Phonological encoding in speech-sound disorder: evidence from a cross-modal priming experiment.

The study included only 36 children, and only 18 of the 25 children with speech sound disorder who enrolled in the larger project completed the task, so the sample was small and may not represent all children with speech sound disorder. The children were aged three to seven years, and half were younger than the youngest age group examined in previous picture-word interference work, so the results may not apply to older children. The task measured naming speed in the lab, not speech intelligibility, communication participation or response to therapy, so it cannot show how to treat speech sound disorder. The interfering words had many close sound neighbours, with counts from 7 to 33, and the same words sometimes served as the same word, a same-starting-sound word, a same-ending word, or an unrelated word for different pictures, which may have changed the interference pattern. The groups differed in speech accuracy, expressive vocabulary and phoneme discrimination, and the authors used regressions to try to account for this, but the study cannot cleanly separate these factors. The main predicted difference was not supported, and the only group difference was a general faster response time relative to the neutral tone, which the authors did not predict as a marker of a sound planning deficit.

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Do not conclude that phonological encoding is intact in speech sound disorder. The study tested one picture naming task in 36 children aged three to seven years, and it did not find the specific naming speed benefit from words that share the ending that it predicted, but that does not rule out all phonological encoding difficulties.