Association between Ability to Discriminate Speech Sounds and Process of Articulation Acquisition in Children with Articulation Disorders

Abstract

An auditory picture-pointing task was used to investigate external discrimination, i.e. discrimination of speech sounds produced by others, in seven children with articulation disorders. No children included in the study had received any articulation training. Non-disordered children aged 3 and 4 years (10 each) were used as the control group.
A one-fourth selection task consisting of the two-mora words "ka-me" and "sa-me," together with /k/ and /s/ as initial sounds combined with "a-me" and "ma-me," which have the same succeeding sounds, was carried out to calculate the number of total correct answers and the percentage of terms selected from the lexicon, and to determine the reaction time. The results demonstrated that the external discrimination ability in the group of children with articulation disorders substituting the initial sound /k/ was similar to that observed in the control group of children aged 4 years. In contrast, the results further indicated that the group of children with articulation disorders substituting the initial sound /s/ had similar external discrimination ability to that of the control group of children aged 3 years.
Our investigation of the external discrimination ability of children with articulation disorders indicated that some sounds may be easy to discriminate and others difficult to discriminate, depending on the patterns of articulation errors. The results suggested that awareness of one's own articulation of speech sounds may be important in acquiring articulation.