Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Farquharson, Kelly
• Hogan, Tiffany P
• Hoffman, Lesa
• Wang, Jun
• Green, Kimber F
• Green, Jordan R
• Weng, Xuchu

Titel

A longitudinal study of infants' early speech production and later letter identification

Ist Teil von

• PloS one, 2018-10, Vol.13 (10), p.e0204006-e0204006

Ort / Verlag

United States: Public Library of Science

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Free E-Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Letter identification is an early metric of reading ability that can be reliability tested before a child can decode words. We test the hypothesis that early speech production will be associated with children's later letter identification. We examined longitudinal growth in early speech production in 9 typically developing children across eight occasions, every 3 months from 9 months to 30 months. At each occasion, participants and their caregivers engaged in a speech sample in a research lab. This speech sample was transcribed for a variety of vocalizations, which were then transformed to calculate consonant-vowel ratio. Consonant-vowel ratio is a measure of phonetic complexity in speech production. At the age of 72 months, children's letter knowledge was measured. A multilevel model including fixed quadratic age change and a random intercept was estimated using letter identification as a predictor of the growth in early speech production from 9-30 months, measured by the outcome of consonant-vowel ratio. Results revealed that the relation between early speech production and letter identification differed over time. For each additional letter that a child identified, their consonant-vowel ratio at the age of 9 months increased. As such, these results confirmed our hypothesis: more robust early speech production is associated with more accurate letter identification.