Articulation or phonology? Evidence from longitudinal error data

ABSTRACT

Children’s speech difficulties can be motor (phone misarticulation) or linguistic (impaired knowledge of phonological contrasts and constraints). These two difficulties sometimes co-occur. This paper reports longitudinal data from the Early Language in Victoria Study (ELVS) at 4 and 7 years of age. Of 1494 participants, 93 made non-age appropriate speech errors on standardised assessments at 4 years, and were able to be reassessed at 7 years. At 4 years, 85% of these children only made phonological errors, 14% made both articulation and phonological errors and one child only made articulation errors (a lateral lisp). In total, 8 of 13 children making both articulation and phonological errors at 4 years had resolved by 7 years. Unexpectedly, eight children who had demonstrated articulation of fricatives at 4 years, acquired distorted production of ≥ 50% of occurrences of/s, z/ by 7 years. In total, then, 22 children (24% of children with speech difficulties) made articulatory errors at one or both assessments. Case data for all children are presented. Theoretical and clinical implications are considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Longitudinal study
• articulation disorder
• phonological delay
• phonological disorder
• developmental change

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Colleen Holt for phonetics mentoring; Kelly Ng and Katherine Brommeyer for data collection and analysis during their Masters of Speech Pathology.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ For the data reported, the terms misarticulation and distortion denote perceptually unacceptable productions of /s, z/ due to dentalized or interdental tongue placement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council [1105008, 1116976, 1127144, 607315].