Phonological Development Research Articles

The Role of Learner-Focused Instruction in Teaching Arabic Phonemic and Phonological Awareness: Enhancing Language Acquisition and Proficiency

This study investigates the role of learner-focused instruction in teaching Arabic phonemic and phonological awareness with the aim of enhancing language acquisition and proficiency. Phonemic and phonological awareness play a crucial role in language learning, particularly in Arabic, where accurate pronunciation and phonetic skills are essential for effective communication. This research adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative data analysis and qualitative insights from Arabic language learners. The study examines the effectiveness of learner-focused instruction techniques, such as interactive activities, explicit instruction, and personalized feedback, in improving learners' phonemic and phonological awareness. The findings contribute to the existing body of research by highlighting the importance of incorporating learner-focused approaches into Arabic language instruction, promoting more accurate pronunciation, and enhancing overall language proficiency. The implications of this study can inform language educators and curriculum designers in developing effective teaching strategies to support Arabic language learners' phonemic and phonological development.

The development of speech output processing skills in Greek-speaking children

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of literature on phonological development in Greek-speaking children, either typically developing (TD) or with speech sound disorders (SSD). In this paper, a cross-sectional longitudinal approach was used to investigate the development of speech output processing skills in TD Greek-speaking preschool-aged children. Moreover, a group of Greek-speaking children with SSD were assessed to identify potential loci of impairment in atypical development. The developmental study involved two groups: group 1 (n = 16) aged 3;0–3;5 years and group 2 (n = 22) aged 4;6–5;0 years, assessed at three assessment points six months apart. Children with SSD (n = 15) aged 5;6–6;0 years were assessed to be compared with performance of group 2 TD children (at the third assessment point). Assessment tasks included (a) a picture naming task, (b) a task of real word repetition and (c) a task of nonword repetition. A strong time effect was found in both groups of TD children in the development of speech output processing abilities. Performance accuracy was higher on tasks including real words than nonwords; children performed more accurately on repetition rather than spontaneous naming of real words; repetition accuracy on 2–3 syllables items was significantly better than on 4–5 syllables items. Children with SSD were outperformed by TD children of the same age in all assessment tasks; lexicality and word length effect were found in the clinical group. Findings from the present study may be used as a starting point to diagnose children with speech production difficulties in Greece.

Phonological development in first language Laki-speaking children aged 3 to 5 years: A pilot study

Purpose To date there are no studies of speech sound acquisition in Laki, a language spoken in western regions of Iran. Thus, we set out a pilot study to investigate the speech development of 56 first language Laki-speaking children (aged 3–5 years). Method Single words were elicited through a picture naming test specifically developed for this study. After recording and transcribing of speech samples, percentage of consonants correct (PCC), percentage of vowels correct (PVC), and proportion of whole word proximity (PWP) were documented in four age groups (36–41, 42–47, 48–53, and 54–59 months) and both genders. Children’s phonetic inventories and consonant and vowel accuracy were also described. Result All the sounds were considered as emerging by 53 months of age. For speech sound accuracy, all the speech sounds except /ɢ, z, ŋ, ʒ/ were mastered by 5 years. The effect of age on PCC values was significant. Also, age groups showed significant differences for PWP but were not significant for PVC. Boys and girls did not differ for PCC, PVC, and PWP values. Conclusion From a theoretical perspective, findings contribute to theories about phonological acquisition in general and will enable crosslinguistic comparisons. From an applied standpoint, language-specific characteristics are identified, which are much needed for clinical practice with Laki-speaking children.

Complex Natural Systems for Language

In this paper we want to show how complex systems theory can inform the theoretical development in natural phonology. This development leads us to propose complex natural systems modelling for language. We explain how complex systems help us understand both theoretical concepts from natural phonology, for example the concept of preference, as well as variation in language data, for example in English vowel realizations and Polish consonant clusters. We select from our respective research areas those exemplifications which clearly demonstrate substantial variation in language use.

