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This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while the low-frequency variant involves a front rounded vowel which is expected to be mastered relatively early. Late mastery of complex consonants was confirmed. The high-frequency labiopalatalized-consonant variant was absent at age 3 and not yet mastered even at age 5. All children produced the easier-to-produce low-frequency front-rounded-vowel variant, most at far greater frequency than in adult speech, implying that a child's output limitations can affect which variant the child targets for production. Modular theories, in which phonological plans reflect only the characteristics of adult input, fail to account for our results. Non-modular theories are implicated.

Background: Arabic, a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic variety, has a rich consonant inventory. Previous studies on Arabic phonological acquisition have focused primarily on dialects in Jordan and Egypt. Because Arabic varies considerably across regions, information is also needed for other dialects. Aims: To determine acquisition benchmarks for singleton consonants for Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking 4-year-olds. Methods & Procedures: Participants were 80 monolingual Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children divided into two age groups: 46-54 and 55-62 months. Post-hoc, eight children were identified as possibly at risk for protracted phonological development. A native Kuwaiti Arabic speaker audio-recorded and transcribed single-word speech samples (88 words) that tested consonants across word positions within a variety of word lengths and structures. Transcription reliability (point-to-point) was 95% amongst the authors, and 87% with an external consultant. Three acquisition levels were designated that indicated the proportion of children with no mismatches ('errors') for a given consonant: 90%+ of children, 75-89%, fewer than 75%. Mismatch patterns were described in terms of a phonological feature framework previously described in the literature. Outcomes & Results: The Kuwaiti 4-year-olds produced many singleton consonants accurately, including pharyngeals and uvulars. Although the older age group had fewer manner and laryngeal mismatches than the younger age group, consonants still developing at age 5 included coronal fricatives and affricates, trilled /r/ and some uvularized consonants ('emphatics'). The possible at-risk group showed mastery of fewer consonants than the other children. By feature category, place mismatches were the most common, primarily de-emphasis and lack of contrast for [coronal, grooved] (distinguishing alveolar from interdental fricatives). Manner mismatches were next most common: the most frequent substitutions were [+lateral] [l] or other rhotics for /r/, and stops for fricatives. Laryngeal mismatches were few, and involved partial or full devoicing. Group differences generally reflected proportions of mismatches rather than types. Conclusions & Implications: Compared with studies for Jordanian and Egyptian Arabic, Kuwaiti 4-year-olds showed a somewhat more advanced consonant inventory than same age peers, especially with respect to uvulars, pharyngeals and uvularized (emphatic) consonants. Similar to the other studies, consonant categories yet to master were: [+trilled] /r/, coronal fricative feature [grooved], [+voiced] fricatives /?, z/ and the affricate /d???/ and some emphatics. Common mismatch patterns generally accorded with previous studies. This study provides criterion reference benchmarks for Kuwaiti Arabic consonant singleton acquisition in 4-year-olds.

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 that could be used across Spanish dialects and that sufficiently sampled Spanish word lengths, stress patterns, word shapes and phonemes; and (2) to derive hypotheses for the larger study, based on patterns found in these children's speech, and a review of the literature. The two speakers showed some developmental patterns reported for other languages (e.g. constraints on production of liquids and word-initial consonants in unstressed syllables) but also patterns that may reflect Spanish phonological inventories, allophony and frequencies. These data helped consolidate the Spanish word list for elicitation and led to questions for the ongoing study concerning word structure, multisyllabic words, liquids, fricatives and vowel sequences. (Contains 4 tables and 7 notes.)

This paper investigates the effect of the repetition of phonological elements on accuracy in spontaneous language production. Using a corpus of naturalistic speech errors, it is shown that repetition of a whole segment doubles the error rate on the second token (a perseveratory effect), for onset consonants, vowels, and coda consonants; the effect is present (at a reduced magnitude) in the speech of young children. Repetition also leads to an increased error rate on the first token (an anticipatory effect), but only for word-initial consonants and only for adults. Repetition of subsegmental features has an effect only for word-initial consonants and only perseveratorily. There are no effects of repetition of larger units (e.g., syllable onsets) or for general segmental similarity. It is argued that the effect is largely due to mechanisms designed to prevent perseveration (by e.g., shifting average activation values downward), and affects early-accessed information (whole segments; onset consonants) more than later-accessed information (subsegmental features; vowels and coda consonants). (Contains 13 tables and 1 figure.)

