Background: The conversational speech of most children can be understood by people outside the family by the time they reach 4 years. However, for some children, speech sound disorders (SSDs) persist into their early school years, and beyond, despite adequate hearing, oromotor function, and language learning opportunities. One explanation for…

Purpose: Cleft palate is one of the most common birth defects in the United States. Most of these children receive speech therapy by preschool and school-based clinicians. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive tutorial for speech-language pathology assistants (SLPAs) regarding treatment techniques and principles for children…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

The study analysed spectral and tongue shape dynamics of voiceless alveolar and postalveolar fricatives produced by ten children learning Scottish English. Synchronised ultrasound tongue imaging data and acoustic data were used to characterise children's productions of the phonemic contrast. Six children had consistently accurate productions of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate typical Spanish-English speech sound development longitudinally in a group of bilingual preschoolers enrolled in a Head Start Program and to examine the extent to which such development is linked to language proficiency. The study also aimed to identify whether speech development is related…

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech…

Background: It is already known that preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) tend to stutter on function words at the beginning of sentences. It is also known that phonological errors potentially resulting in part-word repetitions tend to occur on content words. However, the precise relation between word class and repetition type in preschool-age…

This study investigated the relationship between specific cognitive patterns of strengths and weaknesses (PSWs) and the errors children make in reading, writing, and spelling tests from the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-Third Edition (KTEA-3). Participants were selected from the KTEA-3 standardization sample based on five cognitive…

Purpose: The authors compared preschool children with co-occurring speech sound disorder (SSD) and language impairment (LI) to children with SSD only in their numbers and types of speech sound errors. Method: In this post hoc quasi-experimental study, independent samples t tests were used to compare the groups in the standard score from different…

This study investigated the relationship between specific cognitive patterns of strengths and weaknesses and the errors children make on oral language, reading, writing, spelling, and math subtests from the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-Third Edition (KTEA-3). Participants with scores from the KTEA-3 and either the Wechsler Intelligence…

This article compares the claims of rule- and constraint-based accounts of three seemingly distinct error patterns, namely, Deaffrication, Consonant Harmony and Assibilation, in the sound system of a child with a phonological delay. It is argued that these error patterns are not separate problems, but rather are symptoms of a larger conspiracy to…

We studied spontaneous speech noun-phrase production in eight French-speaking children with SLI (aged 5;0 to 5; 1) and controls matched on age (4;10 to 5;11) or MLU (aged 3;2 to 4;1). Results showed that children with SLI prefer simple DP structures to complex ones while producing more substitution and omission errors than controls. The three…

Liaison and elision in French are phonological phenomena that apply across word boundaries. French-speaking children make errors in contexts where liaison/elision typically occurs in adult speech. In this study, we asked if acquisition of French liaison/elision can be explained in a constructivist framework. We tested if children's liaison/elision…

Most children's speech difficulties are "functional" (i.e. no known sensory, motor or intellectual deficits). Speech disorder may, however, be associated with cognitive deficits considered core abilities in executive function: rule abstraction and cognitive flexibility. The study compares the rule abstraction and cognitive flexibility of…

Children with unintelligible speech differ in severity, underlying deficit, type of surface error patterns and response to treatment. Detailed treatment case studies, evaluating specific intervention protocols for particular diagnostic groups, can identify best practice for children with speech disorder. Three treatment case studies evaluated the…