Speech perception and production errors in dysphasic children

Abstract

In studies previously reported, children with developmental dysphasia were found to have difficulty in perceiving brief duration acoustic cues in speech. Thus, they were unable to identify and discriminate initial stop consonants. Twelve developmental dysphasics who had participated in the previous studies and 12 matched control children were tested for their ability to imitate (1) steady‐state vowels, (2) diphthongs, (3) consonant‐vowel syllables, and (4) consonant‐vowel‐consonant nonsense syllables produced by the examiner. Secondly, subjects were required to produce the names of pictured objects, i.e., single‐syllable words comprising stop‐consonants in the initial and final position as well as words comprising primarily vowels and diphtongs. Results demonstrated that the dysphasics who failed to discriminate between speech sounds which incorporate brief duration acoustic cues also failed to produce such speech sounds correctly. Those dysphasics whose perception of brief acoustic cues was less impaired in the previous studies were less impaired in their production of speech sounds incorporating brief acoustic cues. All subjects proved able to produce correctly longer duration vowel sounds, which are easily perceived. Short vowels and diphthongs were difficult for those children whose rate of processing problems were most severe.