Early Speech Production in Infants and Toddlers Later Diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy: A Retrospective Study

Abstract In this retrospective study, we compared the early speech development between infants with cerebral palsy (CP) and typically developing (TD) infants. The recordings of utterances were collected from two CP infants and two typically-developing (TD) infants at approximately 8 and 24 months old. The data was analyzed by volubility, consonant emergence, canonical babbling ratio (CBR), mean babbling level (MBL). The major findings show that comparing with TD group, CP group has the characteristics of: 1) lower volubility 2) CBRutter below 0.15 at 2 years old 3) MBL score below 2 at the age of 2 with a feature of above 95% in level 1 4) using consonants mainly at two oral places (bilabials and velars) and three manners of articulation (nasal, fricative, and stop) at 2 years old. Keywords: volubility, consonant emergence, canonical babbling ratio (CBR), mean babbling level (MBL) 1 Introduction Cerebral palsy (CP) is a non-progressive and permanent motor disorder, caused by the impairment of neurodevelopment in the fetal or infant brain (Rosenbaum et al., 2007). More than 60% of children with CP has communication problems stemming from the language or/and speech impairments, including delayed language development, voice disorders, and speech disorder (Sadowska et al., 2020).These abnormality in speech may adversely affect the following ability in terms of communication, intelligibility, phonological awareness and literacy (Peeters et al., 2009). For children with CP, these difficulties may eventually result in the poor performance in academy, problems in relationship, and also less career opportunities. As a result, many researches have suggested early intervention not only aim to diminish the negative impact of the limited motor functions but also provide mental health support for the caregivers(Novak et al., 2017). Previous studies have widely documented similar transition in developing stages for infants’ vocalization in the first and second year of life and showed the strong relation to the future language ability(D’Odorico et al., 2011). However, rare speech development related studies included data with CP infants under 2 years old. Studying early infants’ vocalization has helped enriched our knowledge about disorders, such as hearing impairment, down syndrome, fragile X syndrome (Belardi et al., 2017), autism (Patten et al., 2014), and CAS (M. Overby & Caspari, 2015; M. S. Overby et al., 2019), reducing the severity and providing evident-based support for clinical decision. Volubility, consonant inventory, and the development of canonical babbling are three widely studied domain in early infant speech production, and many has shown to be a precursor to later language ability (Smith & Stoel-Gammon, 1996). Hustad et al. (2014) measured the speech and language development of 27 children at the age between 24 and 30 months, finding that three groups of children with CP with different level of language ability (i.e., not talking, emerging talking, and established talking) can be identified at the age of 2. Speech and/or language delay was found in two groups of children (nearly 85% of the children in this study) and also suggested speech and language assessment and intervention before 2 years old. Early Speech Production …

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