New Phonological Representation of Children with Speech Sound Disorders

Abstract

Objectives: To determine if the phonological representation (PR) deficit of children with speech sound disorders (SSD) begins in the initial stage of PR, this study compared the ability to learn new PR between SSD children and typically developing children (TD). Methods: The study subjects were 14 SSD children and 19 TD children 4, 5, and 6 years of age. After the learning stage, a new PR judgment and retrieval tasks were performed, measuring the accuracy and reaction time of responses. The relationships among age, accuracy of articulation, receptive vocabulary, and task performances were examined. Results: In terms of correct response score on the new PR judgment task, SSD children were significantly lower than TD children. SSD children and TD children had no significant difference in reactions time. With regard to accuracy of the new PR retrieval task, both SSD children and TD children had difficulty with the retrieval of new PR, and thus there was no significant difference. It was found that there were significant correlations between the performance of the new PR judgment task and accuracy of articulation, between the performance of the new PR retrieval task and receptive vocabulary, and between age and both tasks. Conclusion: The study results indicate that SSD children have more difficulty memorizing new PR accurately than TD children. PR deficit of SSD children is likely to begin in the initial stage of PR.