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A longitudinal study of infants’ early speech production and later letter identification
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

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

Kelly Farquharson, Tiffany P Hogan, Lesa Hoffman, Jun Wang, Kimber F Green and Jordan R Green
PloS one, Vol.13(10), pp.e0204006-e0204006
2018
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204006
PMCID: PMC6179191
PMID: 30304048
url
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204006View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

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.
Social Sciences People and Places Biology and Life Sciences

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