Risk for speech disorder associated with early recurrent otitis media witheffusion: Two retrospective studies

The goals of this two-part series on children with histories of early recur rent otitis media with effusion (OME) were to assess the risk for speech di sorder with and without hearing loss and to develop a preliminary descripti ve-explanatory model For the findings. Recently available speech analysis p rograms, lifespan reference data, and statistical techniques were implement ed with three cohorts of children with OME and their controls originally as sessed in the 1980s: 35 typically developing 3-year-old children followed s ince infancy in a university-affiliated pediatrics clinic, 50 typically dev eloping children of Native American background Followed since infancy in a tribal health clinic, and (in the second paper) 70 children followed prospe ctively from 2 months of age to 3 years of age and older. Dependent variabl es included information from a suite of 10 metrics of speech production (Sh riberg, Austin, Lewis, McSweeny, & Wilson, 1997a, 1997b). Constraints on av ailable sociodemographic and hearing status information limit generalizatio ns from the comparative findings for each database, particularly data from the two retrospective studies. The present paper reports Findings from risk analysis of conversational speech data from the First two cohorts, each of which included retrospective study of children for whom data on hearing lo ss were not available. Early recurrent OME was not associated with increase d risk for speech disorder in the pediatrics sample but was associated with approximately 4.6 (Cl = 1.10-20.20) increased risk For subclinical or clin ical speech disorder in the children of Native American background. Discuss ion underscores the appropriateness of multifactorial risk models for this subtype of child speech disorder.