An instrumental phonetic study of lingual activity in articulation-disordered children

Traditional auditory-based assessment procedures for diagnosing articulation disorders are limited in that they provide no direct information on activities of the speech organs. In this study electropalatography (EPG) was used to obtain details of tongue contacts with the hard palate in 4 articulation-disordered children, 2 of whom had been categorized as dysarthric. Their lingual-palatal contact patterns during four repetitions of word lists containing lingual consonants in different phonetic environments, were compared with each other and with a group of normal speakers. EPG provided relevant diagnostic information in that all 4 experimental subjects showed patterns that differed from the normals in both spatial configuration and variability. The nature of their distorted patterns allowed a tentative diagnosis of 2 of the children as verbal dyspraxic.