Speech production abilities of 4- to 5-year-old children with and without a history of late talking: The tricky tyrannosaurus

Purpose: Research on the speech production abilities of children with a history of late talking (HLT) is limited. We compared 4- to 5-year-old children with and without a HLT on a routine speech assessment and a single-word polysyllable assessment.

Method: The two speech assessments were administered to 13 children with a HLT (4;4–5;9 years) and 11 children with a history of typical development (HTD) (4;1–5;10 years). Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

Result: The HLT group had significantly poorer speech accuracy than the HTD group on both the routine speech and polysyllable assessments. The HLT group also showed a significantly higher percentage occurrence of consonant omissions on both speech assessments compared to the HTD group. Descriptive analysis of participants’ polysyllable productions indicated that the HLT group showed a higher percentage occurrence of a range of error types compared to the HTD group.

Conclusion: By 4–5 years of age, children who were late to talk had speech production abilities that were significantly poorer than their peers who were not late to talk, suggesting continued underlying differences.