Speech and Language Processing Abilities in Saudi Children With Speech Sound Disorders and Language Disorders

From a clinical practice perspective, the number of children with speech disorders is the largest, and there are also many children with both language disorders and speech disorders. However, there are currently few research papers on how these two communication disorder subcategories co-occur in Saudi, and our knowledge is quite limited. This paper chooses to start with speech processing ability to explore the relationship between speech disorders and language disorders and possible connections. A total of 34 children with speech disorders aged between 5 and 6 years participated in this study. They came from two preschools and were recruited to participate in the study after being diagnosed with speech disorders. The results showed that the two groups of children had similar abilities in this aspect, which was the most superficial commonality between the two groups. The corrected scores of non-word repetition showed that the performed similarly to the two normal control groups, but the scores of the speech-language disorder group were still lower than the mean scores of the control groups.