title: Speech-production skills in children aged 3-7 years.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  In recent years, clinicians have been using a psycholinguistic approach to the assessment and remediation of children's developmental speech disorders. This requires the comparison of a child's performance across a range of speech-production tasks.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To describe the profile of performance across different speech-production tasks in normal development and to discuss the application of such data to clinical findings.
  
  
  METHODS
  Three speech-production tasks, picture naming, word repetition and non-word repetition, were presented to 100 children with normal speech development, aged between 3 and 7 years of age. The speech-processing demands of the different tasks were considered using a developmental speech-processing model. Stimuli used in the three task paradigms were carefully matched so that children's performance across the tasks could be directly compared.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Within the context of normal speech development, there were significant improvements in performance for all three tasks as children get older. There were also significant differences in performance across the three tasks, and the pattern of these relationships changed with age. Significant differences were found in the accuracy of production of words of increasing length.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Profiles of speech-production task performance are presented within the context of normal development. Comparison of performance across three different speech-production tasks might provide useful insight into the nature of a child's speech disorder.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Communication Science, University College London, UK. m.vance@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Maggie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vance
authors.forename: Joy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Stackhouse
authors.forename: Bills
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wells
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D013068:Speech Production Measurement