Current theories of phonological development make contrasting predictions about the role of vocabulary growth and orthographic knowledge in the emergence of segmental phonological representations. Testing these predictions in children is made difficult by the metacognitive nature of tasks used to assess phonological representations. In this study,…

We investigate bilingual children's perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., "green" is pronounced with a final [m] in "green pen"), while French has voicing assimilation…

This study investigates whether the earliest words children choose to say are mainly words containing sounds they can produce (cf. 'phonological dominance' hypotheses), or whether children choose words without regard to their phonological characteristics (cf. 'lexical dominance' hypotheses). Phonological properties of words in spontaneous speech…

This study aims to disentangle the often-confounded effects of input frequency and morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of inflection, by focusing on simple and complex verb forms in Japanese. Study 1 tested 28 children aged 3;3-4;3 on stative (complex) and simple past forms, and Study 2 tested 30 children aged 3;5-5;3 on completive…

High rates of error and variability in early word production may signal speech sound disorder. However, there is little consensus regarding the degree of error and variability that may be expected in the typical range. Relatedly, while variables including child age, word frequency and word phonological neighbourhood density are associated with…

The Process Density Index (PDI), originally developed by Edwards, is a potentially useful metric for assessing phonological development that is based on the average number of phonological process applications per word in a speech sample. The purpose of the present study was to gather PDI reference data for Dutch-speaking children. Speech samples…

Caregiver speech is not a static collection of utterances, but occurs in "conversational exchanges," in which caregiver and child dynamically influence each other's speech. We investigate (a) whether children and caregivers modulate the prosody of their speech as a function of their interlocutor's speech, and (b) the influence of the…

Approximately 10% of children with a speech sound disorder present with an inconsistent phonological disorder, characterized by inconsistent production of words across multiple trials. A number of studies have provided evidence of the efficacy of core vocabulary therapy for the remediation of this speech sound disorder with a dosage of two…

Purpose: The function of child-directed speech has been debated for decades. This study examined the perceptual and acoustic characteristics of child- and adult-directed Cantonese tones to test the hyperarticulation and prosodic hypotheses that have been proposed to account for the acoustic modifications in child-directed speech. Method: Sixty-two…

The ELO-L (Évaluation du langage oral chez l'enfant libanais) is the first norm-referenced language-screening test in Lebanon. It is an adaptation of the ELO, a French language-screening test. The ELO-L was normed on 1,718 children aged three to eight years and divided into eight age groups with a minimum of 100 participants in each group. It is…

This study provides the first systematic account of word-final cluster acquisition in bilingual children. To this end, forty Welsh-English bilingual children differing in language dominance and age (2;6 to 5;0) participated in a picture-naming task in English and Welsh. The results revealed significant age and dominance effects on cluster…

Phonology is an area of linguistics that is concerned with the sounds of language. Since each language has its own unique system of sound patterns, there is a need to study phonological development in different languages. However, lack of published data necessitates the present study on phonological developmental pattern in Punjabi language…

In French, the acquisition of object clitics seems delayed, and omissions are documented. In this article, we look at the experimental paradigm traditionally used to elicit object clitics and propose a new elicitation procedure that is closer to how clitics are produced in spontaneous production. We show that under the proposed new experiment, the…

Speech-language pathology has different practice and research histories, standards, methods, and challenges in different countries and regions. Awareness of these different realities may contribute to the scientific development of the field and improve the services delivered to different populations. Sharing solutions to similar problems in…

This research investigates children's knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair…