Background: Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) form a heterogeneous group who differ in terms of the severity of their condition, underlying cause, speech errors, involvement of other aspects of the linguistic system and treatment response. To date there is no universal and agreed-upon classification system. Instead, a number of…

This report describes three extensions to a classification system for paediatric speech sound disorders termed the Speech Disorders Classification System (SDCS). Part I describes a classification extension to the SDCS to differentiate motor speech disorders from speech delay and to differentiate among three sub-types of motor speech disorders.…

The emerging etiological model for developmental disorders, like dyslexia, is probabilistic and multifactorial while the prevailing cognitive model has been deterministic and often focused on a single cognitive cause, such as a phonological deficit as the cause of dyslexia. So there is a potential contradiction in our explanatory frameworks for…

Children (ages 5-7, N=31) with expressive phonological impairments were tested on phonological awareness and compared with control children. Children with phonological impairments scored well below controls on phonological awareness and literacy, independent of other language problems. Results suggest that both speech impairment and literacy…

Comparison of the speech fluency and phonology of 18 boys (mean age 61 months) who stuttered and demonstrated either normal or disordered phonology found that the two groups were generally similar in terms of their basic speech disfluency, nonsystematic speech error, and self-repair behaviors. Predictions of the covert repair hypothesis of…

Discusses a study that compared speech and prosody-voice profiles of children (ages 4-14) with suspected developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) to profiles of 73 children with speech delay. Also describes a second study of 20 children (ages 3-9) that investigated whether stress was a diagnostic marker of DAS. (Author/CR)

A study used the conversational speech samples from 19 children (ages 4-14) with suspected developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) to investigate the characteristics of the disability. The results of the study, combined with the results of two previous studies, indicate inappropriate stress is a diagnostic marker for DAS. (Author/CR)

This handbook proposes that early speech and language problems may contribute to reading problems. The relationship between oral language problems and written language problems is presented, followed by tools and models of assessment and treatment. In chapter 1, results of follow-up studies of children with early speech and language problems are…