Child's Phonological System Research Articles

The phonological skills of bilingual preschool children speaking Polish and Ukrainian in Poland

ABSTRACT The extent of quantitative and qualitative differences in phonological development between bilingual children and their monolingual counterparts remains unresolved, especially with regard to typologically-related languages. The current study used a comparative research design to examine the phonological skills of preschool children speaking Polish and Ukrainian, a pair of Slavic languages hitherto unexplored in this context. It involved 57 typically-developing children aged 4;0–6;0, i.e. 18 bilingual children speaking Polish and Ukrainian in Poland, 19 monolingual Polish children in Poland and 20 monolingual Ukrainian children in Ukraine. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of data collected through single-word elicitation tests involved between-group comparisons of bilingual and monolingual children's speech and within-group comparisons of the bilingual children's phonological systems. Results paint a complex picture of bilingual phonological development with mostly typical patterns, a strong crosslinguistic influence, and rare processes which are difficult to interpret. Authors hypothesise that such general patterns of phonological process use might be typical of bilingual development involving typologically-related and geographically close languages. Findings underscore the need to assess bilingual children in all their languages and dialects. Errors which cannot be interpreted through either rules of normal development or crosslinguistic interaction could be a sign of disorder.

Stimulability: Relationships to other characteristics of children's phonological systems

In honour of Miccio's memory, this article revisits the topic of stimulability in children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Eighteen children with SSD, aged 3;6–5;5 (M = 4;8), were tested for their system-wide stimulability, percentage consonants correct (PCC), phonetic inventory size, and oral- and speech-motor skills. Pearson Product Moment Correlations were calculated to determine the nature of relations between stimulability and each of these other variables. Results revealed marked relations between stimulability and PCC and between stimulability and inventory size. Relations between stimulability and both multisyllabic nonsense and real word repetition rates were substantial. Findings suggest that stimulability, as measured for a group of sounds typically challenging for children with SSD, reflects both underlying phonological representations (UPRs) and phonetic imitative skill. The impact of poor stimulability skills in children with severe involvement of SSD and limited phonetic inventories implicates not only the potential difficulty non-stimulable sounds pose at the word level, but the need for increasing stimulability in these children. This, in turn, is a tribute to Miccio's intervention programme and the need for including it in both efficacy and efficiency investigations.

Phonological Neighborhood Density in the Trevor Corpus: Perception and Production Factors in Lexical Acquisition

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2010) Phonological Neighborhood Density in the Trevor Corpus: Perception and Production Factors in Lexical Acquisition Melinda Woodley University of California, Berkeley Since at least the 1980's, phonological neighborhood density (henceforth PND) has been recognized as an important factor in speech processing (e.g. Goldinger, Luce, & Pisoni, 1989). One of the reasons it has provoked such interest is that in contrast to many other factors relevant for speech processing (e.g. word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, etc.) PND is known to have opposite effects on speech perception and production; words in dense neighborhoods are more difficult to perceive, but easier to produce than words in sparse neighborhoods (see e.g. Dell & Gordon, 2003 for a review). More recently, phonological neighborhood density has been invoked as a possible driving factor in the development of segment-based lexical representations. Researchers in phonological development have argued that the lower overall density of young children's lexicons allows them to initially store and access words in a more holistic manner (Charles-Luce & Luce, 1990, 1995; Edwards, Beckman, & Munson, 2004; Logan, 1992; Vihman & Croft, 2007, among others). As words are added to the lexicon, however, the potential for confusion between similar sounding words increases, forcing language learners to pay attention to finer grained phonetic details in order to make the necessary contrasts between lexical items. One potential shortcoming in most studies of developing phonological neighborhoods is that phonological development is considered in the aggregate; in many studies (e.g. Charles-Luce & Luce, 1990, 1995; Logan, 1992) the estimated time course for adding words to the lexicon is based on large corpora of many children. While this approach may gain something in its generalizability, it may also be missing some of the more interesting details that emerge from examining the development of individual children's phonological systems; since each child approaches the learning task based on his or her own experience with language, and his or her own inductive processes, cases studies of individual children's phonological development can shed light on the process by which early phonological generalizations are made and how they eventually develop into a full-fledged phonological system.

