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. 2018 Mar 15;61(3):675-689.
doi: 10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-17-0066.

Influence of Language Load on Speech Motor Skill in Children With Specific Language Impairment

Meredith Saletta  1 , Lisa Goffman  2 , Caitlin Ward  1 , Jacob Oleson  1
Affiliations

Influence of Language Load on Speech Motor Skill in Children With Specific Language Impairment

Meredith Saletta et al. J Speech Lang Hear Res. .

Abstract

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show particular deficits in the generation of sequenced action: the quintessential procedural task. Practiced imitation of a sequence may become rote and require reduced procedural memory. This study explored whether speech motor deficits in children with SLI occur generally or only in conditions of high linguistic load, whether speech motor deficits diminish with practice, and whether it is beneficial to incorporate conditions of high load to understand speech production.

Method: Children with SLI and typical development participated in a syntactic priming task during which they generated sentences (high linguistic load) and, then, practiced repeating a sentence (low load) across 3 sessions. We assessed phonetic accuracy, speech movement variability, and duration.

Results: Children with SLI produced more variable articulatory movements than peers with typical development in the high load condition. The groups converged in the low load condition. Children with SLI continued to show increased articulatory stability over 3 practice sessions. Both groups produced generated sentences with increased duration and variability compared with repeated sentences.

Conclusions: Linguistic demands influence speech motor production. Children with SLI show reduced speech motor performance in tasks that require language generation but not when task demands are reduced in rote practice.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Session structure.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Extracted movement sequences from a child with SLI's productions of the sentence, “Mom pats the puppy.” The left column represents productions elicited by priming; the right column represents repeated productions. The top two panels represent the raw movement records. The middle two panels represent the same records, now time normalized and amplitude normalized. The bottom two panels represent the standard deviations of the normalized records, the sums of which compose the spatiotemporal index (STI) values for lip aperture, or the lip aperture index (LA index). SLI = specific language impairment.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Speech stability by group and task. SLI = specific language impairment; STI = spatiotemporal index; TD = typical development.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Speech duration by group and task. SLI = specific language impairment; TD = typical development.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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