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ERIC Number: EJ1457671
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1092-4388
EISSN: EISSN-1558-9102
Speech Development between 30 and 119 Months in Typical Children III: Interaction between Speaking Rate and Intelligibility
Tristan J. Mahr; Paul J. Rathouz; Katherine C. Hustad
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, v68 n1 p79-90 2025
Purpose: Earlier work has established developmental benchmarks for intelligibility and articulation rate, but the intersection of these two variables, especially within individual children, has received limited attention. This study examines the interaction between intelligibility and speaking rate in typically developing children between the ages 2;6 and 9;11 (years;months) and evaluates whether children show a speed-accuracy trade-off in their habitual speech production. Method: Speech samples of varying lengths were collected from 538 typically developing children. Intelligibility was measured as the number of words correctly transcribed by untrained adult listeners, and speaking rate was calculated in number of syllables per second. Regression models estimated the effects of age, utterance length, and speaking rate on intelligibility. Results: Intelligibility and speaking rate were positively correlated overall but weakly correlated after adjusting for age. In regression analyses, intelligibility increased with age and decreased with utterance length, and there was a trend for intelligibility to decrease with increased speaking rate, especially in longer utterances. At the individual level, for most children, there was a negative effect of speaking rate on intelligibility. Conclusions: Our findings provide evidence from a large-scale sample for the hypothesis that children's speech is subject to a speed-accuracy trade-off where increased speaking rate leads to reduced articulatory accuracy and hence reduced intelligibility. Further research is needed on how to apply this trade-off in a clinical setting.
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. 2200 Research Blvd #250, Rockville, MD 20850. Tel: 301-296-5700; Fax: 301-296-8580; e-mail: slhr@asha.org; Web site: http://jslhr.pubs.asha.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) (DHHS/NIH); Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (DHHS/NIH)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Wisconsin (Madison)
Grant or Contract Numbers: R01DC015653; P50HD105353