Non-Modal Phonation in Children with Speech Disorders

The occurrence of voice disorder and of non-modal phonation were measured in the speech of 53 children. Thirty seven monolingual English speaking children with developmental speech disorder and compared with that in 16 age-matched children with normal speech development. The children’s ages ranged from 4 to 6 years. The speech disordered children were further assigned to 3 subgroups according to Dodd’s [1] classification of developmental speech disorder: delayed, deviant consistent and deviant inconsistent. There was no difference in the prevalence of voice disorder between the normal and speech disordered children. There were, however, significant differences in the presence of non-modal phonation patterns between the normal and disordered speakers. Amongst the subgroups of speech disordered children the deviant inconsistent group significantly used higher amounts of non-modal phonation patterns compared to the other 2 subgroups. These results suggest that poorer speech motor control underlies the speech production of children classified as having a deviant inconsistent speech disorder.