Follow-up to 16 years of school children who had marked speech defects at 7 years

In this paper we present the results of a follow-up study to age 16 years of 215 children in the National Child Development Study who were reported to show marked speech defects with normal hearing at 7 years. At 16 years information was available for 180 (85%) of the surviving 212 children. 30% of these children were in special schools and of the 70% in ordinary schools, 51% were reported still to have a residual speech problem. Additional health and social problems were frequent among the study group children and with very few exceptions they did badly at school. The findings at 16 years strongly reinforce our earlier conclusions that markedly defective speech at 7 years indicates the likelihood of continued backwardness in the development of acceptable verbal communication, social maturity and scholastic attainments.