Speech perception in children with speech sound disorder

This paper describes preliminary results from an ongoing study designed to characterize acoustic-phonetic traits in children with speech delay (SD) of unknown origin. Here we present data on 13 SD children and their siblings (26 children in all) from two speech perception tasks: a two-alternative forced choice categorical perception (ID) task, and an error monitoring (EM) task. In the ID task, minimally differing words (e.g., cage – gauge) were used to create 9-step synthetic continua. For the EM task, children heard both correctly and incorrectly articulated words and indicated whether the word was correct or not. Some word tokens in this task were produced by the SD children identified as probands in this study. On both tasks, SD children performed more poorly than their non-SD siblings, showing more gradual slopes in their ID functions, and less accuracy in identifying correct versus error productions.