Reports on an experiment, conducted on ten children who misarticulated /s/, and designed to survey the effect of consonant context on misarticulation. Suggests that a context-sensitive model of phonetic performance is needed to account for variation in correct /s/ production. (Author/AM)

This is an investigation of the phonological units used by preschool children. Twenty-four English-speaking children aged 4;0 to 5;0 were given three experimental tasks which investigated their ability to segment initial consonant clusters into phoneme-length units: (1) in a segmentation task they gave the first sound of initial cluster words; (2)…

Describes vocalizations of five 13-month-old infants. Data are reported on syllable shape, vowel-like and consonant-like production in context and time, periodic utterances, complex babbling sequences, recurrent phonetic forms, fundamental frequency, and intonation types. Results are consistent with data from other studies and support theory of…

This study examined perceptual and articulatory confusions among the fricatives /f, v, s, z/ and voiced and unvoiced "th" in preschool children. (These phonemes are among the most difficult for children to articulate.) Seventeen children from 3.3-5.1 years of age were tested on syllables formed by taking all combinations of the six…

Reports on an experiment which sought to compare child and adult speech in terms of (1) stop productions evidencing devoicing during consonant closure, and (2) consonant closure evidencing voicing in the case of devoiced stops. (Author/AM)

The role of a strategy of reduplication in phonological acquisition and behavior was examined in terms of: (1) the relationship between adoption of this strategy and failure to produce nonreduplicated multisyllabic forms and final consonants, and (2) the role of reduplication in production constraints. (Author/AM)

Describes a study that examined the organization inherent in children's misarticulations of final consonant sounds. Specifically, it inquired whether, when children with final stop and fricative omissions are taught to produce either stops or fricatives in word-final positions, generalization occurs to untaught items or only to taught items.…

The phonotactic development of one child is traced from age 3;9 to 5;3. Data are presented in a table indicating both the child's phonological equivalent of adult consonant sequences and the range distinguished by the child at a given stage. (CHK)

Results are reported of a study of voice onset time characteristics of stops in initial clusters in American English words produced by children and adults. (Author/RM)

Notes from a diary kept on the language acquisition of a child from age 11 to 22 months, through four developmental stages, were used to investigate the interaction between the child's phonological systems and his developing syntactic system in the context of research on the emergence of multiword combinations. The presence of a phonological…

The development of differential vowel duration was observed in six children who were tape recorded at 1-month intervals from 26 to 36 months of age and in three children from 21 to 24 months of age. By differential vowel duration is meant the relatively different durations of vowels according to whether the following consonant is voiced or…

The development of differential vowel duration was observed in six children who were tape recorded at 1-month intervals from 26 to 36 months of age and in three children from 21 to 24 months of age. By differential vowel duration is meant the relatively different durations of vowels according to whether the following consonant is voiced or…

Spontaneous and imitated-sentence responses of six children were examined for their sound patterns in the acquisition of /x/, /f/, and /s/. The data tend to support the position that children may produce forms exemplifying geographical-dialectical constraints, general developmental processes, and variability in development across children.…

Part one of this study discussed the characteristics of errors involving single fricative consonants made by English children learning their first language. Here, the second part discusses the distinctive features of the single fricatives most commonly mispronounced, as well as the characteristics of errors with clustered fricatives. (34…

This paper reports on the acquisition of the voicing contrast in Mexican-Spanish word-initial stops. In Study 1, three Spanish-speaking monolingual children were recorded every two weeks for seven months, beginning when the children were about 1;7. In Study 2, four monolingual children about 3;10 were recorded once or twice. Two analyses were…