Protracted Phonological Development Research Articles

A Spanish pilot investigation for a crosslinguistic study in protracted phonological development

A crosslinguistic study is underway concerning children’s protracted phonological development (i.e. speech sound disorders). The current article reports pilot Spanish data for this study from two 4-year-old boys with protracted phonological development. The purposes of the pilot study were to: (1) develop and evaluate a word list for elicitation that could be used across Spanish dialects and that sufficiently sampled Spanish word lengths, stress patterns, word shapes and phonemes; and (2) to derive hypotheses for the larger study, based on patterns found in these children’s speech, and a review of the literature. The two speakers showed some developmental patterns reported for other languages (e.g. constraints on production of liquids and word-initial consonants in unstressed syllables) but also patterns that may reflect Spanish phonological inventories, allophony and frequencies. These data helped consolidate the Spanish word list for elicitation and led to questions for the ongoing study concerning word structure, multisyllabic words, liquids, fricatives and vowel sequences.

Variability in a German-Speaking Child as Viewed from a Constraint-Based Nonlinear Phonology Perspective

This paper provides an overview of constraint-based nonlinear phonological theories (Bernhardt & Stemberger, 1998) in clinical application to German. Tenets of the theories are briefly introduced, and then illustrated with longitudinal data from a 3-year-old German-speaking child with variable and protracted phonological development. The child's consonant system showed both improvement and regression over time. Fricatives and /l/ decreased in accuracy and prevalence over time, whereas dorsal (velar) stops increased in accuracy and prevalence over time, replacing both /l/ and fricatives. The analysis proposes that the child showed an unusual ranking of constraints in which the feature [Dorsal] (velar) became a secondary default place feature whenever the global default [Coronal] place feature was ruled out by other constraints. The relevance of these data is discussed for variants of constraint-based theories.