Speech processing in children with functional articulation disorders

Abstract

This study explored auditory speech processing and comprehension abilities in 5–8-year-old monolingual Hungarian children with functional articulation disorders (FADs) and their typically developing peers. Our main hypothesis was that children with FAD would show co-existing auditory speech processing disorders, with different levels of these skills depending on the nature of the receptive processes. The tasks included (i) sentence and non-word repetitions, (ii) non-word discrimination and (iii) sentence and story comprehension. Results suggest that the auditory speech processing of children with FAD is underdeveloped compared with that of typically developing children, and largely varies across task types. In addition, there are differences between children with FAD and controls in all age groups from 5 to 8 years. Our results have several clinical implications.

Keywords:

• Children with functional articulation disorder
• sentence and non-word repetitions
• sound discrimination
• story comprehension

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Susan Rvachew, Ferenc Bunta, András Beke, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier versions of the text.

Declaration of interest

The authors report that they have no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 Both of the authors are phoneticians with long years of experience in labelling various types of (typical and disordered) speech. In addition, both of them are licensed users of the GMP standardized diagnostic tool for the evaluation of children’s auditory speech processing.