A survey of the articulation of the children of the Madison School, Stockton, California

It was the purpose of this study (1) to throw light upon specific speech needs of pupils in one of the elementary schools in Stockton; (2) to throw light on the status of speech in a school population among which the factors of low I.Q. retarded academic progress, exceptionally limited economic background, and racial and national differences, and relatively small; (3) by extension, to indicate something more generally regarding the speech needs of such children of whom the pupils surveyed tended to be a representative group; (4) to find indication of the influence of the factor of chronological age upon articulatory accuracy; (5) to throw light upon the question of the extent to which maturation, rather than training, can be relied upon for the elimination of speech errors in children; (6) to find indication of the influence of the factor of sex upon articulatory accuracy; (7) to discover, among students manifesting inaccuracies, to what extent the inaccuracies tended to be manifested in a relatively large number of sounds, and to what extent they tended to be limited to relatively few sounds; (8) to find indications as to which sounds are most difficult, i.e., most frequently inaccurate, and which sounds are least difficult, i.e., least frequently inaccurate, among primary school children; and (9) to find indications as to the relative frequency of errors in the initial, medial, and final positions of words, respectively