Performance of Swedish children on a dynamic motor speech assessment

Purpose: This study was designed to evaluate the performance of typically developing Swedish-speaking children on DYMTA (Dynamisk Motorisk Talbedömning), a Swedish dynamic motor speech assessment.

Method: Participants were 94 children, 45 boys/49 girls (9/8 multilingual), with typical oral motor, speech, and language skills, between 37 and 106 months divided into five age-groups. They performed two speech motor assessments, DYMTA-A and DYMTA-B using dynamic assessment.

Result: Typically developing children show good motor speech performance on targeted speech characteristics already at the age of three. DYMTA median total score was high for all ages; 90% of maximum or above. A significant correlation with age was found for DYMTA-A (p = 0.000, r = 0.49) and DYMTA-B (p = 0.000, r = 0.77). No significant differences were found across gender or concerning being mono- or multilingual.

Conclusion: DYMTA is the first Swedish assessment tool designed to identify children with CAS. The results of this study demonstrate that typically developing Swedish children perform well on DYMTA and that the test has possible utility for both mono- and multilingual children.