Language or motor: reviewing categorical etiologies of speech sound disorders

Frontiers in Psychology

Kelly Farquharson¹ 

关键词: speech sound disorders;    speech development;    motor ability;    language development;    speech language therapy;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01708

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) exhibit marked weakness with accurate production of age-appropriate speech sounds (Lewis et al., 2006). For some of these children, the etiology of the SSD is clear (e.g., cleft palate, a genetic syndrome, or hearing loss). For others, the cause of their aberrant speech development is unknown; this type of SSD is “functional.” Functional SSDs may eventually remediate after a course of treatment, but may also persist into adolescence or event adulthood (Felsenfeld et al., 1994). Regardless of the outcome, the underlying construct that contributes to this disorder remains elusive. The extant literature is comprised of two primary categorical constructs used to explain functional speech sound disorders: language-based deficits and motor-based deficits. Undeniably, all speech productions are both linguistic (speech sounds, meanings of words, syntax of context, etc.) and motoric (the muscle movement of the speech articulators—lips, tongue, jaw, soft palate, etc.) in nature. However, there are certainly competing theories that suggest language (Raitano et al., 2004; Sutherland and Gillon, 2005; Lewis et al., 2006; Preston and Edwards, 2007; Anthony et al., 2011) or motor (Webster et al., 2005; Newmeyer et al., 2007; Peter and Stoel-Gammon, 2008; Visscher et al., 2010; Redle et al., 2015) to be the predominant causal mechanism for persistent deficits in speech production abilities. I argue that the relation between motoric and linguistic ability is likely complimentary, rather than starkly categorical.

【 授权许可】

CC BY