Restricted Consonant Inventories of 2-Year-Old Finnish Children with a History of Recurrent Acute Otitis Media

Many children experience recurrent acute otitis media (RAOM) in early childhood. In a previous study, 2-year-old children with RAOM were shown to have immature neural patterns for speech sound discrimination. The present study further investigated the consonant inventories of these same children using natural speech samples. The results showed that 2-year-old children with RAOM (N = 19) produced fewer words and had smaller consonant inventories compared to the healthy controls (N = 21). In particular, the number of consonants produced in the medial position of words was restricted. For places and manners of articulation, the most notable difference between the groups was observed for fricatives, which were produced less often by the children with RAOM than by the controls. These results further support the assumption that early and recurrent middle ear infections should be considered a risk factor for language development.