12 Nov The Relationship Between Speech Accuracy and Linguistic Measures in Narrative Retells of Children With Speech Sound Disorders
Summary by Julie Case, PhD
Speech sound disorders (SSD), including childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), often occur as part of a complex profile where children may experience difficulties related to language, reading, writing, motor and attentional skills. In the current study we were interested in exploring the relationship between how accurately children with and without SSDs produce speech sounds and their language abilities, knowing that SSD and CAS commonly co-occur with language disorders. There is limited knowledge about speech and language abilities of children with CAS within connected speech, such as the narrative (story-telling) context. This is interesting since there is a greater cognitive load associated with telling a story; in narratives, the child needs to use all their language skills regarding vocabulary, grammar and story structure, while at the same time attempting to produce accurate speech sounds.
A total of 24 children, aged 5-6 years, with CAS, non-CAS SSD, and typical speech-language development participated in this study. All children received a comprehensive speech-language assessment to confirm diagnostic grouping, and all children scored within normal limits on a standardized language assessment including the children with SSDs. Further, all children produced a story retell narrative which was transcribed verbatim to calculate narrative language measures. Our research team measured the degree to which speech accuracy predicted narrative language performance across the three groups of children and compared their narrative performance to a narrative database from 128 age-matched children with typical speech and language skills. Analyses revealed that poorer speech accuracy was associated with a shorter utterance length, reduced variety of vocabulary terms, and a higher likelihood of linguistic errors. In comparison to the larger group of children with typical speech-language development, the majority of children with CAS and non-CAS SSD showed a higher-than-expected proportion of linguistic errors in the narrative context, with only a small proportion of the linguistic errors explained by individual speech errors. We interpret these findings as a trade-off between speech accuracy and language abilities in a context that is more taxing than standardized language testing. These results also highlight the significance of narrative language assessment to identify potential language weaknesses not evidenced in standardized testing. Finally, this work emphasizes the need to acknowledge the elevated risk for language difficulties in these groups of children, and to not automatically attribute linguistic errors to the child’s speech impairment.
Case, J. & Hallin, A.E. (2024). The Relationship Between Speech Accuracy and Linguistic Measures in Narrative Retells of Children With Speech Sound Disorders. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(9S). 3340-3358. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00615
Summary by Julie Case, PhD
Speech sound disorders (SSD), including childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), often occur as part of a complex profile where children may experience difficulties related to language, reading, writing, motor and attentional skills. In the current study we were interested in exploring the relationship between how accurately children with and without SSDs produce speech sounds and their language abilities, knowing that SSD and CAS commonly co-occur with language disorders. There is limited knowledge about speech and language abilities of children with CAS within connected speech, such as the narrative (story-telling) context. This is interesting since there is a greater cognitive load associated with telling a story; in narratives, the child needs to use all their language skills regarding vocabulary, grammar and story structure, while at the same time attempting to produce accurate speech sounds.
A total of 24 children, aged 5-6 years, with CAS, non-CAS SSD, and typical speech-language development participated in this study. All children received a comprehensive speech-language assessment to confirm diagnostic grouping, and all children scored within normal limits on a standardized language assessment including the children with SSDs. Further, all children produced a story retell narrative which was transcribed verbatim to calculate narrative language measures. Our research team measured the degree to which speech accuracy predicted narrative language performance across the three groups of children and compared their narrative performance to a narrative database from 128 age-matched children with typical speech and language skills. Analyses revealed that poorer speech accuracy was associated with a shorter utterance length, reduced variety of vocabulary terms, and a higher likelihood of linguistic errors. In comparison to the larger group of children with typical speech-language development, the majority of children with CAS and non-CAS SSD showed a higher-than-expected proportion of linguistic errors in the narrative context, with only a small proportion of the linguistic errors explained by individual speech errors. We interpret these findings as a trade-off between speech accuracy and language abilities in a context that is more taxing than standardized language testing. These results also highlight the significance of narrative language assessment to identify potential language weaknesses not evidenced in standardized testing. Finally, this work emphasizes the need to acknowledge the elevated risk for language difficulties in these groups of children, and to not automatically attribute linguistic errors to the child’s speech impairment.
Case, J. & Hallin, A.E. (2024). The Relationship Between Speech Accuracy and Linguistic Measures in Narrative Retells of Children With Speech Sound Disorders. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(9S). 3340-3358. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00615
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