Phonological Skills of Children With Specific Expressive Language Impairment (SLI-E)

Abstract

Naturalistic speech samples of 29 3-year-olds diagnosed with specific expressive language delay (SU-E) were compared to those produced by 19 age-matched normally developing peers in order to determine their improvement in phonological skills since age 2, when Rescorla and Ratner (1996) studied them. Specifically, the groups were compared with regard to vocalization rate, verbalizations, fully intelligible utterances, phonetic inventories, percentages of consonants correct (PCC), phonological processes, and mean length of utterance (MLU). Results revealed that there was no significant difference between the groups in their numbers of vocalizations (as there had been at age 2), although there continued to be differences in their phonetic inventories, PCC scores, and overall intelligibility. These findings suggest that at age 2 the children with SU-E were not only less phonologically skilled but less talkative, whereas by age 3 they were equally vocal. Analysis of the phonetic inventories of the children demonstrated that for most consonants, the SLI-E group followed the some pattern of development as the comparison children, but more of the normally developing group had productive control of each consonant, consistent with findings of Rescorla and Ratner. There continued to be differences in intelligibility as measured by rates of verbalization (those utterances with at least one intelligible word) and fully intelligible utterances. Using these measures, we found that approximately half the SU-E children had caught up with their normally developing peers in terms of articulation, whereas half of them continued to be significantly delayed. Finally, although some of the late-bloomer group had caught up to the comparison children in language skills, as measured by MLU, many had not, suggesting that there was a tendency for the children to catch up in some articulation skills before catching up in language abilities.

Babbling and first words in children with slow expressive development

“…In particular, the study focussed on identifying early differences in syllable structure and phonetic characteristics of babbling and first words between the two groups, in order to identify reliable indicators of language development. Our data, collected on a sample of Italian children, are consistent with those reported by previous studies (McCathren, Yoder and Warren, 1999;Mirak and Rescorla, 1998;Paul and Jennings, 1992;Pharr, Ratner and Rescorla, 2000;Rescorla and Ratner, 1996;Roberts, Rescorla, Giroux and Stevens, 1998;Stoel-Gammon, 1989;Thal, Oroz and McCaw, 1995): children 14 who show a low expressive language development at 24 months exhibited significantly different babbling patterns and syllable structures than those of their TD peers at 18-20 months of age. Many authors posited the predictive value of babbling characteristics with regard to subsequent speech and language ability (Davis and MacNeilage, 1995;StoelGammon, 1989;Vihman, 1996), in so far the experience of frequent self-producing CV syllables made infants more aware of similar patterns in their ambient language, rendering these forms more salient as potential building blocks for word representations.…”

Phonological Profile of Spanish-Catalan Children with Specific Language Impairment at Age 4: Are There Any Changes over Time?

“…For example Fee [12] found that the most common simplifi cation processes were cluster reduction, omission of onset syllables, substitution of liquid sounds in the initial syllable and devoicing of fi nal segments, which is consistent with our own fi ndings; this researcher also found the same order of acquisition in SLI subjects and non-impaired ones. In line with Rescorla and Bernstein-Ratner [8] and Rescorla et al [9] we found that children with SLI continue to show a delay in phonology as they grow, and, consistent with these studies, we found great variability in the SLI group. Our results are also in agreement with those of Owen et al [25] and Nettelbladt [26] in that we found the most usual processes to be syllabic reductions and substitutions.…”

Speech development patterns and phonological awareness in preschool children

“…We could determine the set of consonants that children articulate, and we could describe their misarticulations. For example, many of the speech production errors of normal preschoolers (e.g., articulatory distortions) resolve spontaneously by school age or earlier in a predictable manner (Roberts et al, 1998;Shriberg et al, 1986). Most preschool children correctly produce /m/ but many do not produce adult-like /s/ sounds.…”