A multi-dimensional approach to gradient change in phonological acquisition: A case study of disordered speech development

The purpose of the current study is to document phonological change from a multidimensional perspective for a 3-year-old boy with phonological disorder by comparing three measures: (1) accuracy of consonant productions, (2) dynamic assessment, and (3) acoustic analysis. The methods included collecting a sample of the targets /s, ʃ, tʃ, and dʒ/ produced in single words and repeated over time. The samples were analysed using phonetic transcription and acoustic measures of duration, spectral mean, and spectral variance. A dynamic assessment was administered that showed change in response to cues and linguistic environments using a 15-point scale. The results from the three measures were compared for gradient change and evidence of covert contrasts. In conclusion, gradient change was illustrated across the three measures and contrasts were evident in the child's phonological system. Acoustic measures were most sensitive, followed by dynamic assessment; however, accuracy scores based on phonetic transcription showed little to no change for some targets.

A dynamic approach to phonological assessment

Dynamic and static assessments in phonological disorders provide different information about a child's skills and development. Dynamic assessments evaluate a child's phonological system when given support, whereas static assessments evaluate skills without support. The Scaffolding Scale of Stimulability (SSS), described in this article, is one example of a dynamic assessment used to evaluate phonological disorders. The SSS comprises a 21-point hierarchy of cues and environmental manipulations that can be used to support a child in the production of phonemes. Use of the SSS is illustrated by a case study of a 4-year-old boy with moderate phonological disorder. The SSS is compared to a static assessment, a probe of 60 single words based on the child's error patterns. The two assessments are compared across treatment at three time intervals: prior to treatment, after 3 months of treatment, and after 6 months of treatment. Results indicated that scores on the SSS could differentiate the boy's phoneme productions based on the amount of support needed, while phoneme scores on the probe were at 0% accuracy. As a composite score, the SSS showed a greater percentage of change earlier in treatment and across time when compared to the probe.

The early phonological development of a Farsi-English bilingual child

This article addresses the issue of whether bilingual children begin phonological acquisition with one phonological system or two. Five hypotheses are suggested for the possible structure of the bilingual child's phonological system. Analyses of data from a longitudinal study of a Farsi-English bilingual infant, Arsham, supported the hypothesis that the child had acquired two separate phonologies with mutual influence; that is, he made occasional use of phonological features of Farsi in English words and vice-versa. It is suggested that this was due to the pattern of exposure to the two languages, and that other children may show a different pattern, depending on their exposure to the two languages and the role of language dominance.

Cantonese consonantal development: towards a nonlinear account.

Descriptions of the development of prosodic and segmental tiers of children's phonological systems have been derived from investigations of the development of English. This paper provides a preliminary description of phonological tier development in Cantonese-speaking children. Eight children, (two each at 1;7, 2;6, 3;5, and 4;2 years) named 95 pictures. The data were analysed for word, syllable, onset-rime, skeletal, and segmental tiers. The results suggested a developmental order in the acquisition of hierarchical features. Decreasing order of accuracy of the tiers was word = syllable > onset-rime = skeletal > segmental. A model of feature geometry was adopted to describe the acquisition of features. An interesting finding is the way the laryngeal feature (aspiration) was combined with place contrasts one at a time rather than all at once.

Children's Phonological Awareness: Confusions between Phonemes that Differ Only in Voicing

Given the role of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell, it is important to examine the linguistic factors that influence children's performance on phonemic awareness tasks. We found that, contrary to some previous claims, children did not perform better with fricative consonants (e.g., /z/) than with stops (e.g., /d/) in a phoneme recognition task. However, preschoolers and kindergartners were more likely to mistakenly judge that a syllable began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme of the syllable differed from the target only in voicing (e.g., /t/ for the target /d/) than when it differed in place of articulation (e.g., /b/–/d/) or in both place and voicing (e.g., /p/–/d/). These results shed light on the organization of children's phonological systems. They also have implications for the design and interpretation of phonemic awareness tasks.

The substitution of a click for sibilants: a case study

In the case study presented in this paper a 4-year-old English-speaking girl showed an unusual phonological pattern of substituting a dental click for the sibilants /s, z, ∫, ℑ, t∫, dℑ/. After two intervention sessions this pattern was eliminated from her speech and all the sibilants were produced correctly. In addition to providing an example of a child's contrastive use of a non-English segment, this case study provides evidence of a child's selection of a sound substitute on the basis of its auditory rather than articulatory similarity to the target phonemes. The rapid rate of change observed in the child's phonological system seems consistent with a phonological learning model in which the child has adult-like underlying phonological representations.

