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Abstract

Dodd B. Differentiating speech delay from disorder: does it matter? Top Lang Disord. 2011;31(2):96-111.The diagnosis of children with speech sound disorders still is a topic of discussion despite the remarkable progress achieved in the last ten years. It is well known that children with speech difficulties are heterogeneous, differing in severity, underlying cause and speech error characteristics.Classifying the disorder is difficult and speech and language pathologists need at first to establish what criteria were defined as the basis for the classification adopted. Dodd (2011) addresses on her study the question about the differentiation between speech delay and disorder. By definition she considers that children with delayed speech development are classified by the presence of speech error patterns that are typical to children of a younger chronological age in the normative data for that standardized assessment. The classification of disordered speech is also based on the speech error pattern but in this case, errors that are atypical of any age group in the normative sample for the assessment.The author of the article points out that several studies in the literature indicate as explanatory factors for both the delay and the disorder, an inter-relationship between motor, auditory and visual perception and aspects cognitive-linguistic aspects. Earlier studies by Dodd and her research group demonstrated that although the three aspects contribute to the phonological development in children with speech sound disorder it seems that the ability to abstract phonological rules is the most important one. According to the author this finding demonstrates that cognitive-linguistic difficulty underlies the organization and the knowledge of phonological rules.Searching for contributions to the understanding of differentiation between the cognitive-linguistic characteristics presented by speech delayed and speech disordered children the author based her assumptions on the assertion that the difference between these children is due to both the type of speech error patterns used and the number of speech errors made. Thus, the study hypothesized that speech sound disordered children would perform less well than children with delayed phonological development on measures of rule abstraction and cognitive flexibility.Dodd's previous research included 46 children (23 with delay and 23 with disorder) paired by age and gender. All children were part of a larger group of 275 children who were evaluated by Dodd and McIntosh (1) considering phonology, auditory and oral motor abilities.Two experimental tests were used: the first was the Flexible Item Selection Test and the second the The Nonlingusitic Rule Abstraction Task. The first test measured the a core ability in executive function by using figures representing objects varying in shape, size and color. Children were solicited to point out two figures that could be matched. The other test concerning about the abstraction rule was applied using a computer programmed to code and sto...