Lexical Predictors of Intelligibility in Young Children's Speech.

The study used only 38 target words, and this small word set left gaps in the combinations of target frequency and neighborhood competition. All children were typically developing, so the paper states that further work is needed before extending the findings to children with speech motor impairment or other speech sound disorders. The youngest children were less than 3 years of age, which limited the pool of familiar or picturable words. The definition of phonological neighbors treated similarity as all-or-nothing and depended on the pronunciation dictionary, so neighborhood competition estimates may change with a finer similarity rule. The effects of neighborhood competition and motor complexity were uncertain because the plausible ranges included no change. The study measured listener transcription of repeated words and did not test an intervention or communication strategy.

The study was funded by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders grants R01DC015653 and R01DC009411, awarded to Katherine C. Hustad, and by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant U54HD090256. No commercial sponsor is named in the text.

Do not conclude that choosing high-frequency words will improve intelligibility for children with speech disorders. This paper measured how often unfamiliar listeners transcribed 38 words produced by 165 typically developing children, and it did not test an intervention.