Summary Of The Stoel-Gammon Study
Challen Geraghty
Article Summary 1
This research study was conducted by Carol Stoel-Gammon in order to find guidelines for normally developing 2 year olds, but since there is very little research in this area it is a tad bit challenging. Previous studies done by other Speech-Language Pathologists (Sanders (1972) and Prather (1975)) only evaluated a limited number of two year olds and tested the children’s ability to name a test picture or model. Many of the children based on their age were not able to name the test items and this would suggest that this type of testing is not the most appropriate for assessing younger children.
The Stoel-Gammon study gathered speech samples from a total of thirty-three children from English-speaking homes with normal hearing. These samples were gathered in two 30 minute sessions while the children played and had conversations with a caretaker. The first 100 understandable spoken sounds or words that the child made were transcribed. The children’s transcribed speech was then analyzed based on three different measures. The word and syllable shapes used, which is the way the child …show more content…
would put consonants and vowels together to make words. When writing syllable shapes “C” is used for consonant and “V” is used for vowel. The use of phonetic inventories which are repeated sounds used by an individual to differentiate words. Such as /b/ and /p/, which make just enough sound difference to distinguish between big and pig. Then finally, the accuracy of the consonants in the child’s words compared to how an adult would pronounce the word.
The results of the study indicated that monosyllabic syllables like CV and CVC, which are the easiest syllable shapes, were used by almost all of the two year olds studied.
Disyllabic word shapes such as CVCV and CVCVC were a little more challenging but was still present in over half of the children studied. The study also showed that children of this age can only produce a few consonant clusters in initial position and even less in final position. Consonant clusters are a group of consonants next to each other that make it hard to pronounce. An example would be the word “stop” the /st/ at the beginning of the word would be an initial consonant cluster. The words attempted by the two years olds contained a higher number of consonants than vowels. The percentage of consonants pronounced correctly compared to that of a normal speaking adult was 70%
correct.
The importance of this study is that it shows that the “conversational method” of testing children under the age of three is better than using a method of naming a test picture. The study also provides guidance as to what are normal speech skills for a two year old child and can be used to identify children that are developing below the normal level.
Article Summary 1
This research study was conducted by Carol Stoel-Gammon in order to find guidelines for normally developing 2 year olds, but since there is very little research in this area it is a tad bit challenging. Previous studies done by other Speech-Language Pathologists (Sanders (1972) and Prather (1975)) only evaluated a limited number of two year olds and tested the children’s ability to name a test picture or model. Many of the children based on their age were not able to name the test items and this would suggest that this type of testing is not the most appropriate for assessing younger children.
The Stoel-Gammon study gathered speech samples from a total of thirty-three children from English-speaking homes with normal hearing. These samples were gathered in two 30 minute sessions while the children played and had conversations with a caretaker. The first 100 understandable spoken sounds or words that the child made were transcribed. The children’s transcribed speech was then analyzed based on three different measures. The word and syllable shapes used, which is the way the child …show more content…
would put consonants and vowels together to make words. When writing syllable shapes “C” is used for consonant and “V” is used for vowel. The use of phonetic inventories which are repeated sounds used by an individual to differentiate words. Such as /b/ and /p/, which make just enough sound difference to distinguish between big and pig. Then finally, the accuracy of the consonants in the child’s words compared to how an adult would pronounce the word.
The results of the study indicated that monosyllabic syllables like CV and CVC, which are the easiest syllable shapes, were used by almost all of the two year olds studied.
Disyllabic word shapes such as CVCV and CVCVC were a little more challenging but was still present in over half of the children studied. The study also showed that children of this age can only produce a few consonant clusters in initial position and even less in final position. Consonant clusters are a group of consonants next to each other that make it hard to pronounce. An example would be the word “stop” the /st/ at the beginning of the word would be an initial consonant cluster. The words attempted by the two years olds contained a higher number of consonants than vowels. The percentage of consonants pronounced correctly compared to that of a normal speaking adult was 70%
correct.
The importance of this study is that it shows that the “conversational method” of testing children under the age of three is better than using a method of naming a test picture. The study also provides guidance as to what are normal speech skills for a two year old child and can be used to identify children that are developing below the normal level.