Word Detection in Sung and Spoken Sentences in Children With Typical Language Development or With Specific Language Impairment

Background: Previous studies have reported that children score better in languagetasks using sung rather than spoken stimuli. We examined word detection ease insung and spoken sentences that were equated for phoneme duration and pitchvariations in children aged 7 to 12 years with typical language development(TLD) as well as in children with specific language impairment (SLI ), andhypothesized that the facilitation effect would vary with language abilities.Method: In Experiment 1, 69 children with TLD (7–10 years old) detected words insentences that were spoken, sung on pitches extracted from speech, and sung onoriginal scores. In Experiment 2, we added a natural speech rate condition andtested 68 children with TLD (7–12 years old). In Experiment 3, 16 children withSLI and 16 age-matched children with TLD were tested in all four conditions.Results: In both TLD groups, older children scored better than the younger ones.The matched TLD group scored higher than the SLI group who scored at the levelof the younger children with TLD . None of the experiments showed a facilitationeffect of sung over spoken stimuli. Conclusions: Word detection abilitiesimproved with age in both TLD and SLI groups. Our findings are compatible withthe hypothesis of delayed language abilities in children with SLI , and arediscussed in light of the role of durational prosodic cues in wordsdetection.