Whole-word measures and the speech production of typically developing Dutch children

ABSTRACT

In this study, the phonological whole-word measure Phonological Mean Length of Utterance was applied to identify stages in the phonological acquisition of Dutch children. Ninety spontaneous speech samples of 47 typically developing Dutch children from a previous study were examined. Samples were distributed across nine age groups ranging between 1;3–4;0 years. Across all age groups, PMLU of word productions increased significantly with the largest increase found below age 2;0 years. PMLU of the target words showed no significant increase across age groups. Outcomes suggest that the phonological whole-word measure PMLU can be further developed for clinical purposes in Dutch-speaking children. In the future, this measure could become relevant for the diagnosis and evaluation of therapy on the basis of spontaneous language.

KEYWORDS:

• Whole-word measure
• phonological acquisition
• phonological mean length of utterance
• Dutch

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to prof. dr. Toni Rietveld for his contribution with the statistical analyses. This article is based on a study performed by the second author as her master thesis at the Department of Speech and Language Pathology of the Radboud University Nijmegen.

Disclosure Statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.