No abstract

Phological systems of 60 "essentially unintelligible" children between the ages of three and eight years and 60 normally-developing "intelligible" four-year-olds were analyzed and compared. All of the unintelligible children evidenced liquid deviations, cluster reduction, stridency deletion, stopping, and assimilation. Liquid deviations were demonstrated by some of the intelligible children, however, the majority produced liquids approximately, and few demonstrated any examples of cluster reduction, stridency deletion, or stopping. Most of the unintelligible children used one or more of the following processes: final consonant deletion; fronting of velars; backing; syllable reduction; prevocalic voicing; glottal replacement. The intelligible four-year-olds rarely utilized any of these latter processes, but postvocalic devoicing, substitutions of /f v s z/ for /θ/ or /ð/, and vowelization of postvocalic or syllabic /l/ were common in their speech samples.

, "Relation between phonologic difficulty and the occurrence of disfluencies in the early stage of stuttering" (1994). Faculty Research and Creative Activity. 6.

Utterances of 60 normally developing children, who were within 6 months of their second birthdays, were analyzed for occurrences of phonological processes. The subjects were divided equally into three chronological age groups: (a) 1:6-1:9, (b) 1:10-2:1, and (c) 2:2-2:5. The most prevalent phonological processes evidenced by all three groups were cluster reduction and deviations involving liquids (e.g., gliding). Phonological process percentage-of-occurrence means were considerably lower for the middle group than for the youngest group, with the most dramatic differences occurring for syllable reduction and postvocalic singleton omission. Potential clinical applications of the data for ascertaining what constitutes disordered phonological development in preschool children are discussed, as well as implications for specifying remediation priorities.

Forty normal two-year-olds, seen at three-week intervals over a seven-month period, were observed to reduce their usage of three phonological processes: Fronting of velars, Stopping, and Final consonant d e letion, to less than 10 percent of the possible occurrences. Their use of Gliding and Cluster reduction, which initially were more prevalent, also diminished but these processes still remain frequent. Use of all five processes varied in occurrence among classes of phonemes and in different phonetic environments. While some ordering of strategies could be identified in the progress toward suppression of the processes, there was a considerable amount of vacillation among strategies. Some generalizations can be drawn about the acquisition of phonemes and the use of processes by these young children.