Perception of Medial Consonants by Children With and Without Speech and Language Disorders: A Preliminary Study

Purpose The aim of this preliminary study was to investigate perception of the early-acquired consonant /p/ and later-acquired consonant /ʃ/ in medial word position by preschoolers with and without speech and language disorders. Method Twenty-four children, six with isolated speech sound disorder (SSD-only), six with SSD and concomitant developmental language disorder (SSD + DLD), and 12 with typical speech and language skills (TD) completed a battery of standardized speech and language tests as well as an identification task of /aCa/ disyllables. Targets and foils varied by only one place, manner, or voice feature. Mixed analysis of variance (participant groups × two target consonants) was conducted to compare performance of children in the three groups (between-subjects) and to compare performance on consonants that are early acquired or later acquired (within-subject). Results All groups of participants were more accurate in perceiving the early-acquired consonant than the later-acquired consonant. Overall performance by children with SSD-only did not differ significantly from children with TD. As a group, children with SSD + DLD were less accurate than children with TD and children with SSD-only for both target consonants. Conclusions Children with SSD + DLD performed less well than peers with SSD-only and with TD with both predictably easy and difficult sound contrasts. Children with SSD-only performed nominally less well than children with TD for the speech sound with which they have difficulty, but this difference did not reach statistical significance for these relatively small group sizes.