Descriptive Study Of Phonological Development In Acquiring English Pronounciation

This descriptive study aims to investigate the phonological development in acquiring English pronunciation among learners. The research focuses on understanding the process by which learners develop their pronunciation skills in English as a second language. The study employs qualitative research methods, involving data collection through recordings of learners' speech and interviews. The participants are English language learners from various linguistic backgrounds. The findings provide insights into the specific phonological challenges faced by learners and highlight the patterns and stages of their development in acquiring English pronunciation. The study contributes to the understanding of the factors influencing phonological acquisition and offers implications for language teaching and curriculum design.

Exploring The Acquisition Of Consonant In Phonological Development

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of consonants in children's phonological development. Phonological development is a complex process that involves the acquisition and use of speech sounds. The acquisition of consonants is particularly significant as they play a crucial role in the formation of words and overall language development. This research will explore various factors that contribute to the acquisition of consonants, such as articulatory mechanisms, phonetic inventory development, and phonological patterns. Additionally, the study will examine the sequence and rate of consonant acquisition, potential cross-linguistic differences, and the impact of individual and environmental factors on this developmental process. The findings from this study will provide valuable insights into the specific challenges and milestones associated with consonant acquisition, contributing to our understanding of phonological development in children.

Beneficial effects of a music listening intervention on neural speech processing in 0-28-month-old children at risk for dyslexia.

Familial risk for developmental dyslexia can compromise auditory and speech processing and subsequent language and literacy development. According to the phonological deficit theory, supporting phonological development during the sensitive infancy period could prevent or ameliorate future dyslexic symptoms. Music is an established method for supporting auditory and speech processing and even language and literacy, but no previous studies have investigated its benefits for infants at risk for developmental language and reading disorders. We pseudo-randomized N∼150 infants at risk for dyslexia to vocal or instrumental music listening interventions at 0-6 months, or to a no-intervention control group. Music listening was used as an easy-to-administer, cost-effective intervention in early infancy. Mismatch responses (MMRs) elicited by speech-sound changes were recorded with electroencephalogram (EEG) before (at birth) and after (at 6 months) the intervention and at a 28 months follow-up. We expected particularly the vocal intervention to promote phonological development, evidenced by enhanced speech-sound MMRs and their fast maturation. We found enhanced positive MMR amplitudes in the vocal music listening intervention group after but not prior to the intervention. Other music activities reported by parents did not differ between the three groups, indicating that the group effects were attributable to the intervention. The results speak for the use of vocal music in early infancy to support speech processing and subsequent language development in infants at developmental risk. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Dyslexia-risk infants were pseudo-randomly assigned to a vocal or instrumental music listening intervention at home from birth to 6 months of age. Neural mismatch responses (MMRs) to speech-sound changes were enhanced in the vocal music intervention group after but not prior to the intervention. Even passive vocal music listening in early infancy can support phonological development known to be deficient in dyslexia-risk.

Nehalennia and the Marsaci

Abstract The goddess Nehalennia is known principally from two sanctuaries in Zeeland that have been dated to the late second and early third centuries. Variously explained as a Celtic or Germanic theonym, Nehalennia may best be understood in terms of the evidence of other names associated with Roman Zeeland. The Nehalennia sanctuaries are both situated in an area that seems likely to have fallen within the Roman civitas named for the Belgic Menapi, but the cult of Nehalennia appears likely to have been an originally Germanic development before it became more widely adopted by all manner of merchants who traded through the ports in the area. The theonym appears to record similar phonological developments to names recorded of Marsacian soldiers stationed in Roman Britain and Nehalennia accordingly appears to have been a goddess of the Marsaci.

