Distinguishing groups of children with persistent speech disorder: Findings from a prospective population study

Abstract

As part of a large-scale study of children's development, 7390 children were assessed on a range of speech tasks. These were used to identify three groups of children with speech errors within the sample: persistent speech disorder (PSD); speech errors but below the threshold for classification as persistent speech disorder (non-PSD); and common clinical distortions only (CCD). These three groups were compared on demographic factors, performance on IQ, non-word repetition, and diadochokinetic tests. Findings showed that the PSD group and the non-PSD group were most similar for gender, socio-economic status, IQ, and non-word repetition. In the diadochokinetic tasks, the PSD group and the CCD groups were more similar. Implications for these findings in terms of clinical practice are discussed.

Key words::

• ALSPAC
• children
• disorder
• persistent
• population
• speech

Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful to all the families who took part in this study, the midwives for their help in recruiting them, and the whole ALSPAC team, which includes interviewers, computer and laboratory technicians, clerical workers, research scientists, volunteers, managers, receptionists, and nurses. We are particularly grateful to the speech team who collected and transcribed the speech samples. We are thankful to Professor Lawrence D. Shriberg for his advice on case identification. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Sue Loader, speech and language therapist, who had the foresight to initiate the collection of speech and language data from the children when the children were aged 25 months.

Declaration of interest: The UK Medical Research Council (Grant ref: 74882), the Wellcome Trust (Grant ref: 076467), and the University of Bristol provide core support for ALSPAC. This publication is the work of the authors, and Wren, Roulstone, and Miller will serve as guarantors for the contents of this paper. This research was specifically funded by the UK Medical Research Council (Grant ref: G0501804 ID 76829).