A Longitudinal Comparison of Speech Rate of Spontaneous Utterances vs Repeated Utterances in Preschool Children

Abstract

Most researchers have concluded that the rate of speech increases gradually from young childhood to adulthood; however, a detailed understanding of the longitudinal trajectory of speech rate development is clearly lacking from even a brief review of existing data. This shortcoming has recently taken on clinical relevance for fluency disorders (e.g. Chon et al., 2012; Tumanova et al., 2011; Kloth et al., 1995) because aberrations in speech rate are noted in early developmental stuttering (Kloth et al., 1995). Achieving adult-like speech rate is actually a developmental accomplishment, but there is essentially no published data from typical children at the critical times when speech and grammar are developing to understand how motor development and language development shape speech rate. This longitudinal study is the first to evaluate speech rate development in 5 children between 24 and 36 months over the period when grammar emerges. It tests whether speech rate increases across this critical language development period and whether original utterances differ in rate compared to repeated sentences.