Speech production - first words to first school year (6)

Question 1

First words

Answer 1

• usually produced at 10-18 months
• 8-11 words leart per month (speedy)
• smooth transition from babbling to words - both can occur for a period
• at about 50 words (18 months) acquisition takes off
• normally only parents understand word patterns and outsiders do not

Question 2

Ability at 3 months

Answer 2

1. motor skills: lift head at shoulder, turn head, follow moving object with eyes, wriggle and kick
2. sensory and thinking skills: turn head to bright colours and lights, turn head to sound of voice
3. language and social skills: make a cooing sound, smile when smiled at, communicate hunger and fear, anticipate being lifted

Question 3

Ability at 6 months

Answer 3

1. motor skills: hold head steadily, read and grasp, play with toes, shake the rattle, sit in a high chair, roll over
2. sensory and thinking skills: open mouth for a spoon, imitate familiar actions
3. language and social skills: know familiar faces, laugh and squeal with delight scream if annoyed, smile at self in mirror

Question 4

Ability in 12 months

Answer 4

1. motor skills: drink from a cup with help, feed finger food, poke, sit well with no support, stand alone momentarily
2. sensory and thinking skills: copy sounds and actions, respond to music with body motion
3. language and social skills: babble, say 1st word, some separation anxiety

Question 5

First word templates

Answer 5

• some characteristics are babbling e.g. labial (b,p,m), coronal stops (t,d)
• maybe a universal trend for parents names e.g. mummy, papa, mama
• children often have preferential sounds and word templates - preferred since babble stage - differs from child to child

Question 6

Grunwell (1987)

Answer 6

1. syllable reduplication - until 2;6 - repetition of first part of word e.g. bottle = bone
2. assimilation = consonant harmony, cat=kac
3. consonant, vowel interaction, e.g. grass = gas

Question 7

Dodd et al (2002)

Answer 7

typical or atypical (normally use DEAP - diagnostic evaluation of articulation and phonology)

• normative study on 684 children (3-6;11) from Britain
• older children had more accurate production and fewer error patterns in speech
• no gender differences in younger age groups but in older age groups, phonological accuracy girls>boys
• no sig. effects on socio economic status
• 4yr olds - most vowels correct but no lateral ability
  e. g. yellow

Question 8

Kehoe (1997)

Answer 8

Early deletions (2-4)

• final consonant deletion e.g. bed=be - leads to confusion, some consonants are easier than others
• weak syllable deletion - e.g. balloon (luh)(lun)
• e.g. banana (nana_
• complex stress patterns

Early substitutions (2-4)

• voicing errors - initial phoneme is easier, unvoiced is easier
• fronting of velar stops e.g. pig [pid]
• stopping of fricatives - sausage [totId]

Consonant clusters (2-5)

• cluster reduction (until 4 years) - most difficult consonant is deleted, stops are easy but /s/ = more difficult e.g. fruit [fut]
• vowel epenthesis - e.g. black (addition of a sound into a word = balack)

Question 9

Dodd et al (2002) - sounds that should be developed at what age?

Answer 9

• fricatives= 7+

- plosives = 3-3;5

Question 10

Variability of children’s speech production

Answer 10

1. situation (free play vs. picture naming)
2. lexical items - word frequency, or favourite words
3. attenuation for correct pronunciation and errors

BUT too many inconsistencies poses a problem

SLI, hearing impaired, tongue palsy OR multilingual

Question 11

Multilingualism

Answer 11

• most variable phonological development
• Hua and Dodd (2006) - multilingual children may apply unusual processes e.g. may apply something correct in second language e.g. vino=bino
• phonology of target language needs to be reviewed

Question 12

Levelt et al (1999)

Answer 12

• difference between articulatory level and phonological level
• articulatory simplification
• abbling - random articulatory training
• phonological component

Question 13

Berko and Brown 91960)

Answer 13

• awareness of adult forms
• fiss and fish
• aware that one is correct, but cannot produce it
• probs with auditory feedback?

Question 14

Dale (1976)

Answer 14

• rabbit vs wabbit

…

same as fish experiment

Question 15

Smith (2010)

Answer 15

• can regress e.g. say [red] and then say [wed]

Question 16

Smith (1973)

Answer 16

• chain shifts
• puddle = puzzle
  BUT
  puzzle - puddle
• lexical effects - high freq. words are better
• cross linguistic differences - substitutions
  e. g. Cantonese
• articulatory and phonology can vary with child

Question 17

Fenson (1994)

Answer 17

• measured infant vocabularydevelopmetn via parental reports - created a checklist of words a child might know, plus additional sections on actions and gestures for infants and sentences for toddlers
• wide variation in children’s vocabulary scores, but production vocal shows an increase towards the end of second year
• communication development inventory (CDI)

– = may encourage over inclusive responses by parents

Question 18

Hamilton et al (2000)

Answer 18

• CDIs collected from British children aged 1-2;1
• no sig. effect of SES
• compared to American infants, have lower scores on both comprehension and production

Question 19

Lexical development

Answer 19

• initially slow vocal growth to faster growth
• sudden spurt at 50-100 words (in second year of life)
• first words are usually shorter in syllabic length, easier to pronounce and occur frequently
• notion of universal noun bias is more concrete and easier to comprehend
• later= semantic errors e.g. over and under generalisation
• measure mean length of utterance by taking a 30 min sample of speech and count in no. of meaningless morphemes and dividing it by the number of utterances