ACQ Vol 13 no 2 2011

Assessment

An overview of resources for assessing toddlers’ productions of polysyllables Elise Baker and Natalie Munro

Historically, routine assessment of children’s speech has focused on consonant accuracy (e.g., ability to pronounce /k/ in car , bucket , and bike ). The discovery of a link between the ability to produce polysyllables and speech, language, phonological processing, and later literacy abilities suggests that speech pathologists (SPs) need to extend their focus from consonant accuracy to children’s ability to produce polysyllables, considering syllable number, shape, and stress pattern accuracy. This paper reviews a range of experimental tasks and clinical tools that SPs could use to examine toddlers’ productions of polysyllabic real- and nonwords. Given that assessment of toddlers’ productions of polysyllables is a relatively new area of research, SPs are encouraged to assess toddlers’ polysyllable productions within the context of a comprehensive communication assessment. A s children learn to speak, they not only learn how to articulate the individual consonants and vowels in their ambient language, but also to pronounce words of varying syllable shapes, word lengths, and stress patterns. Historically, routine assessment of children’s speech has focused on their ability to accurately articulate consonants in initial, medial, and final word positions, typically in mono– and/or disyllabic words (e.g., pronunciation of /k/ in car , bucket , and bike ). The discovery of a link between the ability to produce polysyllables (words of three or more syllables) and speech, language, phonological processing, and later literacy abilities (e.g., Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998; Sutherland & Gillon, 2005), suggests that speech pathologists (SPs) need to extend their focus from consonant accuracy to one that considers children’s abilities to produce polysyllables, including their ability to match syllable number, syllable shape, and stress pattern in real words such as helicopter and spaghetti , and in nonwords such as / pɜduləmeɪp / and / doʊpəlut / (from Stokes & Klee, 2009b). The impetus for this recommended

change to assessment practice is based on an assumption that polysyllables have the potential to (a) provide insight into the underlying processing difficulties that children with speech sound disorders (SSD) or specific language impairment (SLI) might have with the encoding, storage, and/or retrieval of spoken words (e.g., Contour & McCauley, 2000; Sutherland & Gillon, 2005); (b) help with the differential diagnosis of late talkers who are at risk of future speech, language, or literacy difficulties (e.g., Richardson, Kulju, Neiminen, & Torvelainen, 2009); and (c) improve the identification of children at risk of future literacy difficulties who otherwise might be deemed to have typically developing speech or a mild speech difficulty when assessed on a measure of consonant accuracy (e.g., Nathan & Simpson, 2001). Clinically, the application of this recommendation to everyday SP practice raises some fundamental questions with respect to age of assessment. Specifically, at what age should and/or could children’s pronunciation of polysyllables be reliably assessed? Should SPs wait until children are of preschool or school age to assess production of polysyllables? Is it better or indeed possible to evaluate children’s productions of polysyllables during the toddler years (between the age of approximately 1;0 to 3;0 years)? According to James, van Doorn, and McLeod (2008), children’s acquisition of polysyllabic words is gradual and protracted, with refinement of syllable timing continuing into adolescence. This does not mean, however, that young children do not produce polysyllabic words. Children with typical development have been observed to produce polysyllables in their first 50 words (e.g., Savinainen- Makkonen, 2000). Although children’s initial attempts may be truncated (e.g., helicopter / hɛlikɒptə / as [ kɒtə ]) (Kehoe & Stoel-Gammon, 1997), the number of polysyllables in which all syllables are represented (rather than deleted) changes from 0% to about 50% by 2;3 years (James, 2006). Clearly, if routine assessment of children’s pronunciations of polysyllables is to be conducted, it would seem appropriate to begin that evaluation with children from the time they start to talk – during the toddler years. The purpose of this paper is to explore the literature on the potential clinical value of assessing toddlers’ productions of polysyllables (both real words and imitated nonwords), and to review currently available experimental tasks and clinical resources for assessing Australian-English-speaking toddlers’ productions of polysyllabic real- and nonwords.

Keywords assessment

This article has been peer- reviewed children nonword repetition polysyllables

Elise Baker (top) and Natalie Munro

58

ACQ Volume 13, Number 2 2011

ACQ uiring Knowledge in Speech, Language and Hearing