Stimulability: Relationships to other characteristics of children's phonological systems

Abstract

In honour of Miccio's memory, this article revisits the topic of stimulability in children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Eighteen children with SSD, aged 3;6–5;5 (M = 4;8), were tested for their system-wide stimulability, percentage consonants correct (PCC), phonetic inventory size, and oral- and speech-motor skills. Pearson Product Moment Correlations were calculated to determine the nature of relations between stimulability and each of these other variables. Results revealed marked relations between stimulability and PCC and between stimulability and inventory size. Relations between stimulability and both multisyllabic nonsense and real word repetition rates were substantial. Findings suggest that stimulability, as measured for a group of sounds typically challenging for children with SSD, reflects both underlying phonological representations (UPRs) and phonetic imitative skill. The impact of poor stimulability skills in children with severe involvement of SSD and limited phonetic inventories implicates not only the potential difficulty non-stimulable sounds pose at the word level, but the need for increasing stimulability in these children. This, in turn, is a tribute to Miccio's intervention programme and the need for including it in both efficacy and efficiency investigations.