It's Mine, . . . It's Mine: Unsolicited Repetitions Are Reduced in Toddlers.
Anna Tendera, Matthew Rispoli, Ambikaipakan Sethilselvan and 2 others
PMID 36154743WHAT IT FOUND
Toddlers repeated their own phrases more quickly than the first utterances, and this was already true in the youngest children studied.
Key findings
01Children's unsolicited repetitions were produced more rapidly than their original utterances across the time points.
02At baseline, repeated utterances were faster than original utterances.
03Boys spoke faster than girls at baseline, and this difference stayed significant when each child was left out of the analysis.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 12 typically developing monolingual English-speaking children were studied, so the findings may not apply to children with speech or language disorders, other languages, or different dialects. The study was exploratory and used spontaneous play samples, not controlled utterance types or presentation formats. The nonlinear growth pattern was based on four time points and a small sample, so it needs replication. The study did not test the mechanism behind faster repetitions, such as auditory feedback, priming, or motor practice. It measured whole-utterance articulation rate and syllable count, but not acoustic duration or articulatory kinematics.
Declared interests
The work was supported by NSF funding, and the authors disclosed receipt of financial support for research, authorship, and/or publication. No competing interests or commercial funding are reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that clinicians can speed up a child's speech by prompting repetitions. The study observed children's own unsolicited repetitions, not a therapist's prompt, and it did not test an intervention.