Chapter 4 :

Speech Disorders

1. Introduction
Psycholinguistics concerns the processes underlying the production, perception, and
comprehension of language, of which speech is an uncontroversial component – there have
been substantial controversies concerning the explanatory role of psycholinguistics in speech
disorders.

For example, an English-speaking, post-stroke patient who on perceptual analysis

produces an apparent speech error of replacing a voiceless stop consonant (such as p,t, or
k) with its voiced cognate (b,d, or g) and whose voice-onset time (VOT) for the error is
in the short-lag range (say, less than 20 ms) rather than the target-appropriate, long-lag
range (greater than 30 ms) might be said to produce a phonemic, not a phonetic error. On
this view, the patient is making an error of selecting the wrong phonological unit, not of
misarticulating a correctly selected unit.
This explanation depends on assumptions concerning psycholinguistic processes that
link phonological units to their phonetic implementation: stop consonants specified as
– voice (i.e., phonologically voiceless) are implemented phonetically with long VOTs,
and stop consonants specified as voice are implemented with short VOTs. When a
short VOT is produced for a – voice stop, an inversion of the assumed psycholinguistic
process for this phonetic implementation rule leads to the explanation of an incorrectly
selected phonological unit.
In this chapter we will review some
psycholinguistic approaches to understanding speech disorders, with a selected focus on
developmental speech delay and speech production in persons with neurological disease.

2. Speech Delay
Speech Delay is a speech disorder that has been most influenced by psycholinguistic models,
it is certainly the group of developmental disorders. Simply put, a child with speech delay is one
who produces segmental errors that are not age appropriate, but are not unusual in the typical
progress of speech development.
For example, the well-known case of an older child who has difficulty with a small set of sounds
typically mastered late in languages that use them contrastively would clearly be categorized as
having speech delay, specifically one involving so-called residual errors. Residual errors are
usually thought to be the consequence of a delay in speech motor maturation.
Psycholinguistics plays an important role in research and clinical practice among children with
speech delay. Because cases of speech delay are thought to mirror the patterns
of speech errors in typical development, it makes sense to have a theory that applies
broadly to typical and disordered speech sound development (see Bernstein & Weismer,
2000)

3. VOT AND THE VOICING DISTINCTION IN SPEECH DISORDERS

In the history of speech production research on both normal speakers and speakers
with disorders probably no other measure has been explored so consistently as VOT.
VOT, a measure typically obtained from the speech acoustic signal, is defined as the time
interval between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of vocal fold vibration for
the following vowel