Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2016
This study examined the psycholinguistic profiles of Quebec French-speaking children with developmental phonological disorders (DPD). The purpose was to determine whether the endophenotypes that have been identified in English-speaking children with DPD are similarly associated with speech impairment in French-speaking children. Seventy-two children with DPD and ten children with normally developing speech, aged four to six years, received a comprehensive assessment battery that included measures at the phenotype level (i.e. measures of overt speech production skills) and endophenotype level (i.e. measures of potential underlying core deficits such as phonological processing or oral motor impairments). The majority of the children with DPD presented with a psycholinguistic profile indicative of difficulties with phonological processing. Phonological processing skills also explained unique variance in speech production accuracy, indicating that French-speaking children with DPD, who produce different surface speech errors than English-speaking children with DPD, are nonetheless very similar with regards to their underlying psycholinguistic profile.
We thank the children and their parents who generously agreed to participate in the study, as well as the research assistants, speech-language pathologists, and speech-language pathology students who were part of the project. We also wish to thank Dr Lawrence Shriberg for providing the stimuli for the Syllable Repetition Task and for his assistance with the SRT data analysis. This research was supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the second author and a Bourse de formation de doctorat from the Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec to the first author. The Centre for Research on Brain, Language & Music is funded by the Government of Quebec via the Fonds de Recherche Nature et Technologies and Société et Culture. The research consists of a portion of the first author's PhD, supervised by the second author.