Prosodic location modulates listener’s perception of novel German sounds

Interaction of sounds on the melodic tier (segments) with prosodic and phonotactic structure (syllabic context) in cross-language perception is not explicitly addressed by models of second language phonology (e.g., Perceptual Assimilation Model: Best, 1995). At initial stages of foreign language exposure, learners rely on position-specific phonetic detail more than native speakers or advanced learners, thus mappings according to prosodic and phonotactic context are a crucial factor in early interlanguage phonological development. In a perceptual assimilation experiment, we manipulated syllable position (onset vs. coda) and phonotactic complexity (simple vs. complex codas) in phonotactically similar languages for auditory presentation of six German obstruents (i.e., familiar [h k ʃ] and novel [ç x p͡f]) to native speakers of American English who had no previous exposure to German. By means of weighted proportions (Park & de Jong, 2008) and overlap scores (Levy, 2009), we found that [h k ʃ p͡f] mapped categorically to English orthographic categories <h>, <k>, <sh>, and <f>, respectively, in all positions, whereas the novel fricatives [ç x] exhibited distinct mapping patterns from each other, from other sounds, and according to syllable position. These results demonstrate profound influences of both low-level prosodic and phonotactic contexts on perceptual assimilation of novel sounds

Prosodic interaction in Cantonese-English bilingual children’s speech production

Abstract This corpus-based study investigates intonation patterns in the production of Cantonese by Cantonese-English bilingual children. We examine the intonation patterns in eight simultaneous bilingual children acquiring a tonal (Cantonese) and an intonational language (English) from 2;0 to 3;0. Two intonation patterns are observed in all the bilingual children studied: high pitch followed by a fall (including H_H*L% and H_L*L%) and low pitch followed by a rise (including L_H*H% and L_L*H%), in which English-like intonation is applied to Cantonese and code-mixed utterances. They illustrate cross-linguistic influence in prosody from English in the bilingual children’s early phonological development. Language dominance, use of sentence-final particles, and the children’s grammatical complexity are found to be significant predictors for the production of bilingual intonation. First, the more dominant the child is in Cantonese, the less bilingual intonation is produced in Cantonese and code-mixed utterances. Second, bilingual intonation is significantly more likely to be produced in utterances with sentence-final particles than without. Third, the greater the child’s grammatical complexity, the lower the predicted probability of producing bilingual intonation.

Speech and Language Abilities of Preschool Children Who Stutter

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine speech and language differences between children who stutter without concomitant linguistic difficulties (CWS) and children who stutter with concomitant linguistic difficulties (CWS/CLD) on standardized tests of phonology, vocabulary and grammar. Method: Subjects were 20 children who stutter without concomitant linguistic difficulties (mean age= 5;1 years) and 21 children who stutter with concomitant linguistic difficulties (mean age= 4;9 years). All children were Greek-speaking. Each child participated initially in a 15-minute conversation with an adult. This conversational interaction was subsequently assessed to provide information pertinent to the child’s frequency and type of the speech dysfluency. Then, each child was administered standardized tests of phonology, vocabulary and grammar. Results: Results indicated that CWS and CWS/CLD did not differ in frequency and type of speech dysfluency. CWS did not show problems in developing phonology, vocabulary and grammar, while CWS/CLD lagged behind in phonology development although their vocabulary and grammar abilities were developing normally. Conclusion: Findings suggest that stuttering may appear in children with different speech and language profiles and for a subgroup of children, may be accompanied by a phonological disorder. Clinicians should take into account different aspects of speech and language when assessing and treating children who stutter and should have in mind the likelihood of comorbidity of stuttering with other developmental disorders in preschool children.

Singleton consonant onset acquisition in monolingual Granada Spanish-speaking preschoolers with typical versus protracted phonological development: Impacts of word structure and feature constraints - CORRIGENDUM.

Singleton consonant onset acquisition in monolingual Granada Spanish-speaking preschoolers with typical versus protracted phonological development: Impacts of word structure and feature constraints – CORRIGENDUM

Specificity of phonological representations in U.S. English-speaking late talkers and typical talkers.

