Time-compressed speech discrimination in children and its relationship to articulation

The Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification (WIPI) Test of Speech Discrimination was time compressed at 0, 30, and 60% and administered to 48 normal-hearing children. The children, all between the ages of 5 years, 6 months and six years, 7 months of age, were equally divided into three groups on the basis of articulation ability. Significant effects were found for test groups and levels of time compression, with differences increasing as time compression increased. The implication is that children with multiple articulation errors demonstrate a developmental lag in the ability to process time-compressed speech. Time-compressed speech may be a useful tool in the study of auditory perception in children.