Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists Conference 2025

Description

A speech subsystems approach to establishing norms for speech development in primary school aged children: The VariCS Project

Introduction: The development of children’s speech production skills varies significantly in the primary school years. A lack of norms for this development makes it challenging to compare children with suspected motor speech disorders to typical children. This research aims to make longitudinal normative data accessible to SLTs to use in clinical practice. The Variability in Child Speech (VariCS) project comprises audio recordings from almost 300 primary school aged children in Scotland aged five to twelve years at four time points. The corpus systematically charts longitudinal variability in acoustic measures of child speech for respiration, phonation, resonance, and articulation. We aim to work with Speech and Language Therapists to design a free web-based resource which will enable clinicians to use these metrics in their clinical decision making.

Methods: Data was collected in schools in Scotland through a bespoke iPad app designed to be engaging to children. Participants were grouped according to primary school classes primary 1,3 and 5 (Cohort 1 – 5 to 6 years old at start of data collection; Cohort 2 – 7 to 8 years old; Cohort 3 – 9 to 10 years old). Data were collected four times at six-month intervals to allow for longitudinal analyses. The Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology Screen (DEAP[1]) was conducted during the first data collection time point to screen for speech sound disorders in children. The data comprise connected speech from a story retell, a picture description, as well as sentence repetition (consisting of six sentences). The connected speech data are complemented by a single word picture naming task of 22 single syllable words to elicit corner vowels and selected consonants. Maximum performance tasks including sound prolongation and diadochokinesis were collected.

Summary of main results: Interim analysis of the data shows substantial variation in each of the subsystems including wide ranges in typical children. Sound prolongation task show age related increase, but substantial variability in all age groups.

Conclusions: The corpus will provide a substantial and unique resource capturing the longitudinal speech development of primary school-aged children living in Scotland.

Implications for practice: The VariCS normative data can be used for the assessment of suspected motor speech disorders in children. We will use this talk to engage with SLTs and seek feedback on the best ways to present the VariCS data so that it is of most use clinically.


[1] Dodd, Barbara & Zhu, Hua & Crosbie, Sharon & Holm, Alison & Ozanne, Anne. (2006). Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP).

Period	26 Nov 2025 → 27 Nov 2025
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	National