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Quantifying phonological knowledge in children with phonological disorder
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Quantifying phonological knowledge in children with phonological disorder

Philip N Combiths, Jessica A Barlow and Emilie Sanchez
Clinical linguistics & phonetics, Vol.33(10-11), pp.885-898
11/02/2019
DOI: 10.1080/02699206.2019.1584247
PMCID: PMC6756935
PMID: 31379215
url
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/6756935View
Open Access

Abstract

Generative phonologists use contrastive minimal pairs to determine functional phonological units in a language. This technique has been extended for clinical purposes to derive phonemic inventories for children with phonological disorder, providing a qualitative analysis of a given child’s phonological system that is useful for assessment, treatment, and progress monitoring. In this study, we examine the single-word productions of 275 children with phonological disorder from the Learnability Project (Gierut, 2015b) to confirm the relationship between phonemic inventory – a measure of phonological knowledge – and consonant accuracy – a quantitative, relational measure that directly compares a child’s phonological productions to the target (i.e. adult-like) form. Further, we identify potential percentage accuracy cutoff scores that reliably classify sounds as in or out of a child’s phonemic inventory in speech-sound probes of varying length. Our findings indicate that the phonemic function of up to 90% of English consonants can be identified from percentage accuracy for preschool-age children with phonological disorder when a sufficiently large and thorough speech sample is used.

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