Analysis of pauses occurring in the speech of children with consistent misarticulations

Pauses that occur in the speech of children with misarticulations were measured and compared with those of normal children in terms of the duration of pauses and frequency of occurrence. The two groups were compared on three types of speaking tasks: paraphrased speech, picture-series description, and conversation. The two groups were also compared on three levels of duration categories: 10-50 msec, articulatory pauses; 51-250 msec, mixed pauses; and 251-3000 msec, hesitation pauses. There was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of duration or frequency of pauses. There were significant differences in the duration of pauses in terms of the speaking tasks. Picture-series description produced the highest mean pause durations; conversation the lowest. Because higher duration of pauses indicate more cognitive difficulty in formulating language, it was concluded that children with misarticulations do not have a more difficult time with the cognitive aspects of language formulation, but that they do experience trouble in some level of the encoding process, which causes a reduction in articulatory proficiency. It was also concluded that picture description is a more difficult speaking task cognitively in terms of language production.