Performance of articulation-disordered children on language and perception measures.

Five-year-old articulation-disordered children were classified as syllable reducers or as substituters. They were compared to each other and to normal controls on measures of expressive and receptive language and on preception of word-initial and word-final voicing contrasts. There were significant differences among the groups on several imitative expressive language measures, with the syllable reducers making both deletion and substitution errors and the substituters making substitution errors for functors. There were no significant differences on a receptive language measure, nor in perception of final voicing contrasts, but the articulation-disordered groups performed more poorly than the controls in perception of initial voicing contrasts. Children's familiarity with the stimulus words of the perception task was related to their performance on language measures. Word familiarity appeared to interact with the intrinsic difficulty of stimulus pairs in the case of word-final voicing contrasts.