Identification of Foreign-Accented Words in Preschoolers With and Without Speech Sound Disorders

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of preschoolers with speech sound disorder (SSD) and with typical speech and language development (TD) to understand foreign-accented words, providing a window into the quality of their underlying phonological representations. We also investigated the relationship between vocabulary skills and the ability to identify words that are frequent and have few neighbors (lexically easy words) and words that are less frequent and have many neighbors (lexically hard words). Method: Thirty-two monolingual English-speaking children (16 with SSD, 16 with TD), ages 4 and 5 years, completed standardized speech and language tests and a two-alternative forced-choice word identification task of English words produced by a native English speaker and a native Korean speaker. Results: Children with SSD had more difficulty identifying words produced by both talkers than children with TD and showed a larger difficulty identifying Korean-accented words. Both groups of children identified lexically easy words more accurately than lexically hard words, although this difference was not significant when including receptive vocabulary skills in the analysis. Identification of lexically hard words, both those produced by the native English speaker and the nonnative English speaker, increased with vocabulary size. Conclusion: Considering the performance of the children with SSD under ideal listening conditions in this study, we can assume that, as a group, children with SSD may experience greater difficulty identifying foreign-accented words in environments with background noise.