Speech Development Between 30 and 119 Months in Typical Children II: Articulation Rate Growth Curves.
Tristan J Mahr, Jennifer U Soriano, Paul J Rathouz and 1 others
PMID 34586882WHAT IT FOUND
Typically developing children show wide variation in articulation rate.
By age 4, the 5th percentile is 2.5 syllables per second. By age 10, the 5th percentile is 3.0 syllables per second. Rates increase with age and utterance length, but most children take years to reach adult speeds.
Key findings
01The 5th percentile for articulation rate in typically developing children is 2.5 syllables per second at age 4 years and 3.0 syllables per second at age 10 years.
02Articulation rate increases with age and utterance length, with a one-word increase in length producing a similar rate increase to a one-year increase in age.
03Variability in articulation rate is greater within a single age group than between different age groups, meaning many children remain below adult rates until late childhood.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used a controlled sentence repetition task, so results may not apply to spontaneous or conversational speech. The sample was drawn from Wisconsin, limiting generalizability to other regions. The study did not measure pause behavior, which is a key component of overall speech rate. The study did not include children with speech disorders, so diagnostic cutoffs are based on typical development only.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institutes of Health. No conflicts of interest reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a child with an articulation rate below 3.2 syllables per second has a disorder. This value represents the 10th percentile of adults, and half of typically developing children do not reach it until age 6. Use the 5th percentile benchmarks for concern.