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

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

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.