Exploring vowel errors produced in nonword repetition in children with speech and language disorders.
Janet Vuolo, Taylor L Gifford
PMID 39364675WHAT IT FOUND
Children with developmental language disorder and childhood apraxia of speech both made more vowel errors repeating nonsense words than typical peers.
Children with speech sound disorder did not differ significantly from any group. The study used six children per group, so these patterns are preliminary.
Key findings
01Children with DLD and CAS produced more total vowel errors than children with TD; children with SSD did not differ from any group.
02Children with CAS produced more diphthong reduction errors than children with TD, a pattern not shared by the DLD group.
03A group by syllable length interaction was found only for total diphthong errors: children with CAS produced more than SSD and TD groups at 2 syllables, and children with DLD produced more than TD at 3 syllables.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only six children in each diagnostic group, making the results preliminary and unstable. The data were re-analyzed from a previous study, meaning the sample was not originally selected for this specific question. The groups were matched on speech and language scores, which controls for severity but may limit generalizability to children with more diverse profiles. The nonword task used a specific set of vowels; results may not hold for other speech sounds or tasks.
Declared interests
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Extramural). No other conflicts of interest are reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of significant differences between the SSD group and the other groups as evidence that children with SSD have normal vowel production. The study was underpowered to detect the mild deficits suggested by the descriptive data.