| This study investigated the effects of modifying the rate of speech on the receptive language abilities of children who have a history of recurrent otitis media. The subjects were seven children without histories of ear infections and five children with such histories. The subjects were given a test for middle ear function, a pure tone assessment, a language screening test and a series of sentences of increasing linguistic structure. The sentences were rate-modified and presented to the subjects. The subjects were asked to point to one of four pictures to indicate the picture which matched the sentence they heard. Results indicated that children with histories of recurrent otitis media had greater difficulty processing faster rates of speech than children who did not have such histories. |
