The importance of production frequency in therapy for childhood apraxia of speech.

Purpose: This study explores the importance of production frequency during speech therapy to determine whether more practice of speech targets leads to increased performance within a treatment session, as well as to motor learning, in the form of generalization to untrained words.

Method: Two children with childhood apraxia of speech were treated with an alternating treatment AB design, with production frequency differing in the 2 treatments. The higher production frequency treatment required 100+ productions in 15 min, while the moderate-frequency treatment required 30-40 productions in the same time period.

English speech acquisition in 3- to 5-year-old children learning Russian and English.

Purpose: English speech acquisition in Russian-English (RE) bilingual children was investigated, exploring the effects of Russian phonetic and phonological properties on English single-word productions. Russian has more complex consonants and clusters and a smaller vowel inventory than English.

Method: One hundred thirty-seven single-word samples were phonetically transcribed from 14 RE and 28 English-only (E) children, ages 3;3 (years;months) to 5;7.

The development of distinct speaking styles in preschool children.

Purpose: To examine when and how socially conditioned distinct speaking styles emerge in typically developing preschool children's speech.

Method: Thirty preschool children, ages 3, 4, and 5 years old, produced target monosyllabic words with monophthongal vowels in different social-functional contexts designed to elicit clear and casual speaking styles. Thirty adult listeners were used to assess whether and at what age style differences were perceptible.

English speech sound development in preschool-aged children from bilingual English-Spanish environments.

Purpose: English speech acquisition by typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children with monolingual English was compared to English speech acquisition by typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children with bilingual English-Spanish backgrounds. We predicted that exposure to Spanish would not affect the English phonetic inventory but would increase error frequency and type in bilingual children.

Method: Single-word speech samples were collected from 33 children.

The acquisition of two phonetic cues to word boundaries.

The study evaluated whether durational and allophonic cues to word boundaries are intrinsic to syllable production, and so acquired with syllable structure, or whether they are suprasyllabic, and so acquired in phrasal contexts. Twenty preschool children (aged 3;6 and 4;6) produced: (1) single words with simple and complex onsets (e.g.