THE RATE OF SPEECH OF NORMAL PRESCHOOL CHILDREN (ARTICULATORY DEVELOPMENT, FLUENCY, LANGUAGE, STUTTERING)

The purpose of this study was to assess the development of speech rate in preschool children. Speech rate is a reflection of many processes including language planning and neuromuscular control and as such is closely related to the development of both speech motor control and language performance.;The findings provide some normative information on speech rate in preschool children. In addition, the findings of this study indicated a significant developmental trend for speech rate when group means are used. Utterance length was found to be positively correlated with speech rate, i.e., the longer the utterance the faster the rate. As a result, steps were taken to account for the influence of utterance length on rate. The developmental trend was confirmed when the relationship was controlled statistically by using length of utterance as a covariate; or when the analysis was stratified by utterance length if the utterance chosen was short (three syllables), or medium (five syllables), but not long (eight syllables). There was no difference in speech rate between the sexes. The pattern of variability of rate for the subjects in each age-group was random. These findings may be considered as indications of the child's increasing capabilities in both sentence planning and neuromuscular control and have implications for clinical use.;The present study looked at the rate of speech in 120 normal preschool children--boys and girls in each of six age groups from 2-6 to 5-5 years. Spontaneous speech samples were tape recorded and the rate for 10 utterances was measured for each child.