Speech Rate and Fluency in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

Reduced speech fluency is frequent in clinical paediatric populations, an unexplained finding. To investigate age related effects on speech fluency variables, we analysed samples of narrative speech (picture description) of 308 healthy children, aged 5 to 17 years, and studied its relation with verbal fluency tasks. All studied measures showed significant developmental effects. Speech rate and verbal fluency scores increased, while pauses, repetitions and locution time declined with age. Speech rate correlated with semantic fluency tasks suggesting that it also depends upon the efficacy of lexical retrieval. These results indicate that the interpretation of disorders of speech fluency in childhood must incorporate age appropriate norms.

Keywords:

• speech fluency in children
• speech rate
• acquired aphasia in children

The authors are indebted to Dr Klaus Wilms, of the University of Aachen, for his help in the statistical analysis of the data. Part of the results presented in this study were presented as a Speech Therapy Dissertation by Rosário Vieira (Abstract : Jornal da Associação Portuguesa de Terapeutas da Fala, 1999). Definite results were presented at the Meeting of the Portuguese Society of Neurology in 2003.