Speech Processing, Language and Emerging Literacy Skills in 4 Year Old Children with Specific Speech Difficulties

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Stackhouse, Joy | Nathan, Liz | Goulandris, Nata

Affiliations: Department of Human Communication Science, University College London, UK

Abstract: A number of studies have demonstrated that children with speech and language problems often have associated phonological awareness and subsequent literacy difficulties. However, it is not clear how vulnerable children might be identified during the preschool years. This paper investigates the language, auditory discrimination, lexical representations, speech production, phonological awareness and emerging alphabetic skills of forty-seven 4-year old children with specific speech difficulties and makes comparisons with their matched controls. There was a significant group difference between the experimental and control groups on all areas tested. However, there was individual variation within the experimental group. Further analysis revealed that the children with both speech and language problems performed least well on the tasks. They had more severe speech difficulties and more pervasive speech processing problems than the children with speech problems alone. The importance of including auditory lexical tasks when investigating children’s speech and language problems is stressed.

Keywords: speech and language difficulties, auditory discrimination, phonological awareness, letter knowledge

DOI: 10.3233/ACS-1999-9104

Journal: Journal of Clinical Speech and Language Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 11-34, 1999