Characterizing knowledge deficits in phonological disorders

To aid the development of finer-grained measures of phonological competence within a representation-based approach to phonology, two aspects of nonsymbolic phonological knowledge (knowledge of the acoustic/perceptual space and of the articulatory/production space) were examined in 6 preschool-age children with phonological disorders and 6 typically developing age peers. To evaluate perceptual knowledge, gating and noise-center tasks were used. Children with phonological disorders recognized significantly fewer words than age peers on both tasks. To evaluate production knowledge, spectral and temporal measures were obtained for CV sequences involving both lingual and labial stop consonants. Group differences on this task (such as larger transition slope values from lingual consonants to vowels for children with phonological disorders) were also observed. These differerences were interpreted as indicating that the children with phonological disorders were less able to maneuver jaw and tongue body separately or that they used "ballistic" (i.e., less controlled) gestures from lingual consonants to vowels than their age peers. These results suggest that phonological knowledge is multifaceted, and that seemingly categorical deficits at one level can be linked to less robust representations at other levels.