The contribution of polysyllabic words in clinical decision making about children's speech

Abstract

Poor polysyllabic word (PSW) production seems to mark paediatric speech impairment as well as impairment in language, literacy and phonological processing. As impairment in these domains may only manifest in PSWs, PSW production may provide unique information that is often excluded from clinical decision making because insufficient PSWs are included in speech tests. A 5-stage model of PSW acquisition is described. The model, grounded in optimality theory, expresses a reciprocal relationship between the relaxation of markedness constraints and the contraction of faithfulness constraints from 12 months of age to adolescence. The markedness constraints that persist to the age of 7;11 years are associated with non-final weak syllables and within-word consonant sequences. Output changes are argued to reflect increasing specification of phonological representations with age, liberating information for motor planning and execution, resulting in increasingly accurate output. The clinical implications of PSWs in assessment and therapy are discussed.

Polysyllable productions in preschool children with speech sound disorders: Error categories and the Framework of Polysyllable Maturity

“…banana [nana] for b nan / and elephant [ f nt for / l f nt ) as children develop vowels in context (also known as syntagmatic productions) (James et al, 2008). From the age of 2;4, typically developing children produce more mature polysyllables by including all the syllables (including weak and strong syllables) and demonstrate correct stress accuracy although phonemic accuracy may be reduced (e.g.…”

“…children frequently delete the less-salient weak syllables). As children grow older and their production of polysyllables becomes more mature, children gradually develop phonemic accuracy of the consonants within the stressed syllables (James et al, 2008).…”

“…Polysyllable acquisition in typically developing children has been studied using three main measures: phoneme accuracy, syllable accuracy, and stress accuracy (James, 2006;James et al, 2008). James (2006) proposed that the least mature realisation of polysyllables, as demonstrated by young children, primarily contain the stressed syllable, with the correct vowel (i.e.…”

“…Evidence to support this idea comes from research on typical speech acquisition. When compared to monosyllables, polysyllables take a longer time to acquire (James et al, 2008) and, when sampled, may assist with the identification of children with different sub-classifications of SSD (Vick et al, 2014). What follows is an overview of literature on typically developing children' acquisition of polysyllables, and consideration of how polysyllables might be sampled, analysed and measured.…”

“…One way to identify these preschool children could be to sample and closely analyse their productions of polysyllables. Polysyllables are words of three or more syllables and are also known as multisyllabic words (Kehoe & Stoel-Gammon, 1997;Mason, Bérubé, Bernhardt & Stemberger, 2015) or polysyllabic words (Gozzard, Baker & McCabe, 2006;James, 2006;James, van Doorn & McLeod, 2008). Polysyllables are thought to be more taxing than monosyllabic words as they contain more information to be perceived, stored in underlying representations and produced.…”