Aims: To describe typical phonological development of Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-speaking children, considering the following parameters: age of customary production, acquisition and mastery. Methods & Procedures: Data were collected from 857 children aged between 3 years and 8 years 11 months with typical language and speech development. The…

Covert contrast is the statistically reliable distinction between target language phonemes produced in the process of language acquisition that is nevertheless not perceived by a native speaker of that language. This paper examines the acquisition of contrasts in four Najdi Arabic fricatives, /s/, /[voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/,…

Background: Speech and language researchers study phonological acquisition and evaluate the errors that children make to understand this complex process. This information provides clinicians with a scientific reference for better assessment and intervention services to children with articulation/phonological disorders. Urdu is a language spoken by…

Without data on speech accuracy of Vietnamese-English speakers, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are unable to assess accurately this population for speech sound disorders. This study explored the heretofore uninvestigated speech accuracy and use of Vietnamese-English bilingual individuals residing in the USA. Participants included six…

This study examined how intervention dose frequency affects phonological acquisition and generalization in preschool children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Using a multiple-baseline, single-participants experimental design, eight English-speaking children with SSD (4;0 to 5;6) were split into two dose frequency conditions (4…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the diagnostic accuracy of traditional measures of phonological ability developed for monolingual English-speaking children with their bilingual peers in both English and Spanish. We predicted that a composite measure, derived from a combination of English and Spanish phonological measures, would…

Purpose: There are a number of evidence-based treatments for preschool children with phonological disorders (Baker & McLeod, 2011). However, a recent survey by Brumbaugh and Smit (2013) suggests that speech-language pathologists are not equally familiar with all evidence-based treatment alternatives, particularly the complexity approach. The…

The purpose of this article is to report results of an investigation into the production of a covert contrast by native speakers of Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish in the acquisition of the English distinction between the high front vowels /i/ and /?/. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable acoustic distinction made by a language learner…

Pam Shanks describes the stages in the child's development of language and reminds us that the Montessori principle of observation should guide the support of the child with articulation errors. For most children with developmental articulation delays, the directress can implement Montessori materials and use conversational strategies to emphasize…

A crosslinguistic study is underway concerning children's protracted phonological development (i.e. speech sound disorders). The current article reports pilot Spanish data for this study from two 4-year-old boys with protracted phonological development. The purposes of the pilot study were to: (1) develop and evaluate a word list for elicitation…

The objective of this study is to create a new proposal for classifying the severity of speech disorders using a fuzzy model in accordance with a linguistic model that represents the speech acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese. The fuzzy linguistic model was run in the MATLAB software fuzzy toolbox from a set of fuzzy rules, and it encompassed…

Error patterns in children's phonological development are often described as simplifying processes that can interact with one another with different consequences. Some interactions limit the applicability of an error pattern, and others extend it to more words. Theories predict that error patterns interact to their full potential. While specific…

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…

This article documents the typological occurrence and interactions of two seemingly independent error patterns, namely Velar Fronting and Labial Harmony, in a cross-sectional investigation of the sound systems of 235 children with phonological delays (ages 3;0 to 7;9). The results revealed that the occurrence of Labial Harmony depends on the…

The goal of this research programme was to evaluate the role of word lexicality in effecting phonological change in children's sound systems. Four children with functional speech sound disorders (SSDs) were enrolled in an across-subjects multiple baseline single-subject design; two were treated using high-frequency real words (RWs) and two were…