Temporal factors, disfluencies and self-correction of speech of preschoolers and schoolchildren

Abstract

This study shows how speech rate, articulation rate, pausing, and the occurrence of disfluencies vary from preschool to early school age. It introduces the key terms for the topic and then shows, based on the results of several studies, that both temporal features and the occurrence of disfluencies are influenced by a number of factors, of which age is only one. For this reason, while it can be said that, in general, the speech of older children is faster and contains more disfluencies and shorter pauses than that of younger children, it is also possible that, in certain speech types or because of substantial individual variations between children, the speech and articulation rate and the fluency of speech of preschoolers and schoolchildren do not differ.