Phonotactic Patterns in Conversational Speech of Typically Developing Children and Children with Phonological Impairment: a Comparison

Abstract

Typically developing children learn the phonotactic rules as they grow, whereas children with phonological impairment show phonetic as well as phonotactic limitations. The study aimed to analyze and compare the phonotactic patterns in conversational speech samples for syllable length, word shape, word length and integrity of phonotactic patterns in Hindi speaking typically developing children and children with phonological impairment. Participants were assigned to two groups. Group I (Study group) consisted of 4 Hindi speaking children with phonological impairment in the age range of 3 to 5 years. Group II (control group) consisted of 20 age matched typically developing children. Conversational speech sample was collected from each of the children from each group. 100 utterances were selected and transcribed using IPA. The transcribed sample was analyzed and percentage occurrence of various syllable shape, word shape, word length was calculated. Results revealed that the syllable shapes that were evident in both the groups were CV, CVC, VC, V, CCV, CVCC and VCC. No significant difference between the groups in terms of word length was observed. Monosyllabic structures were found to be more frequent when compared to bisyllabic structures and tri-syllabic words in both the groups. Error analysis revealed no mismatch between the syllable shapes of the target word and ones produced except few instances in CVC and CCVC structures. No significant difference between the syllable shape and word shape were observed in both the groups suggesting that the phonotactic integrity in subjects with phonological impairment was preserved