Articulatory, Segmental, and Prosodic Characteristics in Children with Speech Sound Disorders

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): According to the American Speech-Language Hearing Association's 2007 Technical Report, childhood apraxia of speech is defined as a "core impairment in planning and/or programming spatiotemporal parameters of movement sequences [that] results in errors in speech sound production and prosody." However, there is a remarkable paucity of data regarding how these children actually control the spatiotemporal components of speech production. The broad objective of this project is to begin to fill this crucial gap in the literature by understanding how speech motor deficits interact with phonological and linguistic skill. These findings will have major implications for developing efficacious intervention approaches for children with speech sound disorders. The purpose of the current project is to test how features associated with childhood apraxia of speech, including articulatory and phonetic variability and prosody, may differentiate children with childhood apraxia of speech, phonological speech sound disorders, and specific language impairment. Speech kinematics, including point measures of prosodic structure and a well-established measure of articulatory stability, the spatiotemporal index, are used to test claims that articulatory variability and prosodic impairments are core deficits of childhood apraxia of speech. Aim 1 seeks to determine how linguistic load influences articulatory variability through the inclusion of an imitation task (low-load) and a retrieval task (high load). Aim 2 directly tests th relationship between articulatory and segmental variability in the production of novel word forms in these three groups of children. Aim 3 investigates if the ability to produce weak-strong syllable sequences differentiates these three groups. The results of this study will delineate if features associated with childhood apraxia of speech differentiate motor-based and language-based speech sound disorders, and specify how motor and language components of speech production interact in children with different profiles of speech and language disorders.