Generalization to Conversational Speech

Although changes in children's phonological systems due to treatment have been documented in single-word testing, changes in conversational speech are less well known. Single-word and conversation samples were analyzed for 10 phonologically disordered children, before and after treatment and 3 months later. Results suggest that for most of the children, there were system changes in both single words and in conversational speech. It appears that many phonologically disordered children are able to extend their correct production to conversation without direct treatment on spontaneous speech.

Perceptual categorization of synthesized /R‐W/ continua in normal preschool children

The purpose of the present study was to examine the development of categorical perception of phoneme boundaries. A seven‐step adult /R‐W/ continua was synthesized via the Klatt cascade/parallel software program. The acoustic tokens varied according to the second (F2)‐ and third (F3)‐formant onset frequencies and second (F2)‐ and third (F3)‐formant transition rates. Percentage of correct responses on an identification task was computed to yield a measure of phonemic boundary location for adults and children of 3, 4, and 5 years of age. The phonemic boundaries fell between stimuli 3 and 4, at stimulus 4 and 5 for 3‐, 4‐, and 5‐year‐old children and adults, respectively. The finding that there was a shifting and increasing steepness in the phonemic boundaries as a function of age is supportive of previous research and moreover, of the theory that a child's phonological system is not inherently different than that of an adult but rather is just a simpler or less precise version of the mature system.

Phonological Reorganization: A Case Study

Various types of phonological behavior have been identified as evidence of the systematization which is said to occur in the course of the transition from early, “whole-word” phonology to later, segment-based phonology. However, we have a limited understanding of the role of such early phonological behavior in facilitating — or initiating — the emergence of segmental phonology. Furthermore, there has been little acoustic verification of such changes in children's phonological systems. in this study, the lexical production of one child is analyzed in detail from the onset of word use at 10 months to 16 months, when she had a cumulative lexicon of over 70 words. A period of phonological experimentation and the emergence of productive “word recipes” are documented, using both perceptual and acoustic analysis. Implications of such systematization for the later development of segmental phonology are discussed.

Phonologically motivated substitutions in a 20–22 month old's imitations of intervocalic alveolar stops

Systematic deviations between early word productions and their adult targets reflect not only children's articulatory limitations, but also their phonological development. However, research in child phonology has overlooked an important source of information by excluding from analysis any direct imitations of adult words. Consistent with observations about syntactic and cognitive development, spoken imitations should be systematically modified by the child's phonological system. Imitation studies should thus reveal more about the sophistication of the early phonological system by minimizing demands on memory and lexical access, by allowing presentation of unfamiliar or nonsense words, and by permitting comparison of the child's productions with the actual phonetic and acoustic properties of the adult targets. The present research found remarkable phonological sophistication in a toddler's production of intervocalic stops, based on phonetic and acoustic analyses of her imitations of a set of phonetically reduced adult targets at 20–22 months of age. The adult targets were disyllabic words and nonwords containing /d/ or /t/ preceding 〈-er〉, 〈-le〉, or 〈-en〉, in which the stops were realized as the restricted phonetic variants [r], [dn], or [ʔ], (e.g., respectively, 〈wider〉 or 〈whiter〉; 〈widen〉; 〈whiten〉). Although alveolar stops are not normally produced in this phonetic environment, the child consistently substituted them for the more restricted variants found in the adult targets. The child's phonology also distinguished /t/ and /d/. The findings indicate a rule like that in the adult grammar which determines how these phonemes will be realized in highly specified phonetic contexts and, consequently, how phonetically disparate forms are related in an abstract category. The child's failure to exactly imitate the target utterances and the systematicity of her deviations further argue that the targets were, in fact, filtered through the child's phonology before she produced them. [Work supported by NIH.]

'Working together': a joint phonology and reading programme

This case-study of a 5-year-old shows how the speech therapist and language unit teacher can develop a child's phonological system and early reading skills simultaneously. The work indicates the importance of cohesive and detailed curricular planning between speech therapist and teacher to avoid dissimilar inputs confusing the child.

Refining transcriptions: the significance of transcriber 'errors'.

