Sound discrimination and explicit mapping of sounds to meanings in preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder.

The study used laboratory tasks with synthetic vowels and toy objects, not real words or everyday communication. The sample was 52 children, and the authors' power analysis indicated the overall association between discrimination and mapping needed 58 children for 80% power. The groups were not balanced for maternal education; mothers of children with typical language development averaged 1.6 years more education than mothers of children with developmental language disorder. The groups also differed on vocabulary and non-verbal IQ measures, not only expressive language. Speech articulation testing was done only when concerns were reported, so speech-production differences could not be fully examined. Intervention history was not collected in detail; the 4 children from an intensive language preschool had higher means, but this cannot be treated as evidence of intervention effects. Two children from the typical language group were excluded for language concerns and two because software failed, so recruitment and data loss may affect the sample. The implicit mapping task was not reported, so the full learning picture is incomplete. Duration findings may be limited by the lack of natural speech context.

The authors declared no financial or non-financial conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that poor pitch discrimination causes developmental language disorder or that pitch-based training will improve language. This study did not test treatment, and the association between discrimination and mapping was not firm.