This text-based course is a transcript of the webinar, Adolescent and Adult Outcomes of Early Childhood Speech Sound Disorders, presented by Barbara Lewis, PhD, CCC-SLP.
Dr. Barbara Lewis: Today, I want to discuss some of the research we have been doing over the past 25 years. This research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. I want to thank them for their continued support.
We are going to cover why children with early childhood speech sound disorders (SSD) are at risk for literacy difficulties. Then I will discuss some of the school-age outcomes for children with early childhood SSD and address the long-term outcomes at adolescence and adulthood for individuals with early SSD. We will look at literacy outcomes as well as psychosocial outcomes. Finally, I will talk about the genetic influence on SSD, language impairment (LI) and reading.
Learning Objectives
The learning objectives for this course are that after this course participants will be able to:
- Identify predictors of persistent and recovered speech sound disorders.
- Describe the relationships among speech, language, reading and ADHD.
- Explain clinical implications for improving adolescent and adult outcomes for children with speech and language disorders.
Simple View of Reading
The Simple View of Reading states that there are two parts to learning to read: decoding and linguistic comprehension. Decoding requires letter recognition, phoneme awareness, and alphabetic principle. It is sounding out words and translating printed words into sounds.
Linguistic comprehension is far more complex. It requires the ability to extract meaning from the lexical information, sentences and discourse. It draws on many skills, including vocabulary, morphology, syntax, social communication, and also the reader’s background knowledge as well as problem-solving and interpretation. Decoding skills may be acquired in a brief period of time in early elementary school, while our comprehension skills continue to develop into adulthood.
Predictors of Reading
Phonological awareness is a good predictor of early reading skills and is often incorporate into intervention. Besides phonological awareness skills, overall language abilities including morphological awareness and syntax skills aid in decoding and comprehension. Vocabulary assists with decoding. It is easier to recognize words that are in your vocabulary then words that you do not know. Then there are nonlinguistic cognitive skills, such as working memory, executive functioning, processing speed, inhibition, and attention which aid in reading comprehension. All of these are predictors of good reading.
Phonological Processing Deficits of Poor Readers
What predicts poor reading? Phonological processing deficits are predictive of poor reading. These include phonological awareness and phonological retrieval. We see this on rapid auditory naming (RAN) tasks such as on the CTOPP. Phonological memory shows whether or not the child can hold something in memory and encode the phonological component into memory long enough to decode the word and the sentence, and attach meaning to it. There is some evidence that children with difficulty in pronouncing multisyllabic words also have difficulty with reading. Again, this might be attributed to poor memory or other deficits in speech planning.