Late talkers are a heterogeneous group of children who experience delayed language development in the absence of other known causes. Late talkers show delays in expressive phonological development, but less is known about their receptive phonological development. In the current study, U.S. monolingual English-speaking typical talkers (TTs) (n=23, mean age=26.27months, 57% male; 78.3% White) and late talkers (n=22, mean age=24.57months, 59% male, 72.7% White) completed a Looking-While-Listening task to assess their sensitivity to mispronunciations. Results revealed that late talkers and TTs looked to the referent of a word for a shorter duration when it was mispronounced than when it was correctly pronounced, suggesting they were sensitive to mispronunciations. However, there were no significant differences between the two groups in their sensitivity to mispronunciations.

Development of sign phonology in Kata Kolok.

Much like early speech, early signing is characterised by modifications. Sign language phonology has been analysed on the feature level since the 1980s, yet acquisition studies predominately examine handshape, location, and movement. This study is the first to analyse the acquisition of phonology in the sign language of a Balinese village with a vibrant signing community and applies the same feature analysis to adult and child data. We analyse longitudinal data of four deaf children from the Kata Kolok Child Signing Corpus. The form comparison of child productions and adult targets yields three main findings: i) handshape modifications are most frequent, echoing cross-linguistic patterns; ii) modification rates of other features differ from previous studies, possibly due to differences in methodology or KK's phonology; iii) co-occurrence of modifications within a sign suggest feature interdependencies. We argue that nuanced approaches to child signing are necessary to understand the complexity of early signing.

Exploring the Implications of Input Variability for Unfamiliar Accented Speech Perception: A Focused Review and New Hypotheses

Children with and without communication disorders have difficulty understanding words and sentences produced by talkers with unfamiliar characteristics, such as unfamiliar accents. To date, few studies have investigated how this difficulty manifests in linguistically diverse children. Studies of monolingual children have found that lexical and phonological skills predict accurate perception. For linguistically diverse children, there are differences in the structure of their linguistic input relative to their monolingual peers. These differences in their linguistic input influence their lexical and phonological development, suggesting that they may also differ in how they perceive unfamiliar accented speech. In this paper we present different hypotheses for how input variability might affect unfamiliar accented speech perception. Then, we conduct a focused review of the literature on how input variability affects early linguistic development for bilingual and bidialectal children. We link this information to the literature on how children with and without language disorders understand unfamiliar accented speech to identify important areas for future inquiry. Determining how input variability interacts with linguistic skills to predict unfamiliar speech perception is a crucial area for future inquiry. Effective clinical recommendations and educational accommodations require understanding of the linguistic skills and experience that support accurate variable speech perception for diverse populations.

Describing the Spoken Language Skills of Typically Developing Afrikaans-Speaking Children Using Language Sample Analysis: A Pilot Study.

Language sample analysis is widely regarded as the gold standard of language assessment. However, the uncertainty regarding the optimal length of sample and the limited availability of developmental language data for nonmainstream languages such as Afrikaans complicate reliable use of the method. The study aimed to provide guidelines on representative length of sample and concurrently provide a preliminary description of the spoken language skills of Afrikaans-speaking children. The study involved 30 typically developing Afrikaans-speaking children aged between 3;6 and 9;6 (years;months). A descriptive research design was used to transcribe and analyze 1-hr interactions collected in natural environments of participants who were recruited using referral sampling. Video and audio recordings of the samples were transcribed using adapted Sampling Utterances and Grammatical Analysis Revised analysis procedures. Results indicated that mean length of utterance in words per minute, number of different words per minute, and total number of words per minute stabilized at 30 min and no significant differences were found between 30 min and longer time segments. Morphology results concur with existing developmental findings in Afrikaans. Lexical diversity results correlated with the findings of the lexical specificity and accuracy in the Prutting and Kirchner Pragmatic Protocol (Prutting & Kirchner, 1987). The developmental trajectories for pragmatic and phonological development were consistent with existing guidelines. The study concluded that a 30-min interaction segment provides a representative language sample for Afrikaans-speaking children who are between 3;6 and 9;6. It provides promising preliminary developmental data and clinical guidelines, confirming the potential of language sample analysis (LSA) as a reliable component of language assessment in Afrikaans.

