Speech production in child language development

Mapping the neural and psycholinguistic processes that underlie speech production and development is crucial to understanding how children learn and use language. In this article, we briefly review theories of child speech production and development. We then present a school-based ecological technique to assess children’s naturalistic speech production, which uses graph theory as a model to understand speech connectedness and recurrence patterns. We discuss data provided by a series of studies using graph analysis, which evidence the power of this technique in predicting children’s reading and linguistic skills by assessing their speech production early on. In general, results from these studies show that larger long-range connectedness and fewer short-range recurrences in children’s speech production were predictive of reading performance and linguistic skills in both typically developing and neurodiverse children.  Findings from studies like these may inform accommodations and interventions that address delays and disorders in language development, ranging from early speech development to reading acquisition and developmental language disorders. In a broader sense, the relevance of these investigations lies in the possibility of grounding intervention programs, translational research and public educational policies.