Acoustic and Perceptual Speech Production Differences in Preschoolers With a History of Late and Typical Talking

PURPOSE: While an emerging body of research has demonstrated that late talkers (LTs) show continued subclinical deficits in language abilities, less is known about their development of speech production skills. The current study investigated speech production abilities among 3-year-old children with a history of late talking (hLTs) or typical talking (hTTs) using three measures of speech production skills. METHOD: We assessed speech production skills in a sample of 3-year-old children who were previously identified as LTs or typical talkers (44 hTTs, 31 hLTs) using a norm-referenced assessment of articulation abilities, a caregiver-report measure of speech intelligibility, and fine-grained acoustic analyses of both earlier- and later-acquired speech contrasts. We compared groups using continuous measures of performance. RESULTS: Across all three measurement methods/types, hLTs showed poorer speech production skills compared to hTTs. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates that, like on measures of lexical and syntactic development, hLTs experience subclinical differences in speech production skills during the preschool period. Furthermore, these differences were detected using three distinct measurement types that varied in resource intensity and granularity. We consider theoretical and clinical implications. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.33618868.