Speech production abilities of 4- to 5-year-old children with and without a history of late talking: The tricky tyrannosaurus

Abstract

Purpose: Research on the speech production abilities of children with a history of late talking (HLT) is limited. We compared 4- to 5-year-old children with and without a HLT on a routine speech assessment and a single-word polysyllable assessment.

Method: The two speech assessments were administered to 13 children with a HLT (4;4–5;9 years) and 11 children with a history of typical development (HTD) (4;1–5;10 years). Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

Result: The HLT group had significantly poorer speech accuracy than the HTD group on both the routine speech and polysyllable assessments. The HLT group also showed a significantly higher percentage occurrence of consonant omissions on both speech assessments compared to the HTD group. Descriptive analysis of participants’ polysyllable productions indicated that the HLT group showed a higher percentage occurrence of a range of error types compared to the HTD group.

Conclusion: By 4–5 years of age, children who were late to talk had speech production abilities that were significantly poorer than their peers who were not late to talk, suggesting continued underlying differences.

Keywords:

• late talkers
• outcomes
• assessment
• polysyllables
• children

Acknowledgement

Authors express great thanks to all participants for their important contributions to the current study.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2019.1638968