Word detection in sung and spoken sentences in children with typical language development or with specific language impairment

Abstract

Background: Previous studies have reported that children score better in language tasks using sung rather than spoken stimuli. We examined word detection ease in sung and spoken sentences that were equated for phoneme duration and pitch variations in children aged 7 to 12 years with typical language development (TLD) as well as in children with specific language impairment (SLI), and hypothesized that the facilitation effect would vary with language abilities. Method: In Experiment 1, 69 children with TLD(7-10 years old) detected words in sentences that were spoken, sung on pitches extracted from speech, and sung on original scores. In Experiment 2, we added a natural speech rate condition and tested 68 children with TLD(7-12 years old). In Experiment 3, 16 children with SLIand 16 age-matched children with TLDwere tested in all four conditions. Results: In both TLDgroups, older children scored better than the younger ones. The matched TLDgroup scored higher than the SLIgroup who scored at the level of the younger children with TLD. None of the experiments showed a facilitation effect of sung over spoken stimuli. Conclusions: Word detection abilities improved with age in both TLDand SLIgroups. Our findings are compatible with the hypothesis of delayed language abilities in children with SLI, and are discussed in light of the role of durational prosodic cues in words detection.