Description
Aims: A considerable subgroup of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties in their speech production development. To monitor their speech production, clinicians need sensitive measures that can show subtle changes in children’s development over short periods of time. We developed two new Dutch speech performance measures; a Dutch version of the Word Complexity Measure (WCM) and the FONO-P (phonology-points). The aims of this study are to examine whether (1) the two new performance measures capture change in speech production skills over a period of three months, (2) these measures are more sensitive to change (i.e., have higher change rates) than an established, frequently used accuracy measure (i.e., PCC-R), and (3) performance and accuracy measures can have different change rates on an individual level.Method: We examined single word productions of 54 children with DLD and speech production difficulties (mean age = 4;0, SD = 9 months), elicited at two time points. We used Wilcoxon signed-rank tests to check whether the children improve on the WCM and FONO-P between T1 and T2, and a mixed effects analysis to examine whether these measures show more change than the PCC-R. Finally, we did an exploratory analysis on the three measures on an individual level to see whether or not children’s change rates are similar for performance and accuracy measures.
Results: Children show significant growth on the WCM and FONO-P between T1 and T2. There was no evidence that the WCM, FONO-P, and PCC-R differ in their sensitivity for monitoring change. Our exploratory analysis suggests that differences in change rates between performance and accuracy measures are possible for certain (subgroups of) children.
Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that the performance measures are of added value for monitoring speech production skills of subgroups of children with DLD, especially for younger children, and, more generally, children with relatively low levels of speech production ability.
| Period | 28 Sept 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | ESLA congress of speech and language therapy |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Brugge, BelgiumShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |