Metrical analysis of the speech of children with suspected developmental apraxia of speech

Previous studies have shown that metrical analysis accounts for syllable om issions in young normally developing children better than prior perspective s. This approach has not yet been applied to children with disorders. inapp ropriate sentential stress has been proposed as a diagnostic marker for a s ubgroup of children with suspected developmental apraxia of speech (SD-DAS) , suggesting that the application of metrical perspectives to this populati on may be appropriate. This report extends the goal of identifying diagnost ic markers For SD-DAS using analytic procedures from metrical phonology. Th e lexical metrical patterns of children with SD-DAS were compared to those of a group of children with speech delay (SD) to verify the applicability o f metrical constructs to children with disorders while at the same time see king lexical stress characteristics that might be useful for differential d iagnosis. The lexical stress errors of children in both the SD and SD-DAS d isorder groups were found to conform to patterns identified in metrical stu dies of younger normally developing children, confirming the applicability of this approach to children with disorders. Lexical metrical patterns did not differentiate the groups from each other. However, syllable omissions p ersisted to much later ages in the SD-DAS subjects, especially those childr en previously identified as having inappropriate phrasal stress, Further me trical studies of the speech of children with suspected SD-DAS ore needed, both at the lexical and the sentential level, using both perceptual and aco ustic measures.