Infancy: Phonological Development

2011

The emergence and later fading of two phonological templates-a 'palatal' template and consonant harmony-are investigated in the first 500 words produced by a child acquiring Estonian and English. Throughout the period the child's use of palatal forms, in particular, considerably exceeds their frequency in Estonian, the child's dominant language. Regression in accuracy is also traced, both overall and in individual word forms. Changes in frequency of use of the template patterns are related to growth in the size of the lexicon, the consonant inventory, and the length in syllables of words attempted. Articulatory difficulty is found to play at best a minor role in motivating pattern use, which is ascribed instead to the challenges of planning and recall.

Journal of English Language Teaching and Linguistics

Children acquire language through interaction with other children, their parents, and their surroundings. Acquisition of language may influence children’s success at school. The language aspect that children acquire first is phonology. In acquiring language, children whose language development is slower than their peers may experience speech delay. Thus, the present study emerges to investigate the phonological development of a three-year-old child who is diagnosed with speech delay as well as to examine the factors that support the development. Using a qualitative approach, this study was a case study that employed a single participant. The results of the study indicated that the participant’s language ability developed significantly after several months of receiving therapy. He displayed an ability to produce imitative sounds and non-imitative ones. The spontaneous utterances were also meaningful compared to what he had before the therapy. The evaluation revealed that the developm...

The emergence of features plays a key role in any theory of phonological development that does not assume that they are innately available before the onset of speech. After reviewing Jakobson's claims for universal orders of emergence, we consider possible criteria for feature or segment acquisition, and then discuss data from nearly 50 children (10 languages including Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, and Welsh as well as several Germanic and Romance languages). Small early vocabularies and phonetic variability make minimal pairs rare in most children. While a few children show clear evidence of utilizing features or segments, others show none, and most fall between these extremes. Gradually increasing evidence of segmental structure and systematicity reflects the slow transition to a more orderly phonology. These data support an emergentist model of feature acquisition that has many possible routes to (re-)creating phonological organization within the individual child's mind.

This paper presents a cross-sectional and longitudinal investigation into the development of a contrast in voicing production in simple and complex consonant clusters for 21 children. The results showed that, although the group results indicated a progression that may have been caused either by development in articulatory proficiency or by an growing underlying representation, individual children develop in a manner that is not consistent with a developmental model postulating only articulatory development.

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

This paper reports a normative study on the phonological development of British English-speaking children. Speech samples of 684 children, aged between 3;0 and 6;11 years, randomly selected from nurseries and schools in eight different areas throughout the UK, were collected and analysed to obtain normative data. This paper reports on two aspects of speech development: the age of acquisition of sounds (phonetic acquisition) and the age that error patterns were suppressed (phonemic acquisition). It discusses the effects of age, gender and socio-economic status on speech sound development. The study found that older children had more accurate production and fewer error patterns in their speech. It found no gender differences in the younger age groups. However, in the oldest age group, it found the phonological accuracy measures of girls' better than boys. It found no significant effects of socio-economic status on any of the phonological accuracy measures.

Non-disordered acquisition of phonology tends to receive relatively little attention in general texts on language acquisition. The topic is given twelve pages in book-length language acquisition text, twenty in O' Grady's (2005), and a single chapter out of nineteen, in Ritchie and Bhatia's (1999) child language acquisition handbook (Clark 2009 is an exception, with much more extensive phonological coverage). Johnson and Reimers' contribution of an entire volume dedicated to the acquisition of phonology (and phonetics) is a welcome and important remedy for this gap.

The production of phonological patterns is a very complicated process especially when alveolar consonant sounds are pronounced in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The toddlers ageing 2-3 years as well as the language handicaps find it more complicated to cope with this sound process. The present study on toddlers aims at investigating the alveolar consonant sounds in keeping with single word production. The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception by Jason Geller was implemented to investigate sound productions in the perspective of Substitution Process proposed by Burnthal and Rankson (2004). Non-probabilistic Sample of twenty-five toddlers was given 125 words; a five-word set to every toddler to pronounce repeating at least five times at the top of his voice the articulators at length. Data was collected by means of informants' close observations. The comparison between the pronunciation of original words and that of produced words with their phonetic transcription provided evidence of the shift in alveolar sound patterns during the phonological process by the toddlers. The results implicated that the toddlers made good use of articulators with ease and without any special training. They simplified the complicated consonant sound patterns at their own convenience. The study will be equally beneficial for speech pathologists, linguistic scholars, and keen phonology learners.

1971

A review of work on children's language shows that the development of language in young children is best viewed in terms of an increasing differentiation of functions, until the basic linguistic competence is established at a relatively early age - usually within the child's fourth year. After this age development proceeds in the mastery of the finer stylistic features which are contained in a child's group-language. A study of the speech of 9-year old children shows a high degree of uniformity in phonological detail. 9-year old speech is taken as the terminal model for the developing speech of younger children in this investigation. Within the 9-year old group there are found to be phonological features which differentiate the speech of boys and of girls. The speech of younger children is found to differ in certain characteristic ways from the mature model. Traces of earlier modes of speech are relatively persistent among children up to 4½ years of age. Development betw...

Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 2021

The production of phonological patterns is a very complicated process especially when alveolar consonant sounds are pronounced in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The toddlers ageing 2-3 years as well as the language handicaps find it more complicated to cope with this sound process. The present study on toddlers aims at investigating the alveolar consonant sounds in keeping with single word production. The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception by Jason Geller was implemented to investigate sound productions in the perspective of Substitution Process proposed by Burnthal and Rankson (2004). Non-probabilistic Sample of twenty-five toddlers was given 125 words; a five-word set to every toddler to pronounce repeating at least five times at the top of his voice the articulators at length. Data was collected by means of informants’ close observations. The comparison between the pronunciation of original words and that of produced words with their phonetic transcription provided evidence of the shift in alveolar sound patterns during the phonological process by the toddlers. The results implicated that the toddlers made good use of articulators with ease and without any special training. They simplified the complicated consonant sound patterns at their own convenience. The study will be equally beneficial for speech pathologists, linguistic scholars, and keen phonology learners.

Journal of Child Language, 2010

ABSTRACTOur understanding of the relationships between lexical and phonological development has been enhanced in recent years by increased interest in this area from language scientists, psychologists and phonologists. This review article provides a summary of research, highlighting similarities and differences across studies. It is suggested that the research falls into two categories with different goals and different methodological approaches: (1) child-centered studies that examine the influences active in the prelinguistic and early-word period, emphasizing individual developmental patterns and the active role played by the child; and (2) studies inspired by research on word processing in adults; these focus on the effects of the phonological and lexical characteristics of the ambient language on underlying representations and word learning in children. The article concludes with suggestions for integrating the findings from the two approaches and for future research.