Retrospective Parent Report of Early Vocal Behaviours in Children with Phonological Delay

Abstract

Children with speech sound disorders comprise a heterogenous group and often form a large part of a speech-language pathologist’s caseload in a paediatric setting. The early vocal development of these children is of interest, both in understanding the nature of various speech difficulties and for informing the possibility of early identification. Limited babbling has been reported and observed in children later diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS); however, the early development of children with more common speech sound disorders, such as phonological delay (PD), has not been extensively studied. The present study sought to quantify parent report of the early vocal, language and motor development of children with PD. Questionnaire data indicated that the PD group reported results similar to those of the typically developing group on key vocal, language and motor behaviours in early development.

Keywords::

• Infant Vocalisations
• Parental Report
• Phonological Delay
• Speech Sound Disorders

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the SLPs who assisted with recruitment for this study, especially Stacy Fietz who recruited the bulk of participants. Thank you to the parents who so enthusiastically reported on their child’s early development.

Notes

1 In the original study, this group was termed specific language impairment (SLI), but we now use the updated term developmental language disorder (DLD) as per current SPA guidelines and Bishop et al. (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chantelle Highman

Dr Chantelle Highman is a speech pathologist, lecturer and researcher at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia.

Chloe Harper

Chloe Harper is a speech pathologist working in early intervention at a community disability provider and who conducted aspects of the research as a student assignment.

Neville Hennessey

Dr Neville Hennessey is a senior lecturer at Curtin University.

Suze Leitão

A/Prof. Suze Leitao is a clinician, researcher and the Director of Graduate Research in the Curtin School of Allied Health.