Articulation rate in 3- and 5-year-old children.

The major purposes of this study were to provide normative data on articulation rate in preschool children and to examine the influence on articulation rate of age, gender, context, and utterance length. The subjects were twenty 3-year-old children and twenty 5-year-old children, equally balanced for gender. Durational measures of utterances were analyzed in syllables and phones per second in both spontaneous and imitated speech contexts. The articulation rate of the 5-year-old subjects was significantly faster than that of the 3-year-olds. Spontaneous speech was significantly faster and more variable than imitated speech. Some gender differences were found. Measures in syllables per second and phones per second, although not always yielding identical results, were found to be highly correlated.