29 Jul Differences between School-Aged Children with Apraxia of Speech and Other Speech Sound Disorders on Multisyllable Repetition
Nina R Benway and Jonathan L Preston published an article titled Differences between school-aged children with apraxia of speech and other speech sound disorders on multi-syllable repetition in an ASHA Perspectives Clinical Forum dedicated to Childhood Apraxia of Speech. The article describes their study which found that multi-syllable word repetition is an appropriate task to differentiate motor planning difficulties for some children and is summarized here.
Differences between School-Aged Children with Apraxia of Speech and Other Speech Sound Disorders on Multisyllable Repetition
By Nina R Benway and Jonathan L Preston
Multisyllabic word repetitions require children to demonstrate skill in speech sound production, word structure, and prosodic accuracy. Because these aspects of speech are often impacted in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), multisyllabic word repetitions may be a useful assessment tool. Multisyllabic word production continues to develop during the school years in typical children (James, van Doorn, McLeod, & Esterman, 2008), which makes it possible that typically developing children and children with non-CAS speech sound disorders will have difficulty with some aspects of multisyllabic word repetitions also. That raises our study’s primary question: which specific speech features, elicited during multisyllabic words productions, can be used to differentially distinguish between school-aged children with CAS and non-CAS Speech Sound Disorders (SSD)?
To answer this question, we first determined a list of perceptual speech features that previous researchers had investigated to see if the feature could distinguish the speech of children with CAS versus children with non-CAS SSD. This analysis shows that the same feature didn’t always produce the same result from study to study.
We then narrowed that list down to 15 unique features that could occur in multisyllabic words, and then counted how many times children in our sample (61 children total aged 7-17, 21 diagnosed with CAS and 40 diagnosed with non-CAS SSD) produced each speech feature during repetition of 20 multisyllabic words (from Preston & Edwards, 2007). Next, we looked to see if the frequency of occurrence of any feature differed significantly between children with and without CAS. In this sample, we found that children with CAS had more voicing changes and full syllable deletions, fewer structurally correct words and less accurate lexical stress, than children with non-CAS SSD.
Overall, features of CAS that affect phoneme accuracy, word structure, and prosody may be likely to persist into late childhood and early adolescence, and multisyllabic word repetition can be used as an assessment tool to detect these speech features. Our results agreed with some previous findings but not others. We believe that the mismatch seen in CAS study results is due partly to the fact that CAS can be thought of as a spectrum of difficulty with significant individual variation and features that change as children develop. This underlines the importance of planning intervention for children based on their individual speech needs, and not a strict set of features defining what CAS “should” look like.
View a PDF of the article here.
REFERENCES
James, D. G., van Doorn, J., McLeod, S., & Esterman, A. (2008). Patterns of consonant deletion in typically developing children aged 3 to 7 years. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 10(3), 179-192. doi:10.1080/17549500701849789
Preston, J. L., & Edwards, M. L. (2007). Phonological processing skills of adolescents with residual speech sound errors. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 38(4), 297-308. doi:10.1044/0161-1461(2007/032)
ASHA Sig 2 Perspectives Forum May, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_PERSP-19-00086
Nina R Benway and Jonathan L Preston published an article titled Differences between school-aged children with apraxia of speech and other speech sound disorders on multi-syllable repetition in an ASHA Perspectives Clinical Forum dedicated to Childhood Apraxia of Speech. The article describes their study which found that multi-syllable word repetition is an appropriate task to differentiate motor planning difficulties for some children and is summarized here.
Differences between School-Aged Children with Apraxia of Speech and Other Speech Sound Disorders on Multisyllable Repetition
By Nina R Benway and Jonathan L Preston
Multisyllabic word repetitions require children to demonstrate skill in speech sound production, word structure, and prosodic accuracy. Because these aspects of speech are often impacted in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), multisyllabic word repetitions may be a useful assessment tool. Multisyllabic word production continues to develop during the school years in typical children (James, van Doorn, McLeod, & Esterman, 2008), which makes it possible that typically developing children and children with non-CAS speech sound disorders will have difficulty with some aspects of multisyllabic word repetitions also. That raises our study’s primary question: which specific speech features, elicited during multisyllabic words productions, can be used to differentially distinguish between school-aged children with CAS and non-CAS Speech Sound Disorders (SSD)?
To answer this question, we first determined a list of perceptual speech features that previous researchers had investigated to see if the feature could distinguish the speech of children with CAS versus children with non-CAS SSD. This analysis shows that the same feature didn’t always produce the same result from study to study.
We then narrowed that list down to 15 unique features that could occur in multisyllabic words, and then counted how many times children in our sample (61 children total aged 7-17, 21 diagnosed with CAS and 40 diagnosed with non-CAS SSD) produced each speech feature during repetition of 20 multisyllabic words (from Preston & Edwards, 2007). Next, we looked to see if the frequency of occurrence of any feature differed significantly between children with and without CAS. In this sample, we found that children with CAS had more voicing changes and full syllable deletions, fewer structurally correct words and less accurate lexical stress, than children with non-CAS SSD.
Overall, features of CAS that affect phoneme accuracy, word structure, and prosody may be likely to persist into late childhood and early adolescence, and multisyllabic word repetition can be used as an assessment tool to detect these speech features. Our results agreed with some previous findings but not others. We believe that the mismatch seen in CAS study results is due partly to the fact that CAS can be thought of as a spectrum of difficulty with significant individual variation and features that change as children develop. This underlines the importance of planning intervention for children based on their individual speech needs, and not a strict set of features defining what CAS “should” look like.
View a PDF of the article here.
REFERENCES
James, D. G., van Doorn, J., McLeod, S., & Esterman, A. (2008). Patterns of consonant deletion in typically developing children aged 3 to 7 years. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 10(3), 179-192. doi:10.1080/17549500701849789
Preston, J. L., & Edwards, M. L. (2007). Phonological processing skills of adolescents with residual speech sound errors. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 38(4), 297-308. doi:10.1044/0161-1461(2007/032)
ASHA Sig 2 Perspectives Forum May, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_PERSP-19-00086
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