ABSTRACTThis work describes the importance of the transcription process in studies of speech and language acquisition. Using data collected from a hearing child of deaf parents, the three authors derived independent transcriptions of the same speech sample and systematically compared their transcripts with each other and with the best estimate of the speaker's actual productions. The resultant transcripts were used to produce two descriptions of this child's phonological system, one based on a liberal estimate and one on a conservative estimate of the potential error in the transcripts. Discussion includes suggestions for deriving percentages of inter-transcriber agreement and the utility of such figures as a metric of transcription difficulty as well as transcriber ability.

Phonological development in children with cleft lip and palate

This paper presents preliminary results of a longitudinal investigation into the phonological development of children with repaired cleft lip and palate (CLP). The aim of the project is to investigate the extent to which the cleft palate condition affects the nature and chronology of phonological development from 0;10 to 3;6. Recordings are being made of the vocalizations and speech of CLP children at frequent intervals during the first three years of language development. The first recording at 0;10 is immediately prior to surgical repair of the palate. Recordings are then recommenced six weeks post-operatively and made at approximately six-monthly intervals up to 3;6. We report our findings from the study of two children in this paper. Profiles of their phonetic repertoires pre- and post-surgery are presented and compared with those reported for normal children at the same ages. The phonetic and phonological characteristics of their pronunciation patterns at 2;6 and 3;6 are compared with those normally expected at these ages. Also, the phonetic characteristics of their speech are compared with their pre-speech repertoires. We discuss whether the presence of a structural abnormality inhibits and/or disturbs the development of a child's phonological system.

Assessing the functional adequacy of children's phonological systems

This paper develops the means of assessing the effect of children's contrastively restricted phonological systems on a lexical system, that is assessing the functional adequacy of a phonological system. The concept and measure of Functional Loss (FLOSS) is proposed as a measure of the number of lexical distinctions left unsignalled in a lexical system due to the loss of contrasts in the phonological system. FLOSS provides a means of prioritizing treatment goals for therapy which aim at the elimination of homophony from children's lexical systems, and consequently from their speech. It is shown that the phonological process framework provides a suitable means for the assessment of functional adequacy by enabling one to make predictions about the potential of process combinations for FLOSS. FLOSS values calculated on the basis of the ‘common’ vocabulary of children (5; 11-6; 11) are also provided.

A functional analysis of phonological knowledge and generalization learning in misarticulating children.

It has been suggested that a child's productive phonological knowledge may be one factor that potentially accounts for individual differences in generalization learning observed among phonologically disordered children (Dinnsen & Elbert, 1984; Elbert, Dinnsen, & Powell, 1984). This paper evaluates the hypothesis that productive phonological knowledge influences generalization. Three related studies involving 6 functionally misarticulating children were conducted. In the first study, a description of each child's phonological system was developed using procedures of standard generative analysis. Based upon these descriptions, each child's productive phonological knowledge of his or her own sound system was determined and then ranked on a continuum ranging from "most" to "least" knowledge relative to the adult target. The second study implemented an experimental treatment program based upon each child's productive phonological knowledge, with treatment sounds selected directly from each child's continuum of knowledge. The third study reassessed each child's productive phonological knowledge following treatment. The results of these three studies indicated that a child's productive phonological knowledge of the sound system influenced the overall amount of generalization learning. However, the extent of generalization learning was associated with the point on the knowledge continuum at which treatment was initiated. These findings are discussed with reference to individual differences in generalization learning.

The Effect of Signing and Non-Signing on Intelligibility in a Young Hearing Impaired Speaker

The effect of a signing and non-signing communication mode on the intelligibility of a hearing-impaired speaker was investigated. Results indicated that the signing mode in conjunction with oral speech interacted with the child's phonological system, producing a reduction in intelligibility when compared to oral speech with no signing. Further research is needed to investigate whether this effect is wide spread or individualistic.

Response bias in children's phonological systems.

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which auditory and visual stimuli influence certain sound productions of children. Grade level and position of the target sound were the two variables studied. Children were shown a meaningful picture and were asked to repeat the name of the picture as spoken by the experimenter who misarticulated one phoneme in the word. It was found that children in the lower grades tend to repeat the word as it should be articulated, whereas children in higher grade levels tend to repeat the word as it was spoken. Position of the phoneme in the word was not found to be a relevant variable. Support is given to the use of nonmeaningful instruction material as stimuli when teaching new sounds to young children.