Risk for Speech Disorder Associated With Early Recurrent Otitis Media With Effusion

Two Retrospective Studies

shriberg{at}waisman.wisc.edu

The goals of this two-part series on children with histories of early recurrent otitis media with effusion (OME) were to assess the risk for speech disorder with and without hearing loss and to develop a preliminary descriptive-explanatory model for the findings. Recently available speech analysis programs, lifespan reference data, and statistical techniques were implemented with three cohorts of children with OME and their controls originally assessed in the 1980s: 35 typically developing 3-year-old children followed since infancy in a university-affiliated pediatrics clinic, 50 typically developing children of Native American background followed since infancy in a tribal health clinic, and (in the second paper) 70 children followed prospectively from 2 months of age to 3 years of age and older. Dependent variables included information from a suite of 10 metrics of speech production (Shriberg, Austin, Lewis, McSweeny, & Wilson, 1997a, 1997b). Constraints on available sociodemographic and hearing status information limit generalizations from the comparative findings for each database, particularly data from the two retrospective studies. The present paper reports findings from risk analysis of conversational speech data from the first two cohorts, each of which included retrospective study of children for whom data on hearing loss were not available. Early recurrent OME was not associated with increased risk for speech disorder in the pediatrics sample but was associated with approximately 4.6 (CI=1.10–20.20) increased risk for subclinical or clinical speech disorder in the children of Native American background. Discussion underscores the appropriateness of multifactorial risk models for this subtype of child speech disorder.

KEY WORDS: diagnostic assessment, epidemiology, otitis media, phonology, speech disorders

Submitted on March 3, 1998
Accepted on July 22, 1999

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Facebook    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				S. McLeod and K. Bleile The ICF: a framework for setting goals for children with speech impairment Child Language Teaching and Therapy, October 1, 2004; 20(3): 199 - 219. [Abstract] [PDF]

				J. L. Paradise, C. A. Dollaghan, T. F. Campbell, H. M. Feldman, B. S. Bernard, D. K. Colborn, H. E. Rockette, J. E. Janosky, D. L. Pitcairn, D. L. Sabo, et al. Language, Speech Sound Production, and Cognition in Three-Year-Old Children in Relation to Otitis Media in Their First Three Years of Life Pediatrics, May 1, 2000; 105(5): 1119 - 1130. [Abstract] [Full Text]