Aims: To investigate the developmental trajectory of the rate and perceptual assessment of oral diadochokinesis (DDK) in typically developing children compared with adults. Also to examine the characteristics of DDK productions in children with speech sound disorders (SSD) and the relationship between DDK production and percentage of consonants…

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: Children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) often struggle with forming early representations for phonemes and words, which could impact their speech production as well as their lexical access. This difficulty may limit their ability to accurately identify nonexemplar productions of words, such as developmental misarticulations produced…

Background: Speech sound disorders (SSDs) in children are heterogeneous. Differentiating children with SSDs into distinct subtypes is important so that each child receives a treatment approach well suited to the particular difficulties they are experiencing. Aims: To study the distinct underlying processes that differentiate phonological…

Background: Children born with cleft palate ± lip (CP ± L) are at risk of speech sound disorder (SSD). Up to 40% continue to have SSD at age 5-6 years. These difficulties are typically described as articulatory in nature and often include cleft speech characteristics (CSC) hypothesized to result from structural differences. In non-CP ± L SSD…

Background: Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) are at increased risk of reading difficulties due to poor phonological processing skills. However, the extent to which children with SSD demonstrate weaknesses on specific or all phonological processing tasks is not well understood. Aims: To examine the phonological processing abilities of a…

Purpose: Phonologically complex targets (e.g., [pl-]) are understood to facilitate widespread gains following speech sound intervention, and yet, available research largely features word-"initial" clusters. The present study investigates intervention effects following treatment of complex clusters presented in word-"final"…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to (a) provide evidence for a theoretical model of between-language interaction in bilingual phonological production through the examination of substitution error patterns and to (b) provide developmental data on bilingual children with and without speech sound impairments for use in clinical assessment and…

Purpose: Reporting of outcome and experience measures is critical to our understanding of the effect of intervention for speech sound disorders (SSD) in children. There is currently no agreed-upon set of measures for reporting intervention outcomes and experiences. In this article, we introduce the Speech Outcome Reporting Taxonomy (SORT), a tool…

Background: Children with phonological impairment present with pattern-based errors in their speech production. While some children have difficulties with speech perception and/or the establishment of robust underlying phonological representations, the nature of phonological impairment in children is still not well understood. Given that…

Background: Nonword repetition (NWR) is a common phonological processing task that is reported to tap into many cognitive, perceptual, and motor processes. For this reason, NWR is often used in assessment batteries to aid in verifying the presence of a reading or language disorder. Aims: To examine the extent to which child- and item-level factors…

Purpose: This study investigated articulatory patterns for American English /[Voiced alveolar approximant]/ in children with and without a history of residual speech sound disorder (RSSD). It was hypothesized that children without RSSD would favor bunched tongue shapes, similar to American adults reported in previous literature. Based on clinical…

Background: Children with speech sound difficulties often require educational psychology services, yet systematic reviews examining the association between these difficulties and language or reading problems are lacking. This meta-analysis examines whether these children are at higher risk of language and reading difficulties compared to their…

Clinicians providing intervention for pediatric speech sound disorders (SSDs) have many treatment approach options from which to select. Because treatment needs vary across children based on many factors including the error type(s) present and patterns of deficit noted, these factors need to be considered early in the therapeutic process to find…

Background: Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) form a heterogeneous group, with respect to severity, etiology, proximal causes, speech error characteristics, and response to treatment. Infants develop speech and language in interaction with neurological maturation and general perceptual, motoric, and cognitive skills in a social-emotional…