Speech Perception and Phonological Awareness Skills in Thai-Speaking Children with Speech Sound Disorders.
Ketnipa Ratanakul, Wendy Cohen, Dwight C K Tse and 1 others
Thai-speaking preschoolers with mild-to-moderate speech sound disorders scored the same as typically developing peers on five speech perception and phonological awareness tasks once age and vocabulary were taken into account.
A few individual children fell below the typical range.
Key findings
1Across all five tasks (phonemic discrimination, lexical and phonetic judgement, initial phoneme identification, rime awareness, lexical tone awareness), no significant group difference between SSD and TD children remained after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary.
2On the lexical and phonetic judgement task, SSD children scored significantly lower than TD children in the model without covariates (p = 0.01), but this difference disappeared once age and receptive vocabulary were included (p = 0.14).
3Six individual children with SSD scored two standard deviations below the group mean: two on phonemic discrimination, one on rime awareness, and three on lexical tone awareness (one child was below range on both phonemic discrimination and lexical tone awareness).
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What it does not show
The authors explicitly label this a pilot study exploring feasibility and usability of the tasks, not a definitive test of whether SSD children have perception or PA difficulties. All children with SSD had mild-to-moderate severity (mean PCC 76.72), so the finding says nothing about children with more severe disorders. Lexical tone awareness showed a ceiling effect in the TD group, and the authors note this may have limited the ability to detect group differences. There are no standardised Thai articulation or phonology assessments, so children could not be subtyped (articulatory vs phonological), and the SSD group was heterogeneous in error patterns. The SSD group was recruited from both hospitals and schools while the TD group came from schools only, though the authors note the severity ranges were similar across recruitment sites. No data were collected on socioeconomic status or parental education, and the recruitment area (Bangkok and surrounding provinces) has a higher average household income than the national average. The sample is small (32 SSD, 44 TD) and drawn from one dialect region (Central Thai).
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The work was conducted as part of a PhD study sponsored by the Faculty of Medicine, Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University, Thailand.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the null group difference as proof that children with SSD have no speech perception or phonological awareness problems. The study included only mild-to-moderate cases, showed ceiling effects on at least one task, and six individual children scored below the typical range. A group average that looks fine can still hide the children who need help.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →