Speech Adaptation in Children with Phonological Disorders Using Accented Sentences

Objectives: The purposes of this study were to investigate how children with phonological disorders (PD) process speech variation defined as accented speech and to examine perceptual adaptability by contextual cue of the accented speech. Methods: A total of 55 children (4-8 years old) participated in the study across two days. Accented sentences, spoken by a foreigner, were composed of two different contexts; low and high. Children were to listen to each sentence and identify the last word of each sentence on the screen as depicted by a picture. A separate three-way mixed ANOVA (groupxdayxcontext) was used to analyze the data. Additionally, stepwise multiple regression analysis was used to test which variables predicted the children's adaptability. Results: First, no main effect of group but day effect and significant interaction effect of groupxday and contextxday was found. For RT, there was no main effect of group but day effect was found and interaction effect of groupxday did not reach the conventional significant level. Second, it was articulation accuracy which predicted both groups' adaptability accuracy scores. However, expressive vocabulary scores significantly predicted children with PD's adaptability of response time differently from typically developing children. Conclusion: Results indicated that children with PD, as well as typically developing children, have good speech adaptability. Speech variation and adap-tability may be important factors to consider when clinically assessing children's speech processing and language skills, as well as when designing and implementing therapy tasks.