Consonant‐free words: Evidence from Hebrew speaking children with cochlear implants

Abstract

This paper reports on a rare phenomenon in language development-the production of words without consonants, and thus syllables without an onset. Such words, which are referred as Consonant-free words (CFWs), appeared for a short period in the early speech of hearing impaired Hebrew-speaking children, who produced words consisting of one or two vowels (where the latter were disyllabic). The quantitative data are drawn from the speech of six monolingual hearing-impaired Hebrew-speaking children using a cochlear implant device. Their age ranged from 1;5-2;8 years at their first recording session. The elicitation procedure was based on spontaneous speech and picture naming. Findings indicate that cochlear implant users produce CFWs at the initial stage of the prosodic word development. This study claims the CFWs characterize a transitional period between babbling and speech, which varies between different types of populations. The transitional period is rather short in typically developing children, who hardly ever produce CFWs, greater in cochlear implant children, and the greatest in developmental speech disorders such as dyspraxia. Clinical implications of these findings are also discussed.

Number processing and arithmetic skills in children with cochlear implants

“…Recent research shows unambiguously that early implantation enables most of the young users with CI to develop considerable speech and language competence (e.g., Geers et al, 2003 ; Nott et al, 2003 ; Tomblin et al, 2005 ; Connor et al, 2006 ; Johnson and Goswami, 2010 ). The developmental trajectories, however, seem to be deviant from typical with respect to phonetics and phonology and delayed with respect to grammar and lexicon (e.g., Blarney et al, 2001 ; Chin, 2006 ; Leyrer, 2008 ; Adi-Bensaid and Tubul-Lacy, 2009 ; Geers et al, 2009 ; Friedmann and Szterman, 2011 ). Importantly, such variability in developmental pathways of linguistic skills might affect other cognitive domains such as numerical cognition.…”

The emergence of productive speech and language in Spanish-learning paediatric cochlear implant users

“…However, the relationship of CB to later words remains unclear. This results in a tendency for babbling and word production to overlap for an extended period (Adi-Bensaid & Tubul-Lavy, 2009 ;Ertmer & Inniger, 2009). This results in a tendency for babbling and word production to overlap for an extended period (Adi-Bensaid & Tubul-Lavy, 2009 ;Ertmer & Inniger, 2009).…”

“…In the case of children implanted in the first two years of life, the population analyzed in the present article, the benefits are particularly positive, as confirmed by the large number of children who seem to catch up with their hearing peers after three or four years of implant use (see Geers et al, 2009). Some indications that development might be atypical are : early syllables which do not conform to the presumably universal consonant-vowel structure (Adi-Bensaid & Tubul-Lavy, 2009 ; see also Ertmer & Mellon, 2001;Gillis, Schauwers & Govaerts, 2002) ; segmental inaccuracy in the one-word period (Warner-Czyz & Davis, 2008 ;Warner-Czyz, Davis & MacNeilage, 2010 ;Ertmer & Goffman, 2011) ; and morphophonological errors early in grammatical development (e.g., Szagun, 2004 ;Moreno-Torres & Torres, 2008). As a group, the long-term outcomes are notably heterogeneous (e.g., Duchesne, Sutton & Bergeron, 2009), which seems to be associated with a combination of individual and environmental factors (e.g., Pisoni & Cleary, 2003 ;Le Normand, Parisse & Cohen, 2008 ;Geers et al, 2009).…”

Consonant and vowel articulation accuracy in younger and middle-aged Spanish healthy adults

“…Evidence of a dissociation between consonants and vowels has also been noted in research describing children' speech disorders. For instance, some children with impaired motor control skills produce their first words using exclusively vowels (i.e., consonant-free-words) [17][18][19]. Again, this has been explained as a consequence of the increased cognitive demands placed by consonant production.…”

“…Finally, and given that there is agreement among researchers regarding consonant accuracy but not so much vowel accuracy, it is possible that there is a contrast between the two categories, with consonants being more vulnerable than vowels. The possibility that consonants are more vulnerable than vowels would not be surprising: studies in child speech development have long noted that toddlers start producing vowels well before consonants [16]; also it has been observed that children with speech planning deficits do succeed in learning their first vowels but they struggle to learn their first consonants [17][18][19]. Interestingly, delays in consonant acquisition seem to vary cross-linguistically, and might be more common in languages with relatively simple syllable structures such as Hebrew and Spanish (in contrast with languages with complex syllable structures such as Dutch or English).…”