The relationship between speech perception and production: Evidence from children with speech production errors

Abstract

Children with speech sound disorders (SSD), for reasons that are not well understood, fail to produce age-appropriate speech production targets in isolation, words, and/or functional conversation. One line of research suggests these children exhibit underlying perceptual deficits for acoustic cues that distinguish similar phonemes, exhibiting particular deficits for those phonemes produced in error (e.g., /r/, /l/) (Monnin and Huntington, 1974; Shuster, 1998), although other studies have reported mixed results in children with SSD (Locke, 1980; Rvachew and Jamieson, 1989). In the current study, children with SSD and typically developing children were presented with a perceptual discrimination task involving a phoneme produced in error by the SSD children (i.e., /r/). Findings revealed two separate subsets of children with SSD. The first exhibited poor discrimination of /r/ while a second exhibited exceptionally good discrimination of the same contrast. Given that all children with SSD exhibited distorted /r/ productions, a follow-up acoustic analysis is being conducted to identify specific acoustic characteristics of the distorted /r/s in the two groups (i.e., the poor /r/ discriminators versus the excellent /r/ discriminators). The pattern of results relating the acoustical details of /r/ production in these two populations should contribute to a more refined model of speech sound disorders.