Final consonant discrimination in children with phonological disorders

Abstract

A number of researchers have shown that children with phonological disorders, relative to typically developing age peers, have difficulty discriminating the particular contrasts that they do not produce correctly. It is less clear whether children with phonological disorders, as a group, have greater difficulty with more general measures of speech perception than their peers. In this study, 35 preschool-aged children with phonological disorders and a group of 35 typically developing controls (matched for age, gender, and nonverbal IQ) were asked to discriminate between two CVC words which differed only in the identity of the final consonant. The stimuli were digitized natural speech including both whole word and backward-gated versions. The children with phonological disorders performed significantly more poorly than their age peers. Significant correlations (with age partialed out) were observed between discrimination scores (d-primes) and raw scores on both the Goldman–Fristoe test of articulation and the PPVT-III. Since the cues to final consonants in CVC words (VC transition and release burst) are not integrated in time and the burst is not reliably present, it is not surprising that representations of final consonants for children with phonological disorders are particularly vulnerable to diminished redundancy in the acoustic signal. [Work supported by NIDCD.]