This study examines English-speaking children's truncation patterns (i.e., syllable deletion patterns) in multisyllabic words to determine if they are consistent with metrical constraints or perceptual biases. It also examines segmental influences on children's truncations. Children, age 22–34 months, produced three-syllable novel and real words and four-syllable real words, which varied across stress and segmental pattern. Results revealed a significant stress pattern effect on truncation rate, but findings were not consistent with metrical or perceptual salience predictions. The clearest account of the findings came from an analysis of truncation rate across individual words: Children truncated WSW (weak-strong-weak) words and words that contained intervocalic sonorants more frequently than other words. Analysis of truncation patterns in SWW and SWSW words revealed that final unstressed syllables were more frequently preserved than nonfinal unstressed syllables. Findings support the interaction between metrical, syllabic, and acoustic salience factors in children's multisyllabic word productions.
The newly formed picture that emerges from these recent investigations of language in children with Down syndrome must include the following: (a) language production among children with Down syndrome lags behind expected performance based on mental age; (b) in many children with Down syndrome language production skills are not commensurate with comprehension skills; the number of subjects who exhibit this uneven profile increases with age; (c) lexical and syntactic development are asynchronous in Down syndrome with syntax lagging behind; and (d) syntactic development, as measured by MLU, is characterized by periods of relatively rapid linear growth alternating with extended plateaus. Although answering some questions, these findings raise new issues that must be addressed. However, it seems clear that the traditional "slow-but-normal" characterization of the language of children with Down syndrome is no longer tenable. Instead, we must begin to think in terms of specific properties that are unique to the development of language by children with Down syndrome.
Abstract This study investigates the phonological acquisition of Korean consonants using conversational speech samples collected from sixty monolingual typically developing Korean children aged two, three, and four years. Phonemic acquisition was examined for syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants. Results showed that Korean children acquired stops and nasals followed by affricates, fricatives, and the liquid. In general, Korean consonants were acquired earlier in syllable-initial position compared to syllable-final position, except for the liquid /l/. The findings are compared with previous research based on single-word assessments, and differences that appear to be associated with the unique morphological system of Korean are noted.
Longitudinal samples of meaningful speech of 34 normally developing children were analyzed to determine the range and types of consonantal phones produced at 15, 18, 21, and 24 months. Separate inventories for word-initial and word-final consonants were constructed for each child at each age level. Group analyses showed that early inventories in initial position were composed primarily of voiced anterior stops, nasals, and glides; by 24 months, voiceless stops, velars, and a few fricatives were also included. In final position, inventories consisted primarily of voiceless stops and alveolar consonants. There was a strong tendency for the voiced stops to appear first in initial position and for [t] and [r] to appear first in word-final. Individual analyses of place and manner of articulation revealed highly similar patterns across subjects. The findings are related to other longitudinal research in early phonological development and to studies of babbling of younger subjects and correct productions of older subjects.
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Reviewed by: First language acquisition by Eve V. Clark Carol Stoel-Gammon First language acquisition. By Eve V. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 534. ISBN 0521629977. $32.99. First language acquisition provides a well-documented and even-handed examination of how children acquire their native language. Unlike texts that emphasize formal aspects of language learning, the focus of this book is on learning language within a social context. Thus, Clark includes detailed descriptions of the setting in which language is acquired, including the phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic characteristics of child-directed speech as well as nonverbal aspects such as gesture, eye gaze, facial expression, and joint attention. The role of cognitive and social skills is also highlighted throughout the text, providing a framework through which the linguistic achievements of the child can be viewed. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of acquisition. The first two sections account for the majority of the text (nearly 275 pages of 423 pages in ten chapters). These sections cover the aspects of acquisition traditionally covered in texts on language acquisition. The first section, ‘Getting started’, begins with the prelinguistic period and continues up to the first words. Ch. 2 discusses the setting and conversational interactions in which children learn language, and lays the groundwork for the importance of communicative setting that is highlighted throughout the book. Ch. 3 focuses on speech perception and includes a review of infant speech perception prior to the onset of words and of perceptual development in the early stages of meaningful speech. Acquisition of first words is detailed in Ch. 4, with an emphasis on the nature of early vocabulary, rate of acquisition, and the purposes for which words are used. Phonological