The effect of phonotactic constraints in German-speaking children with delayed phonological acquisition: Evidence from production of word-initial consonant clusters

Abstract

U n i v e r s i t ä t P o t s d a mHumanwissenschaftliche Fakultät fi rst published in: International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology -8 (2006) In this study the effect of phonotactic constraints concerning word-initial consonant clusters in children with delayed phonological acquisition was explored. Twelve German-speaking children took part (mean age 5;1). The spontaneous speech of all children was characterized by the regular appearance of the error patterns fronting, e.g., Kuh ''cow'' /ku:/ ! [tu:], or stopping, e.g., Schaf ''sheep'' / a:f/ ! [ta:f], which were inappropriate for their chronological age. The children were asked to produce words (picture naming task, word repetition task) with initial consonant clusters, in which the application of the error patterns would violate phonotactic sequence constraints. For instance, if fronting would apply in /kl-/, e.g., Kleid ''dress'', it would be realized as the phontactically illegal consonant cluster /tl-/. The results indicate that phonotactic constraints affect word production in children with delayed phonological developments. Surprisingly, we found that children with fronting produced the critical consonants correctly significantly more often in word-initial consonant clusters than in words in which they appeared as singleton onsets. In addition, the results provide evidence for a similar developmental trajectory of acquisition in children with typical development and in children with delayed phonological acquisition.

What Machine Learning Can Tell Us About the Role of Language Dominance in the Diagnostic Accuracy of German LITMUS Non-word and Sentence Repetition Tasks

“…Thus, a greater performance gap between TD and SLI is expected for both monolingual and bilingual children on NWRT_LD, which contains trilateral sCC onset clusters, where /s/ and /ʃ/ represent an appendix to the prosodic word. The latter has been shown to be deficient in phonologically impaired monolingual German children (Ott et al, 2006). An overview of segments and syllable types is given in Table 2.…”

“…Unlike the CL-NWRT, e.g., the Dutch Quasi-Universal NWRT (Boerma et al, 2015; Boerma and Blom, 2017), which primarily tests phonological short-term memory and comprises phonologically simple non-words compatible with the phonological properties of any language, the German LITMUS-NWRT was devised to tap more directly into phonological abilities by focusing on phonological complexity. The latter was found to be a promising marker for assessing phonological impairment (Marshall et al, 2002; Ferré et al, 2012; for German, see Ott et al, 2006). LITMUS-NWRTs of this type systematically vary segmental (articulatory difficulty), syllabic (presence or absence of clusters) and sequential complexity (types of consonant and syllable sequences) combining them into non-words of increasing phonological complexity.…”