Greater intelligibility in verbal routines with young children with developmental delays

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Abstract
The unintelligible speech of many developmentally delayed children poses problems for language intervention and language assessment efforts. Eighteen developmentally delayed children in Brown's (1973) stage I and their parents participated in two studies of the relationship between verbal routines and the intelligibility of developmentally delayed children's speech. The first study demonstrated that more intelligible child speech was found in routines than in nonroutines. To determine if routine utterances were articulated more accurately than nonroutine utterances, the second study extracted a representative sample of routine and nonroutine utterances from their visual and discourse contexts and asked two naive observers to transcribe them. To investigate the possible effect of contextual information, the naive observers transcribed the extracted utterances under context-information-present and context-information- absent conditions. The results indicated that extracted utterances were more intelligible under context-information-present conditions. The results were interpreted as indicating that child speech was more intelligible in routines than nonroutines because routines provide adults with more context information for interpreting ambiguous child utterances.