The Importance of High-Frequency Bandwidth on Speech and Language Development in Children: A Review of Patricia Stelmachowicz's Contributions to Pediatric Audiology.

We review the literature related to Patricia Stelmachowicz's research in pediatric audiology, specifically focusing on the influence of audibility in language development and acquisition of linguistic rules. Pat Stelmachowicz spent her career increasing our awareness and understanding of children with mild to severe hearing loss who use hearing aids. Using a variety of novel experiments and stimuli, Pat and her colleagues produced a robust body of evidence to support the hypothesis that development moderates the role of frequency bandwidth on speech perception, particularly for fricative sounds. The prolific research that came out of Pat's lab had several important implications for clinical practice. First, her work highlighted that children require access to more high-frequency speech information than adults in the detection and identification of fricatives such as /s/ and /z/. These high-frequency speech sounds are important for morphological and phonological development. Consequently, the limited bandwidth of conventional hearing aids may delay the formation of linguistic rules in these two domains for children with hearing loss. Second, it emphasized the importance of not merely applying adult findings to the clinical decision-making process in pediatric amplification. Clinicians should use evidence-based practices to verify and provide maximum audibility for children who use hearing aids to acquire spoken language.

Singleton consonant onset acquisition in monolingual Granada Spanish-speaking preschoolers with typical versus protracted phonological development: Impacts of word structure and feature constraints.

While consonant acquisition clearly requires mastery of different articulatory configurations (segments), sub-segmental features and suprasegmental contexts influence both order of acquisition and mismatch (error) patterns (Bérubé, Bernhardt, Stemberger & Ciocca, 2020). Constraints-based nonlinear phonology provides a comprehensive framework for investigating the impact of sub- and suprasegmental impacts on acquisition (Bernhardt & Stemberger, 1998). The current study adopted such a framework in order to investigate these questions for Granada Spanish. Single-word samples of monolingual preschoolers in Granada (29 typically developing; 30 with protracted phonological development) were transcribed by native Spanish speakers in consultation with an international team. Beta regression analyses showed significant effects of age, developmental group, and word structure variables (word length, stress, position of consonants and syllables within the word); salience, markedness and/or frequency across the phonological hierarchy accounted for many patterns. The study further demonstrates the impacts of sub- and suprasegmental constraints of the phonological system on consonant acquisition.

Characterization of the phonological system in low-income Brazilian preschoolers.

The purpose of this study is to characterize the phonological skills of low-income preschool children in a city in the Natal in the Northeast, Brazil. The researchers assessed the phonological skills of 90 children (from 5 to 6:11) in early childhood education in three public schools located in regions of social and economic vulnerability. The evaluators used the phonology subtests of the Test of Childhood language (ABFW) children's language test. In addition to performing the standard analysis they examined the following: Phonological Processes (PP), Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC), Percentage of Correct Consonants Revised (PCC-R), and Process Density Index (PDI). The Spearman's Correlation Coefficient test was used to analyze for correlations among the PCC, PCC-R, and PDI. According to the cutoff values of children who speak Brazilian Portuguese (BP), adequacy of the PCC and PCC-R values was observed in most participants (PCC: 82 children - 91.1%; PCC-R: 87 children - 94.6%). The processes of liquid simplification (LS), consonant clusters simplification (CCS), final consonant simplification (FCS) were productive of which the CCS (32.2%) and FCS (20%) are still expected for age and LS are not. There was a robust negative correlation between the variables PCC x PDI and PCC-R x PDI. Most children showed adequate phonological development. Variations were observed in syllabic segments, especially in the coda, which reflect the influence of regional linguistic differences. The evidence obtained regarding the phonological performance of children within this region contributes to a more accurate speech-language diagnosis.

Roman Jakobsonʼs unpublished study Major Trends of the Old Czech Phonological Development

Roman Jakobsonʼs unpublished study Major Trends of the Old Czech Phonological Development