Overtensing (the use of an inflected form in place of a nonfinite form, e.g. *"didn't broke" for target "didn't break") is common in early syntax. In a ChiLDES-based study of 36 children acquiring English, I examine the effects of phonological and lexical factors. For irregulars, errors are more common with verbs of low frequency and when phonological processing biases favour the past-tense form relative to the base form (vowel dominance and the consonant addition bias). For regulars, errors are more common when the inflected form ends in a rime that can occur in monomorphemic forms in English (which children have had independent practice with) than when the rime is found only in inflected forms. Results demonstrate that default patterns can be subject to lexical frequency effects. Results are compatible with a particular conceptualization of competition (the integrated multiple competitor approach), whether connectionist or symbolic.

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a sentence-production task, the vowel of the base form or past-tense form of an irregular verb is primed by an identical vowel in the subject noun (e.g., base vowel "cream," past-tense vowel "chrome," unrelated vowel slot). For verbs with different vowels in the base form and past-tense form, phonological priming of the base vowel or of the past-tense vowel increases the rate of overregularization errors such as "*freezed" as compared to an unrelated vowel prime. For verbs with the same vowel in the base and past-tense forms (e.g., "hit/hit"), phonological priming has no effect on the rate of overregularization errors. It is argued that irregular forms are not produced in a specialized subnetwork for (irregular) past-tense forms, but are produced in the general lexical system simultaneous with general phonological processing. Implications for theories of inflectional morphology are discussed.

Models of speech production differ on whether phonological neighbourhoods should affect processing, and on whether effects should be facilitatory or inhibitory. Inhibitory effects of large neighbourhoods have been argued to underlie apparent anti-frequency effects, whereby high-frequency default features are more prone to mispronunciation errors than low-frequency nondefault features. Data from the original SLIPs experiments that found apparent anti-frequency effects are analysed for neighbourhood effects. Effects are facilitatory: errors are significantly less likely for words with large numbers of neighbours that share the characteristic that is being primed for error (''friends''). Words in the neighbourhood that do not share the target characteristic (''enemies'') have little effect on error rates. Neighbourhood effects do not underlie the apparent anti-frequency effects. Implications for models of speech production are discussed.

In morphological processing in adult speech, irregular forms are subject to several types of errors, including overgeneralization and overtensing. A morphonaming task found that probability of these errors is affected by a phonological factor that derives from vowel phoneme frequencies in a complex fashion: whether the vowel in the past tense form is dominant relative to the vowel in the base form or recessive relative to the base vowel. (Author/VWL)

Form-oriented errors of verbal inflection in speech are examined as indicators of cognitive processing in six experiments with college undergraduates. Appendices list words used as stimuli in the six experiments. (LMO)

A diary study of the speech of a child acquiring English found eight between-word processes, all of which were optional and occurred in fairly restricted environments. Most of the processes were also of short duration. (Author/CB)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology & Audiology is the property of Speech-Language & Audiology Canada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology & Audiology is the property of Speech-Language & Audiology Canada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Clinicians have had limited resources for conducting phonological evaluations of Canadian Francophone children and to this day, there are no standardized tests of French-Canadian phonology (Brosseau-Lapré, Rvachew, Arcand, & Leroux, 2011). The current paper presents a new assessment tool to evaluate the segments and structures of Canadian French phonology (emphasis on Manitoba French) in the context of a nonlinear phonological framework. The objectives of this article are to: (a) present an overview of nonlinear phonology and explain how models of phonology account for non-adjacent segments, (b) provide an overview of Manitoba French phonology, (c) examine the phonological characteristics of the French word list (e.g. segment sampling and syllabic structure), and (d) explain, briefly, how to administer, transcribe, and analyze data from the test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology & Audiology is the property of Speech-Language & Audiology Canada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)