development is reviewed in Ch. 5, beginning with the babbling period. In addition to a review of phonemic and phonotactic development and a description of common [End Page 651] error patterns in children’s speech, C introduces the notion of communicative schemas (meaningful utterances without an identifiable adult model) and templates as part of learning to pronounce, and notes the presence of extensive individual differences in phonological development. Ch. 6 deals with lexical development and, once again, highlights the social setting in which the child learns new words, the lexical and grammatical categories of the lexicon, and the occurrence of overextensions in word use. The difference between comprehension and production is highlighted throughout the chapters in this section, a difference that is particularly apparent in the domain of lexical acquisition: at the age of sixteen months, the average child has a comprehension vocabulary of 150 to 200 words, but a productive vocabulary of about eighteen words. In the second section, ‘Constructions and meanings’, the focus is primarily on acquisition of the morphological and syntactic features of the language being acquired. Although the bulk of discussion and most of the examples are from English, findings from other languages are introduced to reflect the ways that languages differ in forming words, phrases, and sentences. This section includes five chapters, tracing acquisition patterns from the emergence of word combinations (Ch. 7), to the appearance of inflections (Ch. 8), to the use of complex clauses including use of demonstratives, relative clauses, quantifiers, questions, negatives, and causative constructions. The last two chapters in the second section focus on combining clauses into more complex sentences (Ch. 10) and on compounding and derivation in word-formation (Ch. 11). As in the first section, C emphasizes the role that social context, particularly parental input, and cognitive abilities bring to the acquisition of morphological and syntactic acquisition. For example, in the section on word combinations (Ch. 7), she cites examples of early combinatorial productions stemming from a gesture plus a word, arguing that this approach allows a child to bypass difficulties with articulating more than one word at a time. Later in Ch. 7, C highlights the role of the parent as conversational partner in determining ‘new’ vs. ‘given’ information. In discussing complement-taking verbs (Ch. 10), she notes strong parallels between infrequent use of that in child productions and in adult input. According to the data she cites, adults do not use that when introducing a...
Perceptual similarities of musical tones separated by octave intervals are known as octave equivalence (OE). Peter et al. [(2008). Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Speech Prosody, edited S. Maduerira, C. Reis, and P. Barbosa, Luso-Brazilian Association of Speech Sciences, Campinas, pp. 731–734] found evidence of octave-shifted pitch matching (OSPM) in children during verbal imitation tasks, implying OE in speech tokens. This study evaluated the role of lexical stress and speech sound disorder (SSD) in OSPM. Eleven children with SSD and 11 controls imitated low-pitched nonwords. Stimulus/response f0 ratios were computed. OSPM was expressed preferentially in stressed vowels. SSD was associated with reduced expression of OSPM in unstressed vowels only. Results are consistent with the psycholinguistic prominence of lexical stress and prosodic deficits in SSD.
In the course of acquiring language, chilearliest stage of language development dren often encounter difficulties in making (mean length of utterance ranging between themselves understood. When such failures 1.00 and 2.00 morphemes per utterance). In occur children must learn to recognize the addition, the subjects met the following se cause of the miscommunication and subselection criteria: (a) a mild deficit in adaptive quently how to clarify that failure. Several behavior as measured by the AAMD Adap studies of conversational interaction have five Behavior Scale (Grossman, 1973), (b) no examined the clarification strategies that sensory deficits and no history of seizures, 1 'Ato 2-year-old nonretarded children use (c) no prior institutional placement, and (d) when the listener is not able to understand participation in a preschool program, their original message. The findings reveal that these children use a variety of contin^ , n n ,■ d j ' Data Collection Procedures gent responses to maintain mutual under standing (Gallagher, 1977; Scollon, 1976; The data that served as the basis for this Stokes, Note 1). study were videotaped in six 'A-hour ses McLean and Snyder-McLean (1978) have sions over a 4-week period. The sessions recently suggested that retarded children sampled a variety of everyday activities that may lack a basic understanding of how to included playing with familiar and unfamil formulate contingent messages in conversaiar toys, eating meals and snacks, and look tion. If substantiated, this conversational ing at picture books. This diversity was de deficit would presumably result in frequent signed to provide each child with a range of communication breakdowns. This investilinguistic and nonlinguistic experiences that gation examines the communication failure would encourage a representative use of lan of four retarded children and explores the guage. strategies they adopt for clarifying these The language samples were transcribed miscommunications in everyday conversaorthographically. Both interand intratran tional situations. scriber reliability measures were computed using a random sample of 100 consecutive utterances per child. The proportion of agreement between transcribers and within a single transcriber was 85% and 87%, re spectively. Method
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