetition over nonwords for Persian-speaking preschool children. Recent research in our labs expands this pattern of performance to other populations.…”

“…To transfer averages from time-by-count (seconds/ strings) to a count-by-time (syllables/s) measure, we suggest Equation 1. (1) For example, Zamani et al (2016) provide SMR data in a time-by-count scale. Specifically, they report full syllable string production times (in seconds) that represent the time required for 10 repetitions of the trisyllable /pataka/ (a total of 30 syllables), with an average of 7.91 s (for preschool girls, see Table 2).…”

“…Note that a similar method has been adopted for SMR (Icht & Ben-David, 2014) and for the Stroop task (Ben-David, Nguyen, & Van Lieshout, 2011;Ben-David & Schneider, 2009). For example, taking the same data set discussed above (Zamani et al, 2016), the reported standard deviation was 0.87 (seconds/10 strings). To convert it to a count-by-time scale, Equation 2 can be used.…”

“…The nonword repetition assesses the ability to access a new (or less familiar) motor program in the absence of linguistic cues (Tiffany, 1980). However, several researchers suggest that repeating real words can be more suitable for some populations, mainly preschool children (Canning & Rose, 1974;Netsell, 2001;Robbins & Klee, 1987;Zamani, Rezai, & Garmatani, 2016) and older adults . Specifically, real words may be more engaging than nonsense, meaningless, syllable strings and thus better reflect oral-motor behaviors and general abilities (for a review, see Heinrich et al, 2016).…”

“…repetition of real and non-words and syllable sequences are clearly differentiated" (p. 269). Evidence collected in the literature generally shows that real word repetition is faster and more accurate than nonword repetition (Zamani et al, 2016). Real word repetition assesses a client's ability to access a stored motor program through linguistic cues, rather than forming a novel motor program in a nonword repetition.…”