Későn beszélni kezdő gyermekek beszédfeldolgozási sajátosságai

Abstract

Late language emergence is a multifactorial phenomenon that may concern all linguistic fields during language acquisition. Late talkers are reported to show either typical receptive language abilities or various impairments in speech perception and verbal comprehension. This cross-sectional study focuses on late talking Hungarian children′s speech processing at the ages of six and eight. The language onset of the 104 participants of the study was either at the age of 3 or at the age of 4 while 52 typically developing children were randomly selected as controls. Six tasks of the standardized Hungarian GMP test package were used to evaluate the children′s receptive skills (sentence and nonword repetitions, speech sound discrimination, sentence- and text comprehension). Children with language onset at 4 scored significantly below children with language onset at 3 irrespective of their age. All late talkers underperformed the control subjects′ performance level on the given measures. The discussion concerns (i) the late talkers′ receptive skills depending on language onset and (ii) the changes in speech processing performance between 6-year-old and 8-year-old participants.